Love this cover for the new Gnod and White Hills LP
Design
I can’t recommend this enough, a very good read for designers or even people with a just passing interest in design. You don’t have to know your kerning from your baselines to appreciate the information in this great book. Simon Garfield take a humorous, but well researched, look at fonts and typography across the ages, from design giants like Helvetica, Univers and Gill to the underdogs of the lettering community.
Chapters on Comic Sans prove he’s no type snob, a fascinating story about a lost typeface that drowned in the Thames and even a few eye openers will keep you turning the page. Who would have thought Eric Gill was into that? Also the new Olympic font comes in for a good kicking before he’s done.
If you’re a student just starting, a seasoned pro or you just know someone who likes their design but is really hard to buy a present for, this book is for you. I only wish something like this was around when I was in college, it might have saved me from making some of those dodgy font decisions in the past.
Yes, I know what you’re thinking, Katy Perry, I would too, but…
Aside from the fact that I have a thing for women in black bob haircuts and none other than Noisia have remixed her new single into a dubstep ‘anthem’, check out the font on the cover.
No, really. I don’t know who the designer is but I love some of those letter forms, the K, A and E especially. Shame they had to go and spoil it with the terrible dot matrix font for KanYe, no less than he deserves I suppose.
Mike Hinge was an illustrator, typographer and graphic designer, born in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1931. Early in his illustration career he worked for the largest ad agency in New Zealand before moving to Los Angeles, where he attended the Art Center of the College of Design. In 1966 he moved to Manhattan, where he worked as an art director for several ad agencies. His graphic designs were notable, and his colorful and psychedelic illustrations appeared on numerous science fiction paperback books and magazines during the 1970s, including Analog, Mediascene, Heavy Metal, Fantastic, and Amazing.
Hinge also did design work for 2001: A Space Odyssey and produced illustrations for mainstream publications like Time magazine, including covers featuring Richard Nixon and Emperor Hirohito. He was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Professional Artist in 1973, plus nominated for 6 Locus awards in the ’70’s. His designs for typefaces and graphics won him several awards and were exhibited, including a show at the Brooklyn Museum. A book about his art The Mike Hinge Experience was published in 1973 and he featured in the 1982 artists anthology The New Visions. He died of a heart attack in 2003 and still remains relatively unknown outside of the sci-fi community, for more info check out Ivan Richards’ Onyx Cube blog for many examples of his original artwork.
[youtube width=”636″ height=”382″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpPVPEoJdb0[/youtube]
Taken from the new Wagon Christ album ‘Toomorrow’, out now on CD, LP and download
The ‘Chunkothy’ video is directed and animated by Celyn Brazier at Nexus with Beccy McCray providing invaluable production skills. Bali Engel helped colour and provided the beautiful animated sequences for the insect loop and fishes. Margot Tsakiri-Scanatovits and Manav Dhir also provided colouring skills and contributed to the animation of the insects. Steve Mc Inerney constructed the final edit with perfect timing and imagination.
The animation was created in Photoshop, with most sequences on one layer. It was as simple as that really. No gimmicks, no tweeny motion tricks, no cgi. Celyn created small beat guides for reference, sometimes following the rhythm, for example on the bouncy ball loops, but mostly as many random patterns and as much weird sh*t that she could possibly make in six weeks.
CREDITS
Celyn Brazier – directing, deigning, colouring, animating
Beccy Mccray – producer
Steve Mcinerney – editor
Bali Engel – colouring, animating
Margot Tsakiri-scanatovits – assistant colouring
Manav Dhir – assistant colouring
Dead Formats T-shirt Series No.3: Compact Audio Cassette by Michael C Place / Build 2003
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The Moebius exhibition in Paris ends this weekend at the Foundation Cartier. I sadly didn’t make it back there but hope it will come to the UK some day. Here are a selection of the films featured on the exhibition site.
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The Six Ton Armour site hosts ‘Psychcasts’ – psychedelic podcasts – alongside artwork by Rimrimrim. They’ve recently started putting out mixes on CD too and I got a couple of them in the post last week. Beautiful they are too, with screen printed covers that recall some of the Twisted Nerve / Finders Keepers sleeves or Canada’s now defunct Bully label. The mixes are very good, sprawling across the psych realm and digging deep. Definitely worth keeping and eye and ear on for future releases and mixes. Buy these two CDs here… but you can also download the Black Olsun ‘Spells’ mix for free from here…
Further to the post about 3D I did last week, I’ve dug out some of the comics I was talking about. Best find was ‘Bizarre 3D Zone’ which is almost Zap Comix in 3D form, including a strip by Robert Williams which works extremely well visually. There were a few underground comics in the the 60’s and 70’s using 3D it seems but not all of them work because the printing is so bad the red/green division can’t be seen too easily.
A company called Blackthorne Publishing spearheaded the 3D comics surge in the late 80’s, buying up licenses to lots of kids shows like Transformers, GI Joe and Star Wars. Their most successful line was, bizarrely, the California Raisins (!?) but they bit off more than the could chew when they acquired the rights to print Michael Jackson’s ‘Moonwalker’ in 3D. The film didn’t do the business expected and their comic flopped, costing them the company. Most of their titles only ran for 1 or 2 issues and the projected Star Wars line (surely a golden ticket?) only made it to issue 3 before the company folded.
In Bizarre 3D Zone there are a few singular page strips that crop up that are quite bizarre indeed, some don’t even work in the conventional 3D way as they are simply only either the green or red. But in amongst the other separated images they give an odd effect and you realise that this is the ultimate in psychedelic comics as it’s playing with your perceptions of the page. I can only imagine what it was doing to hippies on acid way back when.
For no reason other than they did some great sleeves. (Click for bigger version)
Yes please! The vinyl reissues continue from Ghost Box, can’t wait for these beauties.
Last year I had an inexplicable yearning to buy more comics again after largely dipping out of the medium for a few years (save for the weekly dose of 2000ad thrill power and a few others). I also started to dig in the 50p-£1 boxes for older things I read as a kid or just liked the look of. Along the way I picked up a number of 3D comics from the boom in the late 80’s as well as a couple for more recently. When they work they’re great but frequently the writing never matches up to the standard of the imagery. There’s a whole blog post to be had out of some of those but that’s for another time.
This week I’ve been experimeting with 3D analyphs on a project – converting a 2D image into 3D when you look at it with those red and blue glasses. It’s not that hard, fun, if not a bit frustrating, and involves a bit of guesswork. I’ve managed to make one successful image so far but I can’t post it yet as I’ll get in trouble if it’s available to all at this stage.
But what should turn up on Jim Mahfood‘s Facebook stream today? News of a new book by Tristan Eaton (he designed the Dunny & Munny figures for Kidrobot) full of 3D images by a ton of different artists. Four years in the making, the 224 page book, published this Spring by Prestel, features a little bit of his work and a lot of Tristan-curated images from 100 artists across a multitude of disciplines: graffiti, illustration, contemporary art, graphic design, etc.
Check some images that I found online at animalnewyork.com and you can pre-order the book here.
The full artist list (with the ones I’m excited to see in bold): DRIAN JOHNSON, ANDREW BELL, ANTHONY AUSGANG, ASKEW, BASK, BILL MCMULLEN, BLOKT, BOOKS, BUFF MONSTER, CALMA, CASEY RYDER, CATALINA ESTRADA, CEY ADAMS, CHRIS MARS, CRAOLA, D*FACE, DABS & MYLA, DALEK, DAVE COOPER, DAVE KINSEY, DAVE NEEDHAM, DAVID FLORES, DEMO, DR. REVOLT, DARREN ROMANELLI, EBOY, EDATRON, ERIK FOSS, ERIC WHITE, ERIC HAZE, ESAO ANDREWS, FILTH, FLORENCIA ZAVALA, GARY BASEMAN, GARY TAXALI, GLENN BARR, GOMEZ BUENO, ISABEL SAMARAS, JAMES JEAN, JEFF SOTO, JEREMY FISH, JEREMY MADL, JERRY ABSTRACT, JIM HOUSER, JIM MAHFOOD, JOE SORREN, JON BURGERMAN, JULIE WEST, JUNKO MIZUNO, KANO, KATHY STAICO SCHORR, KENZO MINAMI, KEVIN BOURGEOIS, KEVIN SKINNER, KID ACNE, KOBIE SOLOMON, KRISTIAN OLSON, LAURA BARNHARD, LOGAN HICKS, MARK BODE, MARK DEAN VECA, MARK JAMES, MARK RYDEN, MATT CAMPBELL, MATT EATON, MAYA HAYUK, MICHAEL DE FEO, MISHKA, MINT AND SERF, MISS VAN, MORNING BREATH, MR JAGO, MYSTERIOUS AL, NATHAN FOX, NATHAN JUREVICIUS, PETE FOWLER, POSE MSK, RAY ZONE, RENATA PALUBINSKAS, RICH JACOBS, RON ENGLISH, ROSTARR, SHEPARD FAIREY, SKET ONE, STANLEY CHOW, STASH, STEPHEN BLISS, TARA MCPHERSON, TES ONE, TODD SCHORR, TOKIDOKI, TOM THEWES, TRAVIS LOUIE, TRAVIS MILLARD, TRISTAN EATON, TRUSTOCORP, UNKL, UPSO, AND WINSTON SMITH.
I was in Paris last Friday, playing at La Machine, but upon waiting for the Eurostar the next day I saw a poster for a Moebius Exhibition at the Foundation Cartier. Gutted not have known this was on earlier as I could have seen it before I left. The link above takes you to the exhibition site with a wealth of info, images, beautiful videos of Moebius drawing and mouth-watering merchandise, check the pencil sets below.
Ordered. For those that missed the three 12″s, they’re all here plus another 40 minutes in lavish Andy Votel designed sleeves.
Stumbled across this on Amazon today, love the cover.
Wagon Christ has a new album called ‘Toomorrow’ set for release in March. The excellent Celyn Brazier is on artwork duties again and you can hear a track from it here.
Found this whilst looking at another link on the MOC (My Own Creation) pages by BlaBlurBlah.
Around this time of year some of us are thinking about getting new calendars to plan our way through the next 12 months. I’ve just sold several OLD calendars, very beautiful ones designed by Vaughn Oliver at V23. Below are some examples of various months I’ve picked out. The V23 calendars were always very obscure, you couldn’t write on them and you could hardly tell which day or month it was on some, but that wasn’t the point.
