Typography, illustration, photography, music, stuff.
A short, sweet Spotify playlist that I put together. All songs guranteed to provide a pleasanty warming glow.
Ghost Train, Summer Camp
Good Dancers, The Sleepy Jackson
Let’s Go Surfing, The Drums
Home, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros
Stop Ou Encore, Plastic Bertrand
That Certain Female, Charlie Feathers
Lloyd, I’m Ready To Be Heartbroken, Camera Obscura
(Excuse the mildly un-PC title, but it’s a Barleyism, innit).
Image via Arquivo Fabriek)
Love Jarvis. Don’t always manage to catch his show on Sunday afternoon. Work block iPlayer and the BBC take it down before you get a chance to listen.
Hands up if this sounds familiar.
Well, I may have found the answer – Cocker’s Sunday Service Archive. This site allows you to download the shows he has made for 6 Music as MP3 files. So that’s no more worrying about missing another of Mr Cocker’s supreme broadcasts, because you can listen to it at your leisure.
One thing to mention, not all shows have a file to download yet. If you can help right this wrong, the author of the site would love to hear from you. Get in touch via the site.
Photo by Timothy Cochrane.
For the last few months Krent Able’s comic strips have been one of the first things I turn to when I get my new copy of The Stool Pigeon. Totally sick (old and new sense of the owrd), beautifully drawn and very funny.
Check out a larger size of the comic here.
I see a Quentin Blake illustration, I’m taken back to being a child. I really do love his drawings.
via The Guardian.
Reasons for this post:
P.S. I get to see these guys play in October (Grinderman, Hammersmith Apollo), it’ll be bloody immense. Fans of the Roman Empire should check out the poster.
After spending most of the year apart from Spotify (those buggers in IT claim that it was eating up all the office bandwidth, so set up firewalls to block it – well fuck you IT, I found out the proxy password to get round your stupid firewall) I have recently had the opportunity to reacquaint myself with this glorious treasure trove of music.
To celebrate I thought I’d make a playlist. Then I had a little brainwave, why not put it on the blog I thought (obviously I’m not the first to have this thought, check out the +KN Mixcast) so everyone could enjoy my immaculate music taste too. There’s no theme to this one, just a collection of songs that I’ve been really enjoying over the last few months and weeks. Hope you like it
So here you go; click here for the playlist link and see below for the track list.
You’ve got to be in it to win it
Silver trembling hands, The Flaming Lips
Hideaway, Karen O and the Kids
You will find me, Micah P. Hinson
No pussy blues, Grinderman
Fix up, look sharp, Dizzee Rascal
The overachievers, Liars
Roadrunner, The Modern Lovers
All the kings men, Wild Beasts
Falling and laughing, Orange Juice
Inbetweenies, Ian Dury and the Blockheads
Digital, Joy Division
Zero, Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Odessa, Caribou
Alphabet aerobics, Blackalicious
Bassline, Mantronix
Oh it’s you, Super Cat
Ali Baba, John Holt
54-46 Was my number, Toots and the Maytals
One day, I want to have the chance to be involved with creating a brand that needs untold elements to all work in perfect harmony with one another to function effectively. Where the process of managing all these decisions will not be rushed through or underestimated and in fact be valued as something that is essential for an organisation to be portrayed seriously and professionally to its users or customers.
Anyway, I spotted this on Brand New. Check out the post, it’s a great analysis of an attractive piece of branding.
You wait an age for an age for a post about the London Underground, and then I go and post about it twice in the space of twenty-four hours, bit like London buses I guess!
Now, I’m not sure if you’ll have spotted them on the Tube yet, but TfL have recently launched a series of posters. Going under the title “Tube or False’ they pose questions like ‘every week our escalators travel the equivalent of twice around the world’ with the answers being available on the TfL site.
I think it’s a great idea. A poster that provokes a bit of interaction from passengers is a good thing and once again I’m really impressed with the design of the range. Patterns from the network’s seat upholstery have been used as backgrounds to the questions which not only looks great, but ties the posters back in with the Underground – a really nice touch.
For all the questions, and their answers, click through to the TfL site.
To put it simply, it would be a dream of mine to be allowed to tour around the disused and abandoned Underground stations of London (of which apparently, there are many).
I think that these posters are pretty much the reason I’d love to do this so much, it’s kind of like a snap shot of life from the past.
How amazing then would it have been to be the guy that made this discovery? A tunnel that had remained unused and forgotten since the 1950′s at Notting Hill Gate station, the posters that remain dating it beautifully.
See all the pictures on Mike Ashworth’s Flickr.
Bit of an update; just perusing the fabulous Going Underground blog, and apparently there is one plucky indidvidual that is aiming to make access to London’s disused stations a reality. Read all about it here.
Yep, that’s right, another post about a series of designs. I don’t think I’ll need to go on for too long though, so do try and bare with me.
The June issue of Creative Review features a case study on Pentagram’s redesign of all the Vladimir Nabokov novels that Penguin publishes. The article got me thinking about how the success of a series is pegged to the designers bravery. What I mean by that is, that a big consideration when designing for a series is how far can you push the difference in the elements that make up each design. The problem you face is that if you leave the elements too similar you have yourself a safe, but boring series of work. But make them too different and you don’t have a series at all, just a disparate collection of (in this case) Nabokov books.
So the key is finding that balance, that’s what makes the Nobokov series a great example. Pentagram have used three elements to create their series. The first, a traditional looking cover design of an ornately bordered box, with centred type, is the foundation of the design, the template that the rest of the elements work off of.
Secondly each book features a patterned background, and though the patterns vary from book to book, they are in keeping with one another.
And third is the illustration; different illustrators were allocated a book each. Their starting point was the covers featuring the first two elements that Pentagram had started. The illustrators were allowed to draw what they wanted, whilst maintaining a certain respect for the structure of the first two elements (so no covering up the name of the author of book, but pretty much, anything else goes). This produced a third but wildly varying component, that when combined with the other two layers of elements creates three levels of consistency that results in a varied, but clearly identifiable series. A good job, well done!
Well, it looks like I did waffle on for a bit in the end. Never mind though, eh.
“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.
Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.”
The words of Steve Jobs. Read more on Wired (via youmightfindyourself)
Wow, love the idea of printing your own business card with a rubber stamp. I’ve been looking for an excuse to get my self some stamps made up for a while now, and this seems like the perfect reason (though saying that, it’s not like I really require business cards either, but hey-ho). I hope that Adam Hill doesn’t mind me pinching his idea!
Be sure to check out the rest of Adam’s portfolio, as well as his business card, there are some super illustrations and typography to look at. Oh, and if you’re interested in having some stamps made, word has it that Blade Rubber (gotta love that name) is the finest outlet in town for such goods.
I wanted to post this one for a few reasons. Number one; to unashamedly cash in on all the World Cup hype that will obviously ensue over the next few weeks. So, you’ve probably seen adverts of that bloke from Kasabian doing a gig wearing an England shirt, right? Well, as part of the ‘Tailored by England’ campaign, Umbro have painted the shirt number of each player from the England squad on a wall from that players home town. You can read Umbro’s official waffle on the campaign here.
Number two; there’s a tenuous series link going on here. I’ve posted about the design series a fair few times now. It’s a subject that I will ruminate on from time to time in the hope, that I too, will one day be able to craft an effective and attractive set of designs to call my own.
And number three; I thought it was worth highlighting a sports brand taking a more considered and hand crafted approach to a marketing campaign. We’re used to bombastic slogans, Herculean photos and heavy sans serifs plastered over huge billboards with it comes to the advertising of most sporting events – so Umbro’s effort is definitely a welcome alternative to the norm.
For all travel loving Brockleyites, today was all about the E-double-L (aka the East London Line or ELL) opening.
SE4 became a true member of the TfL family with a fully operating ELL (as part of London Overground) now running through south-east London, dropping off and picking up from good ol’ Brockley.
To celebrate Silv and I took a trip down to Brick Lane (nearest station, Shoreditch High Street) to soak up the sun (and couple of beers) and treat ourselves to a dee-licious meal at Tayyabs (if you only order one thing, make sure it’s the dry meat curry).
So because I don’t need much of an excuse to take some pictures and rustle up a nice little photo collage (You gotta love that orange-brown-grey colour combo they’ve got going on with this line, right?), but also because I wanted to put on record how amazing the E-double-L is, I thought I’d do an ELL post, so here you go!
Over the last couple of months, when I’ve been able to grab a moment from the day job, I’ve been working with the talented Mr Salthouse, publican and landlord of The Royal Albert, on a logo and identity for the pub’s printed materials.
To borrow the description used on the Royal Albert’s twitter page, the pub is a beautiful, aged boozer just off New Cross Road. It has a wonderfully traditional feel to it; all taxidermy, flock wallpaper and chinks of sunlight penetrating the thick velvet curtains that are half closed over the huge sash windows. There’s something about the area that the pub is located, Deptford, that conjures up thoughts of the past with it’s history and the people that live in the area who can (and probably proudly do) trace their family’s history back for generations in SE8. Plus you have the old buildings and pubs, the bustling market and long established butchers that help give the area a sense of the old. Finally, the pub is of course named after Queen Victoria’s beloved husband, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha – all of these things when added together have influenced, and made appropriate, the direction the identity has taken and has meant I’ve had a chance to indulge in my love of Victorian-era aesthetics.
Would it be too cheesy a thing to say that I love this print? Probably, but I’m gonna say it anyway, I love it. It’s great. So simple and clever, it could work as a logo, a valentines card, a print on your wall, maybe even as a bloody tattoo.
This has got to be the best variation of this now iconic poster that I’ve come across so far. It looks like someone has printed one of those cool Russian criminal tattoos over the original design. After a lot of bland and naff interpretations of the poster – which have turned a cool poster in to a bit of a cliche – I’m pleased with this reworking of it.
Photo borrowed from PubActuelle’s flickr
Facial hair of the upper lip + typography = Dixon-esque results!
Check out the Moustache Blog if you haven’t already.
While perusing Swiss Miss t’other day I came across this series of illustrations that accompany Jason Fried and David Heinemeier’s new book – Rework. It would seem the book is aimed at business owners, giving them unconventional advice on how to succeed in making their company a success.
I’ve written in the past how I admire a good series, so I’ll not bore you with that again, but this definitely falls into the well executed category. I love the hand drawn finish and the use of just black and white. I’ve also got a soft spot for this kind of illustrated/typographic maxim or in this case, advice that ties in with the point of each chapter.
The illustrations are all by Mike Rhode who has written about the process of illustrating the book here. Check out the Rework Flickr set for all eighty-eight illustrations.
