Quick! Brag about how great your festival season was/how edgy the first band you went to see was (mine was Wheatus, deal with it) on the Dr. Martens website and win gig tickets to the slightly wimpy British Sea Power, the more shouty Rolo Tomassi or the er… welsh… The Blackout. Sounds good eh. Then tweet all about it with #firstandforever as your hashtag to carry on bragging.

GO HERE TO ENTER BOYO.

A few days ago ShellsuitZombie (along with Paris-based Triangle Mag and italian blog FrizziFrizzi) was invited out by Vice Magazine to a beautiful city on the outskirts of Venice, Bassano, to visit the HQ of 55DSL, a streetwear company founded by the son of Renzo Rosso, the guy at the head of Diesel.

Andrea Rosso, unwilling to accept a job in his fathers company, chose to take his own path producing a line of clothing inspired by surf skate and snow and with emphasis on collaboration with exciting artists, designers and photographers. The company is now 16 years old and has stores in 22 countries around the world. Not bad eh.

Upon arrival we were immediately treated to traditional italian food (meatballs and lasagne ftw) before getting our hands on the SS2012 55DSL collection. A collection of their collaborations including Will Bryant and Gavin Watson continue the long line of artists and creatives 55DSL have worked with and supported during their time – not only a refreshing change to the nameless tees of rival brands but also a nod to the keen eye of Andrea, who (along with his design team) select each artist personally. After pocketing some clobber we had a chat about the brand before heading off to Bassano to stand on the bridge and sip a delicious local drink called Mezze mezze*.

After that we had a long and delicious dinner before a grappa to send us to bed. My hotel-mate, a lovely blogger from Triangle Mag in Paris, then stayed up until 4am writing articles for her ‘day job’. Not me, it had been a long day.

Check out our flickr photos here.

*definitely could have got that wrong.

Over the past year They’ve pimped people’s profile pics, created customised royal plates and even commandeered an ice cream van to deliver to people’s doorsteps. Now, to celebrate the end of year 1, Poke have helped Orange bring back a popular item from their feed, Secret Portraits.

People describe themselves in one comment – they can either use the #SecretPortrait hashtag, or they can submit their description via the Facebook page – A bunch of illustrators then bring these descriptions to life.

Check out past illustrations here, then get tweeting yeah?

You can keep your pop-up calvados and chutney tasting bar, constructed entirely from reclaimed tamagochis, I’m going here:

Currently addicted to British Pathé’s Youtube channel and website. In the early 1900s, the company was one of the first to make short news and lifestyle video bulletins to be played in cinemas around the country – at a time when cinema attendance was at it’s highest ever. Now their free online archive provides us with a time-warp to a bygone era where everything was brightly coloured and slightly camp (and provides them with a tidy income through licensing). The 90,000 videos on the site are quite overwhelming but there are some absolute peaches in there if you care to dig.

The latest video from ShellsuitZombie’s favourite band Keston Cobblers Club is now up and it’s an absolute tearjerker. The story of a couple realising a lifelong dream is KCC’s most ambitious work to date and reportedly caused a few headaches (and bruises) but the end result is totally worth it.

In other news, Keston Cobblers Club are now (finally) on Spotify - add them to your chillout playlists motherfuckers.

Vice magazine, for those who somehow don’t know, are purveyors not only of brave straight-talking guides to some of the seedier, stranger or more horrifying parts of the human condition but have also applied this no holds barred approach to the cultural spheres of fashion, music and anything else ‘the kids’ are into.

The Vice tone of voice, so raw and refreshing when reporting on conflicts in Libya or Congo, seems to feel much more at home ribbing wierdos for wearing crocs or having a sperm tattoo, most noticeably in its infamous ‘DO’s and DON’Ts’ column. Sadly it’s less prominent position in the recent site redesign means I can’t be pretending to read a worthy music column while secretly looking at naked fatties, so it was with guilt-ridden satisfaction that I accepted their offer to send me a review copy of the new print accompaniment to everyone’s guilty secret corner of the internet.

First of all, the book is small and RRPs at £9.99 (which means six quid on Amazonznz) – having worked briefly in an art publishing house I know this aims it at the impulse point-of-sale ‘that’ll go in the loo’ market. And actually, that is what it’s perfect for. When that second log just won’t budge and you’re bored of angry birds, this book will provide a good chuckle. From the aforementioned naked fatties to drag queens through sweat, hair and terrible tattoos, this book has the lot, all captioned with the sort of snide hostility the online column is famous for.

It lacks the depth of its recent big brother ‘The World according to Vice’, reviewed here, but is a good taste of one of the sections of Vice with (I would imagine) the biggest repeat custom. Plus your seedy uncle who thinks he’s in with the kids will love all the boobs, should you present it as his christmas gift.

Tessa is a designer and illustrator from Aalst, a tiny town in Belgium famous for Carnivals and Onions. Now based in Berlin, she creates a mixture of collage and design with a very free exploratory style. I got lost in her flickr in particular which is chock a block with small visual observations and experiments as well as deliciously pretentious names (the below piece is entitled ‘You don’t know what you desire if what you desire does not yet exist’. Go check her out.

Here’s another fine young illustrator to have a look at – lovely line work and a strange sense of humour in the work of Amee Christian – who is seemingly incredibly prolific for someone so young, having illustrated for quite a few magazines and clients despite still being a student.

This is the way to do it, work your shit off, even if it’s for free while you can afford it. You end up with an impressive body of work, which I’m sure will see Amee in good stead for the future.

Bit of an odd one this… but it’s great and the soundtrack is done entirely by our friends and favourite folksy band EVER, Keston Cobblers Club. The last episode has just come out on ‘the tube’ – worth checking them all out for some B-road Britain style antics.

Whoever said we weren’t rock and roll eh.

A couple of weeks ago we held a zine workshop with Alex Zamora from FEVERZINE - have a watch of this video to see what we got up to. We’ll be putting up photos of some of the zines shortly (the video barely scratches the surface of the body of work produced), but until then be content with pausing the HD footage and salivating/giggling over it.

We absolutely loved this workshop, there’s nothing better than getting people  to stretch their creative muscles in new ways and producing a magazine in 3 hours is definitely a good way to do it.

More New Blood videos to come…

Go to John Thurbin for all your stop-motiony black-and-whitey illustrationy needs. This video is sort of mesmerising and his designs are lovely too. A 2011 Middlesex grad, hopefully we’ll be seeing more of John in the near future. JT will triumph indeed.

Some insanely detailed stitching from Peter Crawley has gone into this Wallpaper logo, accumulating a staggering 70 hours of needle-time for the metre-squared piece which involved 12,000 hand-pierced holes and 250m of cotton. It was exhibited as part of the Wallpaper exhibition at Brioni House in Milan.

Sharon McCabe is a current Graphic Design and photography BA student at Leicester DeMontfort university and has a lovely portfolio of her photography which shows a mature photographic eye for someone so young. We’re looking forward to seeing the design part of her site expand in the next year.

ShellsuitZombie’s favourite magazine subscription service, Stack, has been going from strength to strength since we first reported it (I’m sure in no small part down to both issues of SSZ being delivered in their lovely brown envelopes…ahem) and have now started holding magazine related events.

After 2 successful ‘Printout!’ events they are now hosting a 48 hour magazine making session at the Southbank Centre on the 12th to the 14th of August and anyone can get involved. ShellsuitZombie will be there (stapling and photocopying and making tea I would imagine) and so will many others if past events are anything to go by, so make sure you sign up.

When Kaiser Chiefs set about launching their new album ‘The Future Is Medieval’, they wanted to do something a little bit different.  So they joined forces with Weiden+Kennedy to build a website which empowered the fans to create their own version of the album, choosing the tracklisting and creating artwork using a specially designed tool.

After just a couple of weeks, the band were taken aback at the range and excellent of the fan album artworks. So Wieden + Kennedy London developed a data viz running 1,000 of the covers to celebrate the designs. As you scan the designs the album covers flip over like record sleeves to reveal the user name of the fan who created the design. If you click on the cover it takes you through to the fan page where you can buy that fan’s version of ‘The Future is Medieval’.

W+K Creative Technologist Joao Wilbert created the album visualisation tool by combining a Google App Engine application programmed using Python that scrapes the Kaiser Chiefs website and collects a selection of covers created by users. The app scrapes the site everyday looking for new covers and then it loads 1000 random ones every time the user views it.

The result is stunning, and a suitable celebration of a very cool collaborative project.