Paul Thurlby is a great illustrator. He's been doing his own little alphabet which I've been watching grow over the past few weeks. It's been quite pleasurable seeing which ones he's done each week. I'm kinda sad it's (nearly) over. See them here.
Enjoy.
I just stumbled across a really pretty damn sweet collection of American food packaging on Flickr. It mostly seems to be kids food packaging and ads from the 60s, 70s and 80s.
The Jonathan Levine gallery in New York is probably one of my favourites to visit in Chelsea. They always have interesting people showing there. From the Date Farmers to Jim Houser to D*FACE, the roster is pretty solid.
The show on now is pretty damn good with some great work from Souther Salazar (above) and Andy Kehoe below.
I popped by the ever reliable Elms Lester gallery today to peep at the new Ron English show. Pretty good if you're a fan of his work...
Alistair over at We Made This, friend to designers everywhere (and Tantramar) is compiling a list of what music designers listen to when designing things. So if you want your Moroder or Stevie Nicks to make the mix, send it over to him.
Sadly there aren't nearly as many bicycles in China as there once were. For example nowadays 3 million people take a taxi in Beijing every day! When you have lots of bicycles, you need smart design adjustments for them. The flat bar in the centre of these stairs is for people to push their bikes up.
One of the directors at Fjord; Christian Lindholm calls this of course design, because when you see it you exclaim 'of course it should do that'.
I like logos, I think they're a very interesting domain. I brush with some logo design in what I do at Fjord but it's certainly not my forte.
One of the interesting elements around branding is how far can you push the design and make sure it retains what it is, giving the right message to baying hordes?
This animation of the batman logo over time raises lots of questions along those lines. Intriguing.
Warning: U2 has been used as a soundtrack, you may want to turn down your headphones, or take them off.
I don't DJ so much anymore, I am however playing some tunes at this shindig at the ICA on Thursday. Two super good illustrators Andrew Rae and Mr Luke Best are having a drawing contest and I'm playing some audio inspiration.
I will (hopefully) get to play all those records that I never ever got to play out before. Should be fun.
When I was at art school (many years ago), I loved David Carson, then I hated him, then I loved him again. This happened for some time. I love him now. He has no design training and in fact trained as a sociologist and I love the way he always seems to extract the genius from the stupidity, you know it's there but you can't always see it.
Until I saw this TED talk though, I had no idea he was so funny, charismatic or charming. At one point he's looking at a slide and says 'I don't like the ones that are hard to read'.
Anyway, this talk is pretty fun and he raises some nice points here and there. Worth 15 minutes of your time.
I spend some time in Google Reader, so I was pleased that someone has designed another skin for it. I'm not a big fan of Google design. I like soft, sleek and unfussy. So the Helvetireader is just what the doctor ordered. Nice.
This is the Curve gallery at the Barbican (which is free). There is nearly always good stuff in the Curve. It's always playful in nature and I think this one is one of my favourites for playfulness.
Artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer has created a sort of interactive radio interference project. As you walk through the Curve gallery a bright light from the left shines on you creating a large shadow of you on the right hand wall. This shadow is mapped with a red outline, pinpointing your location and movements.
Then as you move you body you find and interrupt Fm radio frequencies that are aimed at certain points. Making your shadow larger and smaller raises the lowers the volume.
So it feels like your body has suddenly become an antennae to enable the
broadcasting of Rinse FM or Meteor data. The little speakers along the
floor line then play the sound of what you have found.
It's very playful and I saw kids having a great time dancing around and making the radio turn on / off and change channel. It's as you step back that you realise the journey of walking through the gallery is exactly like scrolling the whole way though an analogue radio dial. A lovely idea. I felt like one of the borrowers on the set of Predator!
The show runs until January 18th.
Update: between 15th - 23rd Nov courtesy of the ICA Rafael Lozano-Hemmer will be creating the worlds largest interactive video installation in Trafalgar Square!
Kemistry Gallery have an interesting show on right now. It's a collaboration with the renowned ad agency Fallon.
Over nine days, 283 people stood on a cross on the floor in the gallery and five writers (from different disciplines) each wrote a first impressions portrait. They were only allowed 2 minutes.
The show is currently in the second stage, so you can only view the
portraits, sadly no longer get one written of your own. One was written about me but I haven't had time to get down there to read it yet.
I'm very curious though...
The show is on until 22nd November.
I love eBay for many reasons. It has everything I've ever wanted (almost). It lets you snoop through people's stuff (sort of). And you can get nice things in the post (if you buy stuff). I got this package the other day from Holland. How lovely is that?
With stupidly amazing stamps to boot. I was flabbergasted. It took me a while to justify opening it. The guy obviously enjoys sending records out and packaging them up. How wonderful.
In this digital age it often worries me that we're loosing the charm out of so many of the analogue processes we took for granted previously. I'm sure I've waffled on about this before.
It's why I took part in Russell's Dawdlr and might do again when I think of another idea. And it's why I think this is so brilliant.
I always look to try and incorporate charm in the digital things I design but it's not always the easiest element to squeeze in when it's often not really essential to the service. But often essential to the experience.
It's made me want to do something crowd sourced with the postal service. Thinking hat on.
Onion maps have a whole bunch of great 3D isometric maps. Vegas (above) is one of my favouries. Plenty here for cartographers of all ages.
ACADEMIC (ish)
