What is Giclée?

If you walk into an art gallery or go through their cat­a­logue, chances are you would find a sec­tion reserved for repro­duced art­work. It would come under the strange sound­ing name, giclée (pro­nounced zhee-clay). What exactly is giclée, you might wonder.

Giclée is a type of dig­i­tal fine-art inkjet print, usu­ally repro­duc­tions of art­work orig­i­nally cre­ated in tra­di­tional media (paint­ings, draw­ing, and so on). Before the era of high qual­ity dig­i­tal print­ing, fine art prints were usu­ally pro­duced by con­ven­tional four-color off­set lith­o­g­ra­phy. Since the 1990s, that role has been taken over by giclée printing.

His­tory:

In the late 1980’s, the dig­i­tal print­ing pio­neers were look­ing for a new iden­tity for the beau­ti­ful prints they had worked so hard to achieve.  They wanted a dis­tinc­tion between their artis­tic work and the com­mer­cial pre-press proofs churned out by IRIS printers.

Ini­tially, IRIS prints were not quite top­notch. Their color fast­ness was doubt­ful, and the prints tended to fade within a few years.  It was also not pos­si­ble to achieve a com­pletely smooth tran­si­tion of color gra­di­ents, so impor­tant for repro­duc­ing art­work. After all, they were used mainly to match col­ors before the mass scale print run. (more…)

A Feast For Your Eyes

Opera Houses, a sym­bol of nation’s wealth, are a great rep­re­sen­ta­tion of nation’s culture.

David Lev­enti takes us on an amaz­ing jour­ney around the world.   You are able to stand cen­ter stage as well as expe­ri­ence the van­tage point of the per­former.  This is once in a life­time opportunity.

Our eyes can feast on the incred­i­ble detail from gilt dec­o­ra­tions, to vel­vet seats to the most exquis­ite chandeliers.

(more…)

A Beautiful Design is Always Magic

At a first glance, this chair appears to dis­obey the laws of Physics.

The Magic Chair comes from designer Davide Conti and seems to only stand on one foot. This opti­cal illu­sion is made pos­si­ble due to a trans­par­ent mate­r­ial which is used …to help main­tain the bal­ance of the chair. But since this mate­r­ial is almost invis­i­ble, when look­ing at this prod­uct from a cer­tain angle, the user will sur­pris­ingly only see a bunch of straight thin lines. (more…)

100 Year Old Photos of Apache Tribe

These pho­tos of Apache tribe were made by Amer­i­can pho­tog­ra­pher Edward S. Cur­tis about 100 years ago.

(more…)

Sneakers for All Kind of Geeks

We must really dig unique and geeky sneaker designs because we’ve writ­ten about them a lot here on Bit Rebels. Maybe I’m more of a dork than I thought, but when I saw these Twit­ter sneak­ers, I instantly started drool­ing. I would totally wear these!

Daniel Reese, a 21-year-old sneaker designer, takes reg­u­lar Nike sneak­ers and turns them into works of art. In addi­tion to Twit­ter, he also cre­ates Pac Man, The Simp­sons, Google, Michael Jack­son and many other cus­tom sneak­ers, how cool is that?

These shoes, which sell for around $200 – $250 per pair, are only avail­able for a lim­ited time. Accord­ing to Daniel’s web­site, since he only cre­ates these on a part time basis, he will close down his store, with­out notice, when he has as much work as he can han­dle. Then, when he fin­ishes that batch, he will reopen again. You can pur­chase a pair by going here. Nice work Daniel!

(more…)

Ugliest Design in the World

(more…)