Man the christmas shopping comes back every year doesn’t it. It’s hard to budget for everything around this time of year but … hold on … you’re a creative kind of guy right? Why don’t you just design up a lovely christmas card and get it sent round to a thousand people this christmas, and whats more pocket a nice little christmas wad while you’re at it. Just think how happy Granny will be when she gets her Xbox with Modern Warfare 3 and an extra controller! *yoink*.
Runners up also receive Stack annual subscriptions – which we raved about here. Well worth picking up a pencil for.
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.
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.
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.
The design agency and capital letter-avoider jkr has released a new book entitled “The Blue Lady’s New Look and Other Curiosities”, or just “Blue Lady” to its mates. I got hold of a copy a few weeks ago and since then I have been reading it on a variety of trains and deck chairs around the country.
The purpose of the book is to present a collection of posts from jkr’s blog, the Design Gazette. Almost daily, its author, Silas Amos, provides an intelligent, thought-provoking critique of the latest developments in design and branding, delivered entirely without ego, which is impressive from an agency described by a leading creative industry commentator as “pretty shit hot”. To describe the Blue Lady as an anthology is to sell it short though. In my opinion, the book is much more than a collection of disparate essays. The pieces have been lovingly organised into a number of themed sections building to a climactic final chapter that articulately captures the current state of design and culture.
Like an episode of Scrubs, each of the essays introduces an important question that often has no clear-cut answer. Should you continuously refresh your brand’s image or stick with what’s familiar? Is it a good idea to associate the brand with a particular celebrity? Should packaging be different for items bought online rather than in-store? For each of these issues, the Blue Lady presents a spectrum of recent cases that have been successful and some that haven’t. This makes the book a great source of inspiration and guidance for both students and design professionals. It’s a shame there isn’t an index to help search through different brands or key concepts.
One of the Blue Lady’s closing points is that design today is highly referential, so it is fitting that Amos regularly draws from an encyclopaedic knowledge of past designs, literature and the arts. At times when reading the book, I felt like a young apprentice, smiling and nodding as my mentor spoke in a language of past icons and learned cultural references, then scurrying off to Wikipedia to work out what he was on about. Don’t get me wrong, the Blue Lady reads well and is free from impenetrable jargon, but it treats the reader as a peer, expecting them to share a certain level of cultural understanding. By the end of the book you’ll be well equipped to contribute to the discussion (if you weren’t already).
So yeah, get a copy. It will inform you about the many factors that are shaping today’s cultural context and make you think about where things might go in the future. Which is important because you’ll be the one doing the shaping. It’s only £7.19 on Amazon right now and, in case you were wondering, it smells great.
The Shakey Monkey Space app. Wow, we (and probably a lot of other people) have been saying for ages that someone should somehow take the piss out of this kind of work, and blow me down, the guys at Cog Design have only gone and done it.
This app lets you create a piece of work worthy of many a fffound page (and unfortunately many portfolios) with a wiggle of your hand, purely by shuffling together an assortment of animals, lines, space and sky images, shapes and underlined obliques. In fact there are so many that, with over 1 million combinations your work will probably be more original than the object of its derision. What makes it even better is that you can then export your masterpiece inside its very own mystery ‘poster-poser’ shot. So fashionable.
We asked creator John Burton about the app (and when I say ‘asked about the app’ we of course meant ‘invited to have a rant’). He said this:
‘We created the app because we were bored with people producing the same kind of trendy, monkey-floating-in-space, style-over-substance imagery. It all seemed so formulaic. We took a satirical approach from the start, poking as much fun at ourselves and tackling as many design clichés as we could – the animals and random geometric shapes floating in space, strikethrough and underlined block capitals in italics, the faceless-phantom presenter of all posters holding up your end result. The result is a bit of fun we want everyone to get
involved in.’
Well we’ve had a lot of fun with it (and it’s free). Download it and nip this vein of unoriginality right in the bud.
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?
While up north last month one of the grads we met was Leeds-based design student Heather Bradley. She showed a suprisingly mature knowledge of type and layout in her branding work, even working with spatial designers to design spaces for the brands she was working on. Nice to see an editorial concept carried out over multiple issues too (and that’s a custom typeface, intriguingly titled squircle).
This scrabble board, named A1 and created by Industrial design student Andrew Clifford out of ash and mahogany, uses 6 different fonts on the tiles and aims at the designers and typographers of the world. As a product it sure is purty, especially with the inclusion of cork buffers and magnetic board holder thingies, though I don’t know if I could hack playing a game with the full mixed letter set (individual typefaces would also be available) – my brain has enough trouble with ‘words with friends’ without a curious mix of serifs, slabs, sans, gothic and blobby fonts used here.
Still, if you’re interested in a limited edition fancy-pants version of a belter of a game, head to his site where you can put your name down for one. At least if you have shit letters you’ll be able to touch wood for better ones.
Just spotted these crazy robots on the Core77 design blog. They have been built in Kandahar, Afghanistan by the US soldier Rupert Valero out of local junk. His creations speak the international language of awesome, which is great for bonding with the local kids. There’s an interview with him here and you can even buy some of his stuff on Etsy.
Little White Lies is one of London design agency and independent publisher The Church of London‘s several titles and the mag from which the agency was born. In this video they show the process of developing the Black Swan issue, one in a long line of beautiful pieces of design (I can’t think of another title with such consistently striking and touchable covers). Looks like a lot of fun too.
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.
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.
