Andrew describes himself as an English illustrator from France (?) and lists his influences as Hergé, Ben Nicholson and Giotto. Regardless he brings a certain rustic charm to the oft-overused papercraft style of illustration utilising good use of shape, colour and composition. Lovely stuff. Visit his site here.

Watch this doc about 12 East London ‘shirt-done-up-all-the-way-to-the-top’s who have formed a kick-ass collective called This is it. There will be dozens of these things happening around the east end, what with all the squats and hipsters, but these guys are different in that they’re really creative. A video they made to celebrate their new working space went a likkle bit viral and led to a show in Jaguar shoes and the above edgy Vice mini doc about their work.

Now where can I get my hands on that hammer costume?

See here for the full video:

Bad Things That Could Happen from This Is It on Vimeo.

We’ve been all over the country this month – at one point nipping up to Leeds where we presented a whole pile of waffle to students from the three universities at an event called ‘don’t be an idiom‘, a curious mix of caravans, haybails, wax eyeballs and other often experimental pieces of design and illustration. It was great to meet so many of the guys up there and the moment we got everyone dancing to a song of our own composition (garageband, boom) in the middle of our lecture was both bizarre and exhilarating in equal measure.

We are constantly being excited by the creativity and comradeship of the northern bunch – it sometimes seems like everyone knows everyone, regardless of which college they’re at. As a thank you to them (and you) here’s the song we all danced to. Bangin’.

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For this year’s red nose day Colchester graduate illustration duo Phil and Lauren (AKA The Hidden Dingbat collective) decided to help the cause by pictorally transcribing the entire televised evening onto one huge mural. That’s 7 hours of drawing all at once. The plan was to not only raise money during and after the event through their sponsorship page but also to flog the finished piece (complete with as many celeb signatures as possible) with all proceeds also going to the Comic Relief cause. It’s a lovely idea that has produced an even nicer bit of work (see above for a couple of close-ups) – but they now desperately need to get in touch with Olly Murs for the first signature. So where are you Olly? eh?

You can sponsor their red nose day campaign here.

Finally, all the greeking at university pays off! Spotted this on the Creative Review feed (which part of is paywalled now, wtf!) and it really jumped out. To be fair though I’m a sucker for words I don’t understand and wood panelled floors.

Check out more work by Jotateam here.

David O’reilly, the Irish-born prodigal animator Jesus*, has just released the full version of his award-winning short film ‘The External World‘ onto the interweb for our viewing pleasure (it’s just above, yeah there.) Please I beg of you, if you do nothing else this weekend, whack this on full screen, put some pants on, pour some ice cold milk on your crunchy nut cornflakes**, sit back and enjoy. It’s truly a work of genius(/madness? there’s a fine line).

*other prophets are available
**or your hung-over snack of choice.

Howdy, so we’ve been keeping a slight radio silence over the last week or two, but don’t think we’ve been resting on our laurels, oh no. In fact we went … up north. I know. Like, further than Watford even. In a mad few days with D&AD we visited Newcastle and Leeds, holding portfolio crits, workshops and the odd lecture (like above yeah?).

We met some cracking students from unis spanning the breadth and length of the North (and bits of Scotland), even learning what an interactive media course gets up to (there’s some mind-boggling work coming out of Northumbria this year) and witnessing a guy spit his gum on another person’s iPad (mid Angry Birds), pick it up, pop it back in his gob and wander off down the train. Waste not want not.

We’ll follow this post with a couple of the students we met whose work shone, but rest assured the state of design education in the North is very much alive and kicking (and it’s WELL CHEAP!).

This set of images was created by Aled Lewis, a gifted designer, illustrator and Threadless regular. He often works with pop culture imagery and his t-shirt designs have that “I wish I came up with that” quality: simple, witty images that work beautifully with the colour of the material.

It’s been a while since I did a proper REVIEW of something, so when a review copy of Vice Magazine‘s latest tome plopped onto my doormat it was with great gusto that I ripped it open. After admiring its sleek black and gold hardback cover and 352 uncoated pages it was in the bag and off to work. This was my first mistake.

Anyone aware of Vice as a magazine, website and online TV channel will know of their much-copied but ultra-refreshing editorial stance. No fear. No subject too far, no ‘vice’ too sordid, and as I was reminded as I opened the book for the first time ON THE BUS OPPOSITE A SMALL CHILD no detail left to the imagination. We had enjoyed the vice photo-guide to milking ones own prostate and an article on which sex is the more proficient fellator before I noticed his tiny innocent eyes peeking at the filth within. Yep, not one for the family bookshelf.

Back in the comfort and relative safety of my own house I was free to more fully explore the contents of the book. Since its media empire emerged from a small Montreal-based fanzine in the late nineties, Vice has kept a reputation for brilliant photojournalism and reportage from all corners of the globe, an achievement it flaunts proudly with articles on everything from the proponents of the northern (and horrendous) ‘Donk’ musical genre to the current collapse of Dubai’s economy and mistreatment of its construction workers. Summaries of VBS documentaries on Liberia, North Korea and the now award-winning documentary about a heavy metal band from Baghdad are interspersed with pieces on Hyponogogia (waking nightmares) and Chemical Psychedelics. A fair few of the articles I had read before but I devoured them all the same, their fury and humour fresher for being in a new format.

If you are a fan of Vice already, this is everything you would expect it to be, a collection of the most timeless, brave and often controversial articles and features from their huge collection. Interviews with Lemmy, David Lynch and Spike Jonze are interspersed with photojournalism from across the world and extracts from the infamous vice guides under the heading ‘(Don’t) Try This at Home’ – It’s a fantastic pick-up-and-read book, housing the same great content as the magazines but in a much more presentable format.

The World According to Vice retails at £20, which depending on who you are is well expensive or pretty reasonable for a ‘thing’ to be. Personally for a book of this size and quality it’s a no-brainer, if only for some cracking dinner party anecdotes (and if you’re the type of person that goes to that kind of dinner party you can definitely afford £20). Go buy it you bastards.

The E–Spam zine from the talented young folks at Just Us. is here!

‘e-spam’ shows 13 illustrators and designers visual response to the amount of e-mail spam; we as internet users receive on a daily basis.

I think I’m in it, so go buy it. NOOOWWWW

Waste and Gringo Records present Floodit 06.

Live Music from:

REMEMBER! Bring along your own blank tees / sweaters / tote bags etc and get them printed up live for only £5 per design! Also available on the night will be A3 embossed stamps prints of each artwork.

Heavy line-up, should be great, get on it!

Photomontage is a term now more commonly associated with digital photo manipulation (as in ‘hey LOL I photomontaged ur face wid this pic of a pornstar/lolcat), a mould that Scottish illustrator Lola Depré breaks completely by using real paper, scissors and glue to shatter and reform her subjects into caricatures of themselves or different creatures altogether. Some really funny and creepy work on her bulging website, most of which is for sale. We hope to see much more of her work in the future.

Well, Vimeo announced their winning shorts from their 2010 Video Awards (judged by an extraordinary array of cinematic names including David Lynch, Roman Coppola and… erm… M.I.A) and the winner was Last Minutes with ODEN. I’m not afraid to admit (having a similar hound myself, 16 and going strong) that I was fairly close to big slushy man-tears while watching, even if the dude is a mega-hipster.

Others commended included ‘Between Bears’ a favourite of mine and worthy winner of best animation (see below). See all winners here.

Craig Matchett, aka Supernovi, creates these little zines, vis/res,  as a part of a beautiful print portfolio. He has also watched Men in Black over 100 times and is 23.59Gb old. Yeeeah.

The album cover. A square of pure expression with, client allowing, no rules and the opportunity to enter into history. Two men that have literally lived the dream and produced some of the most iconic album covers of the last 50 years are Storm Thorgerson and Roger Dean, the darlings of pop and album cover art’s golden age – the 60s and 70s (though they have remained prolific ever since).

Lucky then that they’re doing a talk on the 28th of October in conjunction with our mate Adrian Shaughnessy’s Unit Editions at Logan Hall, London. Tickets are available from www.uniteditions.com priced at £12.50, a snip compared to some of the other conferences and wotnot going on at the moment.

UPDATE: It’s cancelled. Balls.