The Consensus of Opinion Article in Harper's Bazaar, Photograph by Man Ray, March 1936
About this site
Welcome to the official home on the Infotube Cyberfreeway for the Official Mike Flavin Fan Club. I had set up this site many years ago with the idea that it would be a place for me to post a mix of professionally-related content and personal blog posts, but it never really took off. Recent life changes have inspired me to give it another shot.
About Mike
Mike is a graphics programmer working in the video game industry. From June 2004 - August 2023, he worked at (Deep Silver) Volition, until that studio was shut down. For the moment, Mike continues to live in Champaign, Illinois, sharing his house with a couch and several other pieces of furniture.
About Alexey Brodovitch
(Editor's Note: This was part of the default example content that came with the site template. This dude's bio is way more interesting than mine, so I left it in.)
In 1934, Bazaar editor Carmel Snow attended an Art Directors Club of New York exhibition curated by 36-year-old graphic designer Alexey Brodovitch. Snow called it a revelation, describing "pages that bled beautifully, cropped photographs, typography and design that were bold and arresting." She immediately offered Brodovitch a job as Bazaar's art director. Throughout his career at the magazine, Brodovitch, a Russian émigré (by way of Paris), revolutionized magazine design. With his directive "Astonish me," he inspired some of the greatest artists of the 20th century (including protégés Irving Penn, Hiro, and, of course, Richard Avedon) to create legendary images.
Brodovitch's signature use of white space, his innovation of Bazaar's iconic Didot logo, and the cinematic quality that his obsessive cropping brought to layouts (not even the work of Man Ray and Henri Cartier-Bresson was safe from his busy scissors) compelled Truman Capote to write, "What Dom Pérignon was to champagne ... so [Brodovitch] has been to ... photographic design and editorial layout." Sadly, Brodovitch's personal life was less triumphant. Plagued by alcoholism, he left Bazaar in 1958 and eventually moved to the south of France, where he died in 1971. However, his genius lives on.
Text source: Harper's Bazaar