Eric Tesroete is a 3d Artist by trade - you wouldn’t have guessed it eh. He created this head for a Halloween party out of 370 triangular planes of card before taking these beautifully lit photos of him in it. If he could make a service out of this I’d totally pay to spend some time in big-head mode (despite the fact that after a recent dusting off of our studio N64 it turns out I’m the WORST GOLDENEYE PLAYER EVER).

Airfix for Narcissists. Love it.

If you like your bicycles, be sure to check out the photography of Matt Lingo.
He does take photos of other stuff too! Found via

This post comes from the heart. If you are at all interested in print, independent magazines or free bloody speech then you need to subscribe to this service; it has, quite frankly, changed my life.*

The concept of Stack is to promote independent press by sending subscribers one (or quite often several) independent rags a month. This can range from Eye (RRP £17!) to Little White Lies, Bad Idea, VNA, Anorak, the list is endless. If you’ve heard of these then you’ll know what a good deal this is, if you haven’t then you, child, are the most in need of it.

Strangely though, for me at least, it’s the other ‘free’ magazines you get with the featured title that make it all worthwhile. One example is Manzine, an outspoken reaction to mens magazines written by some of their editors. Reading-on-the-bus-kudos aside, it has helped to reinforce my confidence in the power of a print mag, however home-made - No-one else will own my copy of Manzine, I’ve spilt coffee on it and dog-eared the corners, it’s truly been a journey. I still pick it up months later and it’s as ball-splittingly hilarious as it was the day I got it.

I can’t recommend Stack enough, it’s a bundle of joy landing on your doormat every month, a constant in a world of wars, politics, doom, gloom and digital media. Plus they delivered issue one of our magazine last month, getting them a gold star in my book.

Jonny

*well maybe not changed my life but it’s definitely been the best £40 I’ve spent this year

Definitely worth looking at, Lukes site, not only for the quality of work (bloody LOVE the cupboard woodcut) but quality of presentation. A bit of nice photography goes a long long way, and I wouldn’t expect luke to have too much trouble getting through the door of a studio with this bunch of work (unless he’s an arsehole. You’re not an arsehole are you Luke?). He was also partly responsible for the Nottingham Trent 111 identity that we posted a while back.

Can it be true that I hold in my mortal hand an issue of purest AMMO?* With issue three, the cutest little inspiration mag in the planet brings us words and pics from Peskimo, Jam Factory and a favourite of ours Jessica Hische (cue glow of envy due to epic typo-crush) as well as loads of others. You can fit this baby in your back pocket but it’s jam-packed with artists that will make you quiver (ie. Pat Perry - never heard of him before but my is he good…) and is well worth picking up from the AMMO store.

*You’ll be pleased to know that our propensity to shoehorn content into barely-relevant quotes is as yet unabated.

Ashwin is a London-based designer with a very nice collection of work in his portfolio including this poster called ‘The Bare Essentials’. Often a self-congratulatory ‘design about design’ concept combined with the student classic ‘poster over face’ pose will bring me out in a rash but this piece overcomes that by being really rather pretty with some intricate use of colour (The clock has a red second hand for example). You can buy it an’ all.

£2.50 for 64 pages, an Eboy cover and fold-out poster, articles by creative types including Adrian Shaughnessy, Sanky, D&AD, Glug, Eboy etc. Want it? Buy it here.

Some of you may remember our post on the winner of last years Rooted exhibition, ‘Skeletor the Cutlery Skeleton’. Well now the guys that run the event have created their first publication (see above for the page featuring our plastic friend). We were honoured to be asked to judge the event and are even prouder (like leave-it-lying-around-so-people-see kind of proud) to be in the book too.

Along with Skeletor there are some fantastic pieces displayed within a sleek 70 page tome and they are selling out fast - at £10 (a snip) it’s well worth picking up this limited edition bit of ephemera, no doubt featuring the early work of some of the future masters of the design world.

We first met photographer Christine Donnier-Valentin as she was snapping the judging of D&AD New Blood last year. After we discovered she was a reet laugh and she realised how … ahem … photogenic we were, we all got chatting, some time during which she mentioned a project documenting abandoned sofas. Here is a small snapshot of her ever-growing collection.

Her work has recently been featured on the Eye blog where Christine says ‘I ask everybody I meet to contact me if they spot a sofa in the street. I write the day, time, location and - most importantly - who recommended it to me. It has become a networking connection. Friends and colleagues based in London and abroad send me pictures of sofas taken on their mobile. I call them my ‘sofa spies’.’

So if you happen to see one lying around (or you’ve fly-tipped it yourself, tut tut) holler and you never know, it could become something beautiful again.

Product photographer Frederik Lieberath has an incredible attention to detail. (And a good burst mode on his camera).

On Saturday night ShellsuitZombie were kindly given three tickets to what would turn out to be one of the more surreal evenings of our social calendar so far this year. Mercy, the same Liverpool and London based agency that creates 12 Angry Zines, held the sixth of its incredibly successful (and oversubscribed) nights with Liverpool-based pop experimentals The Wave Machines at Shoreditch Church - ‘Wave if you’re really there’.

This one, entitled Baptism, featured a host of talent in the fields of spoken word, music and performance, with brilliant (and hilarious) vocal performances from Nathan Jones, Ross Sutherland, Salena Godden and David J, Music from Eugene Mcguinness and the Lizards and of course The Wave Machines and some bizarre performance art from a troupe, one of whom kept putting her head in the font (church, not typographic). Everything combined (as well as a BYOB policy resulting in excessive wine consumption) to create a great atmosphere, helped of course by the Medieval/Palladian style architecture of the church itself (yep damn right, wikifuckingpedia).

Moment of the night had to go to Dave O’Dowda from Table on piano accompanied by a choir which popped up out of nowhere (like in Love actually). All in all a memorable night, please for gods sake go to the next one.

(The two good photos are © Tamsin Isaacs, the grainy ones are © Ellies crappy iPhone camera.)

Been meaning to post this stuff for ages - busy times (the freaking print mag/New Blood prep) have led to somewhat of a backlog in ye ould inbox - Better late than never.

The last couple of years have seen a spate of collage-based illustration, lo-fi is very much in. However, the fact that you can’t move on ffffound for lazy ’shapes-with-bits-of-space-in-them’ knock-offs doesn’t mean there isn’t still some interesting work going on. Stone and Spear (AKA Simon Peter Frank Cook, Nottingham-based designer/Illustrator) is producing a little chunk of it in fact - utilising negative space, composition and cut-outs of wrestlers rather better than most.

His website is chocka-block full of stuff, enjoy…

Timothy Saccenti has recently had a website overhaul courtesy of design studio Build.
When Build are faced with the challenge of designing a new website, they really do grab hold of web browsers and show them who’s boss. They own the digital space through a unique approach to interaction design, offering a new perspective on what modern day browsers are capable of.

To see more of Build’s digital work, check out Jason Tozer’s website. Oh hello cascading style sheets.

Amazing.

This post is about two things. The first is the photography above, by Kevin Bauman, two of a set of 100 photos of abandoned houses in Detroit, once the USA’s fourth largest city, which has seen a population decrease of  over 50% from its highest of 2 million. The second is a documentary that is currently sitting on iPlayer, ‘Requiem for Detroit?’, covering some of the reasons why (and set to a soundtrack of Eminem, you know cos he was from dere innit). Together they provide a bleak (but interesting) account of the collapse of the American automobile industry and ‘Motown’ and the hope for a better future in a city that was once the embodiment of the American Dream.

That guy is Noel. He was at VS. We think he enjoyed it.

On Tuesday the 16th of February, a day that will live in infamy, We, ShellsuitZombie, hosted a silly evening. Braving wind rain and puddles, a krunkload of people came along to enjoy what we had promised would be a night of competition, intrigue, industry and graduates. And against all odds, we think we just about pulled it off…

With creatives from agencies like AMVBBDO, Fallon, W+K, Profero, BCL etc, designers from beautiful boutique agencies like A+B, The Plant, Morph, Magpie and DRY as well as some lush prizes on offer, a couple of cracking bands, beats by DJ and Designer David Rudnick and a lovely bunch o’ students and grads, that made for a fun-ass time. (and the longest sentence in the world. care.)

The Point

We believe that your first contact with industry shouldn’t be in the reception of a design agency, nervously clutching your portfolio. Job interviews are so forced and you have such a short time to get your personality across, yet personality is a vital part of teamwork and the creative process.  Fortunately, the majority of design professionals are joke-loving booze-hounds and somehow they seem a lot less daunting with a beer in their paw.  Our intention was to create a social atmosphere where grads and pros meet not as potential colleagues, but as co-humans; connecting through humorous anecdotes, not relevant work experience; flipping beermats, not pages of the (immaculately formatted) CV.

The Competition

We really wanted to avoid a school disco situation with grads on one side and pros on the other, nervously eyeing each other, dreading that first dance.  So we came up with a strategy to skip the small talk and escalate to full-on flirting.  The theme of the night was VS, and so a competitive spirit was encouraged throughout the night.  Guests were instructed to pick mini-duels with each other in whatever form they deemed appropriate.  These nano-challenges could be anything from drawing the best willy, to a dance-off, to the best magic trick. The winners of the most impressive micro-tasks won some awesome geek-out prizes kindly donated by our friends - including mugs by A+B Studio, t-shirts and posters from Magpie Studio and the limited edition Firetrap gnome from DRY (thank you all for donating these prizes).  Most importantly everyone got involved, the air was thick with challenges, and these led to real dialogues between new acquaintances.

Meanwhile we had music from the awesome Keston Cobblers Club and the smooth sounds of Harrison Hope.  Later on designer and DJ Dave Rudnick laid down his eclectic beats (So Solid anyone?) and the boozy chat continued.

The Future

More of the same innit?  We love organising events like this and will keep on doing more.  If you have suggestions for themes or locations, definitely get in touch.  Check out our flickr and Facebook pages for more pics and make sure you come along to the next one!

Peace out playerz. One Love.