Graphic Arts

Mister Cartoon eyeballed a blank spot on the giant graffiti mural and rattled his can of spray paint. An aerosol hiss filled the air. With a few fluid swipes of his beefy arm, an image began to take shape: a cluster of storm clouds massing above a Windex blue hot rod. "If I knew the cops were coming to bust me, I could probably finish this whole thing in an hour," the street artist joked.

Shepard Fairey is a talented Los Angeles graphic designer who has twice hit the big time with the public. Provocative connections between the two episodes emerge from a survey of Fairey's work at the Institute of Contemporary Art. So do the rather stark limitations of his work. Fairey's first impact was commercial -- "Obey Giant," a 1989 street-art project that grew into a thriving youth-market business in stickers, posters, apparel, notebooks and other retail products. His second was political -- a 2008 poster, made independently to support Barack Obama's presidential aspirations, that was quickly embraced by the candidate and an ever-widening cadre of supporters.

Sitting on Geoff McFetridge's work table in an Atwater Village studio, there's a man holding a trombone that's turning into a chair. A dog's face bursts from the hoodie of a phantom figure. An umbrella shelters a man holding an ice cream cone, a half-circle and triangle forming a spare ink-black silhouette. The caption awaits. In the imaginary landscape where the 36-year-old graphic designer spends much of his time, shapes and words bump against one another on their way toward a solid idea.

It's easy to miss La Mano Press, hidden away as it is among the factories and warehouses that line North Main Street just east of the Los Angeles River. And inside the corrugated metal building, it's almost as easy to miss Artemio Rodriguez among the giant gray machines that crowd the studio floor. Rodriguez is not tall. He's 34 but looks younger, despite a neatly trimmed mustache and beard. His nervousness peels off a few years. When sitting, his legs bob with agitation.

THEY'RE not Luddites. They stare at computer screens and text their friends and Web surf like most of their peers. But when it comes to crafting quirky graphic design, some L.A.-area college students with a passion for visual experimentation find that nothing beats old-fashioned hard copy.

DESIGNERS are a dreamy bunch. Where we see chain-link fences, they imagine vistas; where we see letters as utilitarian symbols, they see vectors and human impulses; where we see books, they see experiences. Of course, some designers see their work as practical, physical -- necessary, in the most fundamental sense of the word. Inefficiency is ugly; lack of clarity is debilitating; language, in all its many forms -- aural, visual and print -- is only one way to tell a story.

When executive producer Vivian Cannon was putting the finishing touches on tonight's new ABC comedy "Emily's Reasons Why Not," she was unsure how to forecast the quirkiness of the show in its crucial opening titles. So Cannon and her colleagues turned to Lynda and Ellen Kahn, two Emmy-award-winning designers (who happen to be sisters) who make their livings creating graphics, logos and titles for TV.

PowerPoint is: * Bullet Points * A Mysterious Jumble of Graphs and Charts * Utter Boredom But Cliff Atkinson, who runs a one-man, Los Angeles-based company called Sociable Media, wants to change all that. Atkinson published a book last year called "Beyond Bullet Points" about how to combat "PowerPoint fatigue": the deadening sameness of Microsoft Corp.'s commonly used presentation software. The book caught the eye of W. Mark Lanier, a Houston-based trial lawyer.

I've spent many hours playing with photo-editing software--changing colors, adding decorative borders and designing artistic effects. So I had low expectations for Photowow.com, an online photo imaging and printing services company that also restores, enhances, adds special effects and even frames artistic renderings of customers' photographs. The field has become fairly crowded, as increasing numbers of consumers turn to digital cameras and photo-editing software.

By better synchronizing animation's top prizes with the Academy Awards, the animation industry hopes some of Oscar's luster will shine on Annie. The presentation of the awards -- the animation industry's answer to the Oscars -- will move from its traditional November date to Feb. 1 at Glendale's Alex Theatre, a change that organizers hope will make the Annies a more closely watched prelude to the Oscars.