Cool posters

Got plenty of toner and some time on your hands?

Just print out 285 pages to create 750 parts, put aside 245 hours and you too could have your own papercraft scale model 2012 Audi A7!

Sliced Pixels

With this technique Victor van Gaasbeek used the most basic elements in todays graphic design; the pixel.

The pixels were sliced in half, and with the sliced pixels created numerous animal heads. Up-close all you see is triangles, but when you look from a distance, the big picture becomes clear. Check out Victor’s site @ victorvangaasbeek.com

Back to the future?

Taking an early lead from the reissued Big Trak toy in the retro tech stakes is a ‘reimagining’ of the Commodore 64 as a “modern functional PC as close to the original in design as humanly possible. It houses a modern mini-ITX PC motherboard featuring a Dual Core 525 Atom processor and the latest Nvidia Ion2 graphics chipset. It comes in the original taupe brown/beige color, with other colors to follow… No expense has been spared. This is the ultimate hackers keyboard on which to wield your key-fu.”

Suffice to say, a revamped version of the Sinclair C5 that’ll do a ton up the bypass is now looking more likely!

Mister Freedom — history and design in harmony

Following on from the hot 2010 trend for American workwear that we blogged about, transplanted French designer Christophe Loiron has started a new style digression with his California-based brand Mister Freedom‘s Spring 2011 collection, Les Apaches.

Taking inspiration from Parisien hoodlum kultchur of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Loiron’s really gone to town on this homage to his home country’s organic street style. The attention to detail is astonishing, not least this beautiful, specially-commissioned shirt box, painted by Patrick Segui. Expect the influence of the Les Apaches collection to be felt on UK high streets next year — minus the packaging!

Monkee Business — coining it in…

Monkee Business, Eric Lefcowitz’s new tome about the world’s first boyband, is now available in a nifty limited edition run of 300 copies that feature a die-cut cover inset with double-sided coins depicting the respective noggins of Messrs Nesmith, Tork, Jones and Dolenz, as used on the regular paperback shown below. The limited edition is available here.

Field Notes – share the love

We love Field Notes notebooks and we love print and this video shows why.

That’s the way to promote your product: show people you love what you do and that you’re competent at it.

Jon Jackson’s Adios LA

When artist Jon Jackson, a longtime Los Angeles resident, made plans to relocate to Noo Yoik, he didn’t want “to string LA along” and so “decided to firmly break it off through a graphic billboard series posted on the famous streets of his first love”!

Needless to say, the City of the Angels hasn’t seen anything quite like Johnson’s series since Elektra Records broke the mainstream hold on LA’s billboards with their revolutionary paste-ups for The Doors’ debut album and Love’s “Forever Changes” set in 1966-67.

You can check out Jackson’s full series here.

Word Lens

Word Lens (or, in Spanish, lente de la palabra) allows you to simply point your iPhone at a sign you want translating and, bingo! (in Spanish, bingo!). Currently only available in Spanish-English / English-Spanish, developers Quest Visual have promised that a large range of languages are, ahem, on the cards…

iPad Light Painting

Dentsu London clearly bored with their iPads already have found a magical way of creating ‘light sculptures’ using stop frame-animation. Click the images to view the video…

 

Still state of the (street) art

Filmmaker, author and photographer Henry Chalfant, the director of much-loved early-1980s hip hop street art documentary, Style Wars, has just launched a new website that is set to feature his astonishing Big Grafitti Archive. Henry’s portfolio features countless breathtaking shots that effectively helped to communicate grafitti art to the rest of the world, and he plans to make the Big Graffiti Archive available as a DVD set. That’s one for the OG Christmas list, then. Click on the image above to check the subway car in all of its glory.

Another ingredient in the crucible of hip hop, New York’s street gang culture, is explored in Rubble Kings, a new documentary from director Shan Nicholson that’s currently on the film festival circuit. Check the trailer below…

Ligature, Loop & Stem Poster

Every now and again someone sends me a link that literally makes my jaw drop. Check out this amazing letter press typography poster from Scott Boms, Grant Hutchinson and Luke Dorny, printed by Lunar Caustic Press. Want one? No chance. Limited edition of 100 must have sold out in minutes.

Ligature, Loop & Stem Poster

Ligature, Loop & Stem Poster 2

Ligature, Loop & Stem Poster 3

“Just My Type” of Christmas present

Slightly wayward but undeniably brilliant social chronicler Simon Garfield has got a new tome out, “Just My Type: A Book About Fonts” (Profile Books), which is a surefire Xmess winner for anyone with even a modicum of interest in design and the peeps behind it. If it’s a quarter as good as his masterful history of British grappling in the 1970s, “The Wrestling” (Faber), then “Just My Type” will be a hugely enjoyable read. Here’s the blurb:

“Just My Type is a book of stories. About how Helvetica and Comic Sans took over the world. About why Barack Obama opted for Gotham, while Amy Winehouse found her soul in 30s Art Deco. About the great originators of type, from Baskerville to Zapf, or people like Neville Brody who threw out the rulebook, or Margaret Calvert, who invented the motorway signs that are used from Watford Gap to Abu Dhabi. About the pivotal moment when fonts left the world of Letraset and were loaded onto computers … and typefaces became something we realized we all have an opinion about.”

The art of clothing labels…

Art, form and function in harmony, clothing labels have always played an important part in the romantic and aspirational nature of fashion.

Although they may no longer be made of silk or, indeed, actually reflect a garment’s country of origin (thanks to a common legal loophole that allows ‘Made In…’ to be stated, even if it’s just the label that was actually manufactured there), clothing labels still push fashion branding forward in a subtly effective manner.

Thankfully, they now include more detailed laundering instructions than the dreaded legend, Dry Clean Only!

Click on the pic for a larger version…

Letterpress heaven – Hatch Show Print, Nashville

Opened in Nashville by brothers Herbert and Charles Hatch in 1879, Hatch Show Print is America’s oldest printing business and is still creating beautiful letterpress posters and handbills using its huge library of hand-cut blocks. From Elvis, Johnny Cash and Hank Williams, to The White Stripes and REM, Hatch has advertised ’em all. And as Hatch still turns out around 600 print jobs each year, t’ain’t goin’ anyplace soon, bub…

How to take a wedding photo

Along with pictures of cats and babies wedding photography can often seem tired and predictable. Nevertheless Katie Day manages to capture the event without the usual mawkish clichés.

British design classic – the English Rose kitchen

Having made nose cones for Spitfires and parts for Lancaster bombers throughout WW2, the late 1940s found Constant Speed Airscrews (CSA) Industries Ltd of Warwick in something of a quandary. The company entered peace time with a large workforce, huge amounts of machinery and a stockpile of aircraft grade aluminium at their Avon Works on the town’s Wharf Street, but no demand for their products. Surprisingly, CSA decided to make British design history in 1948, by launching what was quite possibly the first modular ‘fitted’ kitchen range in Europe…

The Little Apple – New York as Toytown in The Sandpit

We first showed a tilt shift movie with the video Little Big Berlin and this film, which makes shots of New York seem like a toy town is also a must-see. Surely it’s only a matter of time before this technique is brought to wider public attention in a music video, advertisement or film – it’s an innovative, charming and quirky way to show a city at work.

Great film posters

We first became aware of this guy’s work when Hollywood director Jon Favreau tweeted a hand drawn poster for Iron Man II earlier this year.

The illustrator’s name is Tyler Stout, who hails from Washington in the States. He’s spent years caught up watching films and honing his craft, and it’s through this focus that you can see why he didn’t have a girlfriend until he was in his early 20s.

But it’s that kind of love for the subject matter that’s paid off in his later life, getting commissions to produce brilliantly observed re-imagings of current and classic movie posters.

We’re hugely keen on his ‘Kuato Lives’ Total Recall poster – the ‘two weeeeeeeeeks’ head is great – but all of his posters bring something to the party that hasn’t been seen in film posters for years.

Let’s hope we see a return to these sorts of promo values in the near future – all of our lives would be the better for it.

For more of Tyler’s work, stop by at his website – you may even be able to pick yourself up a print, but you’ll need to be quick!

A little creativity and landscape blots become truly poetic

Architecture firm Choi + Shine has submitted the following entry for an Icelandic pylon design competition. This should just happen. Worldwide. Now.
These beautiful giants come in variable poses and, they claim, only require slight alterations to existing pylon designs too! Just genius.

Hollywood greats – underfoot and on screen

On September 18th, the Cinespia crew are set to end their tenth season of post-sundown, open-air classic movie screenings in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery on LA’s Santa Monica Boulevard with a showing of Night of the Living Dead.

Panasonic Note Headphones Packaging

The simplest ideas are always the best ones. Panasonic Notes Headphones Packaging by Scholz & Friends, Germany.

The FuturePlus heavenly jukebox…

Inspired by a unique new service, And Vinyly, which will preserve your ashes as a limited edition run of vinyl records (no, really), the great and good at FuturePlus have put their heads together and come up with suitably pithy A- and B-side choices for their be-grooved epitaphs…

Made by Fudge

Some bright spark: ‘I know, lets make the website look like a web design programme, cos’ that’s what we do’ Recipe for disaster you might think, Fudge pull it off beautifuly… (grab the guides!)

http://madebyfudge.com/

Made by Fudge

Custom belts: art you can wear — from concho to emo

As you’d expect, yer average High Street emo kid has absolutely no idea of the ancestry of their nattily studded fashion belts, and why should they? Adding studs and jewels to leather belts appears to have crossed over from Mexico to American ‘Western’ wear back in the 1920s. The vaqueros’ penchant for affixing conchos and studs to their garments (all the better to reflect their wealth) had picked up native American influences by the time the style hit such mainstream retailers as Miller of Colorado and Montgomery Ward in the 1930s.

Elektra hits 60 — art and commerce in perfect harmony

The label’s masterpiece? Love’s third album, 1967’s Forever Changes.

Elektra records is celebrating its 60th birthday this year, and as far as independently-minded, hugely successful labels are concerned, it’s managed to surf atop six decades of musical mayhem with great aplomb, maintaining a textbook mix of art and commerce — from Love and the Doors, through the Stooges, MC5 and New York Dolls, to Charlotte Gainsbourg, Björk and Cee-Lo Green.

Lifetime Collective’s unexpected new video

The du jour brand for hipsters. Lifetime, started as a DIY basement outfit and have steadily progressed to creating full collections. Watching this video shows they still haven’t lost their edge. It’s nice when brands mess with clichés.

The 45 sleeve — packaging as art

“Sleeves were designed originally to serve as a protective device for records and labels during shipment. In the case of “45” rpm records, however, a device of this nature becomes unnecessary. The raised label area on 45’s fully prevents any harmful contact between the grooved surfaces of records during shipment. Paper separators – such as this sheet – are designed to protect record labels during shipment. They have no other useful function and may be discarded at your convenience…”

Sage record care advice from the folks at RCA Victor, circa 1952.

As you can see from the small selection of 45 sleeves shown above, thankfully, the rest of the music industry — and, indeed, RCA itself — didn’t share this rather quite touching faith in the durability of the company’s new vinyl medium, and quickly turned the humble shipping protector into an art form in its own right.

RCA’s numpty claim is very redolent of those made on behalf of the CD when it was first introduced — most famously on a 1981 episode of the popular TV science show, Tomorrow’s World, wherein the presenters happily smeared a shiny biscuit with jam, then wiped it off and played it, as if proving that it was virtually indestructible! And we know how that ended…

John Cleese – Creativity 101

John Cleese here chatting about how to be creative and how he’s observed the creative process across his career.

Don’t be a ‘sodcaster’, add some classic EQ…

According to Guardian Guide scribe, Pascal Wyse, the annoyingly tinny tuneage you hear blasting from teens’ mobiles is called a “Sodcast [noun]: Music, on a crowded bus, coming from the speaker on a mobile phone. Sodcasters are terrified of not being noticed, so they spray their audio wee around the place like tomcats.”

A fascinating piece in today’s Graun deals with the aural pollution of ‘sodcasting’, in all of its forms. However, as the article notes, it doesn’t need to involve distorted bass and ear-frying treble.

Happily, there’s an easy option to avoid being tarred with the same sonic brush. If you’re adding a tune to your phone, do everyone a favour and run it through the EQ options in the free audio editor, Audacity. This nifty piece of freeware, which is often packaged with USB turntables as no-frills analogue-to-digital conversion software, also includes a bunch of stellar equalisation options that are based on classic EQ curves of yesteryear. These include ‘Decca FFRR Micro’, which will make your tune sound like a vintage 45rpm record’s blasting out of your phone’s tiny speaker.

Watt-for-watt, the speaker in your phone’s probably equal to that of a mid-1960s transistor radio. Motown’s ‘Hitsville USA’ studio used to mix down their masterpieces through a tranny radio so that their releases would sound great blasting out of same, so adding this EQ curve to your mobile tuneage is a cert for sonic handset satisfaction. It should also preclude the possibility of you getting whacked by an old lady’s handbag on the bus home!