For all of the wine lovers out there it’s no news that this time of year presents the annual harvesting of grapes and along with that, amazing photo opportunities at every turn. We grew ripe with envy when we discovered Alessandro Puccinelli’s beautiful imagery of the Muscat harvest in Southern France wanting to transport ourselves to this magical moment immediately. 

If you’d like a little backstory on the the harvesting of wine grapes, it’s actually the most integral step in the process of wine-making. The time of harvest is determined primarily by the ripeness of the grape as measured by sugar, acid and tannin levels and winemakers base this all-important decision to pick based on the style of wine they wish to produce. I’m pretty sure the lovely woman in the last image may have discovered a bad grape. Enjoy and cheers!

How do grape growers know when to harvest?

The best wine growers are so familiar with the taste of ripeness that they can walk down a row tasting grapes and know intuitively when to pick. However, there is a fair amount of science to back this up. Just so you know, timing the harvest is the single most important decision a grower or winemaker makes each year. 

Wine Harvest Season Chart

Alone Together: A deep look at the loneliness of global cities as it appears during the blue hour

If you live or have ever lived in a large, global metropole you can certainly relate to London-based photographer Aristotle Roufanis’ project ‘Alone Together’ which takes a unique approach in capturing the loneliness that festers in a global city. An ongoing photographic project, Roufanis takes this phenomenon of social alienation in urban centres as a starting point, and adds a positive, optimistic twist to it. Photos are captured in a way that only tiny, individual apartment lights are visible in some of our favorite cities in the world including London, Paris, Miami and Athens. 

“Hardly recognisable in the dark, some of the world’s most famous metropoles are transformed into sprawling canvases of anonymity, where countless people have decided to make their home but hardly connect to each other.”

“The bigger the city, the lonelier we feel,” comments Aristotle Roufanis, who recently moved to London from another bustling urban centre, namely his hometown of Athens, Greece. “In a big city, we are very efficient in covering all our consumerist needs, but we forget our need for companionship. It is important for people to understand that although lonely, they are not alone. Individuality does not equal to alienation.” Roufanis does an amazing job of drawing a parallel between the singular lights in an apartment window to an individual stuck in a dark void of a detached world. Photos are taken in between the hours of dusk and dawn, shifting the spotlight from public to private which enables the eye to focus on only the singular lights in a building rather than iconic landmarks like the Eiffel Tower. 

Roufanis uses a technique of super high-resolution photography complemented by digital editing that can take up to ONE MONTH for each photo. Presented in exhibition context, images are showcased in extremely high-resolution prints to highlight as much detail as possible to the naked eye. The resolution of the images is so high that you can delight your inner voyeur by spying on individuals standing in the windows contemplating the city outside or doing everyday things in their home.

ABOUT ARISTOTLE ROUFANIS

Aristotle Roufanis is a London-based art photographer whose work focuses on patterns, textures and human interactions defined by the condition of urban architecture. An active photographer since his early 20’s, Aristotle Roufanis is a self-taught artist, who has mastered his medium through several personal photographic projects. In 2016 he has participated in Scope Art Fair – Miami Beach and with a solo show in Fotofever – Paris; in the same year, his work exhibited at the Summer Exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts sold out before the show’s public opening. In 2017 he exhibited at Scope in Basel during Art Basel 2017 and he is scheduled to exhibit at the prestigious Zona Maco in Mexico City as well as other art events throughout the world. Aristotle Roufanis’ work is part of esteemed private collections in London, Paris, Milan, Miami, New York and Mexico City.

Roufanis is a civil engineering graduate and has always been fascinated by architecture, and particularly the patterns and sheer scale of large cities. Interested in the many contrasts and the amount of information one can collect through reading an urban landscape, the artist has often turned his lens to urban architecture in the past. Alone Together combines several themes that have appeared in Aristotle Roufanis’s work so far, but merges them in a very skillful and refined way. 

How many people read paper magazine nowadays? I started this post with a question because despite the fact that magazines are becoming obsolete in their paper form, their contribution to design is hard to put on words. Editorial design for me is one of the most inspiring fields of design. It’s the pinnacle of design if you will. You have a limit amount of space on the page, you might have big and small images, you have text and you need to call readers attention for the content. It’s always a great exercise to try to design a magazine. Stine Erlang Sloth shared a cool project on her Behance profile where she redesigned VÆRK Magazine for a school project. Below you can see the results.

The cool thing about this project for me is the typography, use of white space but also the bold use of blue for the cover. It is a departure from the normal white or full image style. I love how bold it looks, especially with the embossed text but still with a classic editorial design style.

Three of the leading lifestyle magazines in Denmark and SMK  has gone together and made a new art magazine – VÆRK, which will open new doors to art. 

Editorial Design

Via Behance. For more information check out:

• https://www.behance.net/stineerlang
• http://stine.erlang.dk/

The kind of project I do enjoy featuring on ABDZ, it’s a combination of art direction and photography. We are taking a closer look at the work of Boston-based art director Jeremy Haunschild. The approach is simple but kindly efficient especially when it’s mixed with Interior Design. Commissioned by Puma, let’s enjoy also the Behind-the-Scenes process for this project.

Jeremy Haunschild is a art director based in Boston, MA. His work is focused in art direction, photography and advertising, check out his Behance for more works.

For PUMA’s 2017 Global teamsport initiative, I designed the visual system and concept that would carry throughout the extensive international diaspora of executions required to support the teamsport business category. I art directed the photography of the key athletes that appeared in the campaign as well as the overall layout and design of the typography and all aspects of post-production.

Project Gallery

More Links

• Learn more about Jeremy Haunschild at jeremyhaunschild.com
• Follow Jeremy on Behance