A Brooklyn-based photographer named Izaz Rony is offering a new kind of portrait service: You tell him where you’re going to be on a particular day, and what you’ll be wearing, and he shows up in the general vicinity and snaps your picture, without you knowing exactly where he is or when he’ll be there. “Using information provided earlier about their weekly routine, the photographer will arrive on the scene, and unseen, take shots of the subject,” he writes on his site, MethodIzaz. “The subject will be photographed walking through the streets, going about their daily business. Without posing and artifice, the camera captures only the natural beauty of the person.”

[via Khoi Vinh.]

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categories: Art and Design

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After living with thwarted technolust since last June, I finally got myself an iPhone on Monday. Verdict: amazing, beautiful, world-historical. I quickly got tired of the generic wallpaper, so I poked around in my files and found a scan of a gorgeous music score by the avant garde American composer George Crumb, whom I posted about two years ago. I spent a few minutes turning the score into a 320x480 graphic, and now it greets me each time I pick up my phone. Even though it’s too small for the details to be visible, it still looks super-cool on the high-res iPhone screen. (I’ve uploaded a much bigger copy of this score so you can see it in all its glory; you can view it here.)

You can download this and use it on your own phone:

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categories: Art and Design, Music and Audio, Science and Technology

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From Vanity Fair’s website, an amazing slide show of lobby cards—“the gorgeous promotional posters that were a common sight in movie theaters from the early 20th century through the 1960s.” They’re from the collection of the late screenwriter Leonard Schrader, the brother of screenwriter-director Paul Schrader.

The slide show itself is here; Peter Biskind’s introductory essay is here.

To read more about this incredible trove of Hollywood ephemera, visit the collection’s official site.

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categories: Art and Design, Film

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A music video featuring “trampoline gymnasts simulating typical video effects.” Filmed in one take. I can’t stop giggling when I watch this.

[Not sure where I found this; Design Observer, I think.]

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categories: Art and Design, TV and Video

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Here’s a nice little short film about Paul Rand (1914-1996), the brilliant graphic designer most famous for designing logos for IBM, UPS, and other major corporations:

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categories: Art and Design

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Check out this astonishing TED presentation by Blaise Aguera y Arcas, a Microsoft researcher who is leading the development of an amazing visual technology called Photosynth. As Arcas’s bio on the TED site explains:

Photosynth itself is a vastly powerful piece of software capable of taking a wide variety of images, analyzing them for similarities, and grafting them together into an interactive three-dimensional space. This seamless patchwork of images can be viewed via multiple angles and magnifications, allowing us to look around corners or “fly” in for a (much) closer look. Simply put, it could utterly transform the way we experience digital images.

This is a revolution.

[via NewsDesigner.com.]

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categories: Art and Design, Science and Technology, TV and Video

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Remember The Great Magazine-Cover Spree of 2005-2006? In the fall of 2005, Vanity Fair approached me to do some fresh covers for the magazine’s Vanities section. I worked on a bunch of concepts for them, and four new covers eventually appeared in the December 2005 issue. Here they are; I’ve never posted them before. A few of these have been modified slightly from the published versions.

The hed was “The Celebrity Invasion,” and the dek was “V.F. samples a few of the new star-studded magazines on the drawing boards.”

(“Esquire” doesn’t have an “n” in it, so I created one by chopping out the “u” and rotating it 180 degrees. Whee…)

Outtakes from the assignment are here, here, and here.

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categories: Art and Design, Magazines, The Magazine Covers

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A few weeks ago I was poking around in the first-floor men’s department at Barneys when I came across this pocket square, which is adorned with little panopticons!

Of course I had to buy it. But I returned it a week or two later, because it was $68, and I’m not yet at a point in my sartorial development where I have much need for pocket squares.

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categories: Art and Design

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Starting on April 1, the city of São Paulo, Brazil, began strictly enforcing its ban on many kinds of outdoor advertising, particularly billboards. A photographer named Tony de Marco has been chronicling the rollback, and his Flickr set is beautiful and amazing.

The Flickr set is here.

[via The FontFeed.]

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What is it with Spanish-speaking countries and poster art? They’ve got something going on. In addition to the work of Bachs, I’ve become a bit obsessed with Spanish Civil War posters. I’d been vaguely aware of them for a while, and I had a general understanding of their cultural and political importance during that conflict, but now I’m in awe of their greatness. Some of the most amazing poster art ever. I’ve been dreaming of owning a couple of custom-framed originals that I could hang in my apartment. Chisholm Larsson in Chelsea sells some well-preserved originals, and reproductions are available online in various places. For now I will make do with the six framed postcards that I recently hung from my bathroom wall; I bought the postcards for a buck each at Chisholm Larsson. The one below is my favorite. I love the type on this, and the powerful energy swooping toward the upper left.

Lots more posters and history here.

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In my ongoing quest to find great, unusual stuff to hang on my walls, I’ve discovered a few amazing poster artists I’d never known about. One is the Polish artist Jan Lenica. But first and foremost is the Cuban illustrator Eduardo Muñoz Bachs (1937-2001), who created more than two thousand posters, most of them for movies. He did much or most of his work for ICAIC, the Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematografica, founded by the Castro government in 1960 to make and promote Cuban films. I found some of Bachs’s work online and I thought, I have to get some of these. Bachs used vibrant colors in a very Cuban way, and he had an incredible sense of space and proportion.

I now own four Bachs posters, including the first two below (I couldn’t find graphics of the other two I bought):

I found them here in New York at the Cuban Art Space at the Center for Cuban Studies, which is located at 124 West 23rd Street. They have a few dozen silkscreened Bachs posters for sale, as well as a bunch by other talented Cuban artists. Original posters are generally $100, high-quality reproductions (also silkscreened) are $55. I bought four reproductions, and had to stop myself from buying more. They’re a slightly odd size—20” X 30”—but after looking around for a while I found great frames in that exact size at Sam Flax, which is the go-to place in Manhattan for high-quality prefab frames.

Here is a 1995 interview with Bachs. To see more of his posters, and maybe buy one or two, try eBay, Stony Hill Antiques and Gallery in Madison, Wisconsin (linked page contains work by Bachs and other Cuban poster artists), and Soy Cubano, based in Cuba.

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This clever promotional coaster got some blog attention a little while back, but I never got around to posting about it. I first saw it here. It’s apparently the work of Paul Brazier, Daryl Corps, and Ben Kay of London’s Lunar BBDO.

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The walls in my apartment are a little too bare, so today I ran around a bit looking for some nice framed stuff to buy. I’ve also been poking around the web trying to find things. And that’s how I stumbled onto the incredible James Brown poster below. I’m not sure if it’s available for sale; it’s the poster of the week on gigposters.com, a very cool site devoted to the art of contemporary concert posters. The site itself doesn’t sell posters, but apparently some of the designers sell their creations. I gotta e-mail the artist—he goes by the name Moctezuma—and find out if I can buy one of these. More of Moctezuma’s work is here.

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categories: Art and Design, Music and Audio

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Thanks to something Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes created, the October issue of Vanity Fair has gotten a little bit of attention. The issue also contains something I created: a fake cover flap you can cut out and attach to a newsstand copy of The Weekly Standard. It’s on page 272, in the Vanities section. More details are here.

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categories: Art and Design, Best Of, Magazines, News and Politics, The Magazine Covers

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Out soon from Harry N. Abrams, Inc.:

From the book description: “Body Type is an eye-opening look into the amazingly creative ways that tattoo artists are utilizing typography. Whereas the majority of tattoo art uses images to convey messages, here the message actually is the image.”

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categories: Art and Design, Books

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Via BibliOdyssey, which is bursting with gorgeous graphical stuff, I just discovered Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie, an admirably geeky blog devoted to the history of the bookplate. As the American Society of Bookplate Collectors and Designers explains,

Since the fifteenth century, distinguished artists and their patrons have given serious attention to this art form. It represents a miniature art developed to adorn books and a convenient, individualized way for the book’s owner to be identified. The bookplate, or ex libris, is a label placed on the inside of the front cover of a book.

These celebrity bookplates are apparently from the blogger’s personal collection:

Go here for more of this blogger’s celebrity bookplates.

The website of the Los Angeles-based ReadInk Books contains a bunch of other Hollywood bookplates, along with some historical background about each.

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categories: Art and Design, Books

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(You know how sometimes you get an idea for a magazine cover, and you sit down and create it, and it makes you laugh, but then you think, Hmm, maybe I shouldn’t post this, because it’s kind of in bad taste? And then you put it aside for a while? And then two or three months later you revisit it, and you find yourself thinking, Hmm, why not post this? And then you spend some time redesigning it, and then you upload it to your server? Like this?)

(The main coverline font is Tobias Frere-Jones’s lovely and ubiquitous Gotham, which you can buy from Hoefler & Frere-Jones.)

(Go to this page for more covers like this.)

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categories: Art and Design, Magazines, The Magazine Covers

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Wow, the 24 post from last week is one of the most-trafficked items I’ve ever posted here. A lot of people obviously find such an analysis to be freakish and obsessive, but honestly, those of us who care about type and design can’t help but notice those sorts of things. Most people don’t even know the difference between a serif font and a sans serif font; naturally many of those people are going to say, as one person did on Dave Barry’s blog, “WTF is he talking about?” The post has been called “astounding” and “rad” and “a great find,” but also “nutty” and “admittedly dull.” And then there’s this comment that was posted on CNet’s blog, which I can’t resist quoting in full:

CNet, you have officially reached the bottom. Not only did you come across this absolutely ridiculous blog posting, but you actually felt the need to torture us by linking us to it and making us think it actually contained even a tiny bit of relevant information. I can never have those few minutes back. I hate you.

Needless to say, I do not want to get a beer with that guy. I’d rather get a beer with Stephen Coles of the excellent site Typographica, who wrote to tell me that the font used for the 24 clock is a commercially available typeface called “LCD,” which you can buy here for $34.50. As you can see, the kerning of the 1’s is built into the font:

I’d also rather get a beer with my pal Lindsay, who wrote to say this: “Finally, something so nerdy that it’s travelled through a worm hole and come out on the other side as cool. … This post is what the internet is FOR.” Right on!

I would also like to call your attention to the fact that Dave Barry has been liveblogging 24 regularly over the last few months, and it’s pretty hilarious.

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Okay, I am a TOTAL FREAK for having noticed this weird typographic pattern on 24. You have been warned. My discovery of this bizarre typographic anomaly took place in a few steps over the course of several episodes, so bear with me as I explain.

I loved the first season of 24, but I gave up on the show after the second season, because the pulled-out-of-thin-air plot twists, the hammy acting, and the fluid-as-water loyalties of the characters became increasingly maddening. “This show is ridiculous,” I eventually said to myself, perhaps when drunk, because I don’t usually talk to myself. “I refuse to watch it anymore.” But thanks to recommendations from a few enthusiastic friends, I returned to the show late in the fourth season, and now I’m totally hooked again. The fifth season has been fantastically entertaining. The producers have worked out most of the kinks in the format and now know exactly what they’re doing. The show is still ridiculous sometimes, but that’s part of the fun.

A few months ago I began to notice something unusual about the 24 clock—the timer that appears onscreen at regular intervals throughout each episode. It’s modeled on a standard LED clock, the kind you’ll see on the radio next to your bed or the microwave in your kitchen or inside a ticking rogue nuclear weapon once you’ve pulled off the face plate. You know—the standard workaday places. On a typical such clock, each number is rendered within a matrix of two vertical bars on either side and three horizontal bars in the middle. At first glance, the 24 clock appears to be based around exactly that sort of matrix. Here’s a screenshot from last Monday’s episode:

A couple of months ago, I noticed that the 24 clock renders the numeral 1 with a short serif at the top. Here’s another screenshot from last Monday’s episode, with the serif circled:

That serif is a needless typographic flourish. A normal clock wouldn’t have a serif there, and in fact it’s totally illogical for the 24 clock to have one: None of the other numerals show evidence that the LEDs on top are split in half and can render a serif. The LED bars along the top are always solid when used in the other numerals, and the light that illuminates the top bars in the other numerals is consistent and unbroken.

So I noticed this and it amused me, but I didn’t think much of it, because why should the 24 clock have to be logical and believable? Every episode of the show contains a lot of stuff that’s illogical and unbelievable. This typographic inconsistency is no more ridiculous than, say, Jack Bauer sneaking onto a diplomatic flight, hijacking the plane in midair, finding the evidence that implicates the president, forcing the bad-guy copilot to land the plane on a Los Angeles freeway, and then eluding the president’s military goons once the plane comes to a halt on the makeshift runway. To mention just one recent half-hour sequence.

[Continue reading "There Is Something Weird Going on With the Clock on 24"...]

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categories: Art and Design, Best Of, TV and Video

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Remember that spoof cover of Parents magazine I created last year to illustrate the hazards of sloppy cover design? A few months ago, one designer ignored my warning. Here’s the cover of Butterick’s Winter/Holiday 2005 catalog:

The cover is totally real. It was first noticed by a Canadian graphic designer named Nick Frühling (whose blog is excellent, by the way), and then was picked up last month by Veer’s blog, The Skinny.

(Thanks to my former Book colleague Steven McClenning for the tip!)

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categories: Art and Design, Magazines

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In recent months, the celebrity weeklies have been all pregnancy, all the time. So on some level this makes sense:

(Go to this page for more stuff like this.)

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categories: Art and Design, Film, Magazines, The Magazine Covers

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My old pal Rob Harrell—whom I wrote about in this post and this post and this post—is scheduled to be featured in a CBS Evening News segment tomorrow or Thursday, and it’s not just because he’s talented.

Rob and I have been friends since we met in the sixth grade at Binford Middle School in Bloomington, Indiana, our hometown. Even in the sixth grade, he was a precocious illustrator and artist, and he went on to get two or three art degrees. These days he is, among other things, the creator, writer, and illustrator of Big Top, a daily comic strip from Universal Press Syndicate—the company that distributes Doonesbury, The Boondocks, and many other nationally prominent strips. Big Top appears in about 40 papers around the country, including the Boston Herald and the Detroit Free Press. In 2004, The Onion’s culture section had this to say about Big Top: “Rob Harrell possesses a classicist’s sense of comic timing … using panel space as well as any comics-page humorist since, yes, Berkeley Breathed.”

Rob moved with his wife, Amber, to Austin last year, after having lived in Indianapolis since college. A few months ago, he was experiencing constant headaches and some unusual pain behind his right eye, so he went with Amber to have some tests done. Eventually the doctors determined that he had a malignant tumor behind his right eye. Did I mention he’s only 37?

[Continue reading "Something Cool Comes From Cancer"...]

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categories: Art and Design, Miscellany

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Greetings from my new apartment on East First Street, where I moved ten days ago after having lived on the Upper West Side since the Harding administration. The move, combined with a couple of busy periods at work, is the reason for the relative silence here so far this year. But I’ll be putting up a fair amount of stuff over the next few weeks—I have a big backlog of things I’ve been meaning to post about.

I have a lot more wall space in my new place than I did in my old one, so I’ve been happily accumulating things to hang on the walls. For a couple of years I’ve been meaning to find books of original scores by the American avant-garde composer George Crumb (b. 1929), who often uses highly unconventional, and graphically gorgeous, techniques to represent his music on the page. I haven’t heard much of Crumb’s music, but the scores themselves are simply sublime works of art. The staves on Crumb’s manuscript pages often dip, curl, and twist back into themselves, forming crucifixes, peace signs, closed loops, and various other symbolic shapes.

I bought two Crumb collections from sheetmusicplus.com: Makrokosmos Volume I (1972) and Makrokosmos Volume II (1973), both of which are for amplified piano. The design of my site can’t accommodate large, detailed graphics, but these images should give you a sense of the beauty of Crumb’s manuscript pages. The first image is a composition called “Twin Suns,” which is part of Makrokosmos Volume II. I rotated the image about 100 degrees clockwise so it would fit in this column:

Here’s a detail from “A Prophecy of Nostradamus,” also from Makrokosmos Volume II:

I’m going to frame four or six or eight of these and put them up in my apartment. As unplayable as they look, Crumb’s scores are all quite playable by experienced musicians. Don’t ask me how.

Here are video excerpts from an interview with Crumb in which he talks about some of his techniques. And on this page you can listen to sound samples and download cropped PDFs of some Crumb scores.

Okay, more soon…

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categories: Art and Design, Music and Audio

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Even the most conservative, unimaginative logotype can be very effective at putting forth a brand identity. Take the Crate & Barrel logo—it’s basically Helvetica Bold (or a minor tweak of it) with a very round, un-Helvetica-like C:

When it comes to corporate graphics, nothing is hoarier than good old Helvetica Bold. But the Crate & Barrel logo is memorable enough, and it pops nicely when stamped in big black type on the white bags and boxes that customers carry out of the store.

In Crate & Barrel’s early days, company executives probably paid tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars to the design firm that created the logo, and the company likely considered dozens or hundreds of variations on the current logo before choosing one. The creation of a logo is often a painstaking process, and the end result is supposed to be an unalterable design whose elements are always rendered in exactly the same way.

So I was amused last fall when I noticed that some things had gone terribly wrong with the sign above the Crate & Barrel store on the northwest corner of Broadway and Houston. Below is what the sign looked like in late September. The r in “Crate” and the e in “Barrel” have rotated counter-clockwise, as if drunk, and the second r in “Barrel” is hovering above the baseline, as if it’s trying to float away:

A few weeks ago, I walked through that intersection and noticed that someone had performed first aid on the sign. It looks better, but it’s still not perfect. Here’s a photo from this afternoon:

The r in “Crate” looks fine now, and the e in “Barrel” has been rotated back into more or less the proper position. But the second r in “Barrel” is still trying to escape. Fly away, poor little r! Run off and join the American Apparel logo, where at least the use of Helvetica Bold is somewhat ironic!

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categories: Art and Design

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Happy new year, and apologies for the extended break. I was both busy and lazy during the holidays, and now I’m waist-deep in my first-ever New York apartment search. I’ve lived in New York since 1987, but this is the first time I’ve ever actually had to look for a place. After a decade in a rent-stabilized 400-square-foot studio on a great Upper West Side block a few yards from Riverside Park, I’m planning to move downtown in the next month or two, probably to the East Village. I spent most of the weekend racing around looking at apartments in a few downtown neighborhoods, and I actually found a couple of places that I’d be happy to live in. I’m hoping to score one of those places in the next few days.

I have a big backlog of cool links and other material that I’ve been meaning to post. I’m going to be swamped this week, too, but I’m planning to get back to a more regular posting schedule by next weekend.

I’ve got apartments on the brain, so for now I’ll leave you with a link to Architecture of Density, an amazing series of Hong Kong images by the photographer Michael Wolf. Here’s a brief description of the project from Wolf’s site:

One of the most densely populated metropolitan areas in the world, Hong Kong has an overall density of nearly 6,700 people per square kilometer. The majority of its citizens live in flats in high-rise buildings. In Architecture of Density, Wolf investigates these vibrant city blocks, finding a mesmerizing abstraction in the buildings’ facades.

The photographs are on display through February 26 at Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco.

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categories: Art and Design, Miscellany

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Yesterday Gawker expressed bafflement regarding Russ Smith’s assertion in The New York Press that Gawker Media has been sold to The New York Times Company for $32 million. “As this is utterly ridiculous and unequivocally not true,” Gawker wrote, “we imagine Smith intended the piece as some sort of quasi-parody.”

But Smith, as unhinged as he most certainly is, may be onto something. A well-placed source inside the Times sent me a screenshot of an in-house mockup of Gawker redesigned to conform to the look, feel, and editorial tone of the Times Company’s flagship website. It’s not a pretty thing: Something is definitely lost when the snarkiness of Gawker is filtered through the bland, establishment-friendly tone of the Times. Let’s hope this deal doesn’t actually go through—it would mean the end of Gawker as we know it. Click on the logotype below to see the rest of this top-secret design.

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categories: Art and Design, Best Of, News and Politics, The Magazine Covers

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One of a series of ads created by Saatchi & Saatchi New York for an apparently fictitious printing company called Hudson Repro:

Graphic-design geeks will probably find this hilarious; most other people will simply be confused. If you fall into the latter category, read this for some insight. Go to Frederik Samuel’s blog for two more from the same series. A fourth ad from the series is here.

[via The Spunker.]

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categories: Art and Design

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A Vancouver music store is selling a custom guitar with a pot-leaf-shaped body. Check out the abalone weed-leaf inlay on the first fret and the joint inlay on the 12th fret:

Judging from the picture, that thing must weigh a ton. Its eventual owner—assuming someone actually buys it—will have to smoke a lot of weed just to deal with the debilitating back pain it will cause.

[Thanks to my Vancouver friend Dominic Ali for the tip!]

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categories: Art and Design, Music and Audio

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Stumbled onto this cool thing last night: The Portland, Oregon-based artist Michael Paulus has created a series of pieces that imagine the skeletal structures underneath the skin of various cartoon characters, including Hello Kitty, Charlie Brown, Marvin the Martian, and Pikachu. “I decided to take a select few of these popular characters,” Paulus writes, “and render their skeletal systems as I imagine they might resemble if one truly had eye sockets half the size of its head, or fingerless-hands, or feet comprising 60% of its body mass.” The characters themselves are printed on an opaque overlay; the full skeletal structure is revealed when the overlay is lifted. Here’s Betty Boop:

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categories: Art and Design

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A couple of months ago an editor at Vanity Fair approached me to see if I wanted to try to come up with something for VF. It worked out pretty nicely: I have a page of four new magazine covers in the December 2005 issue. The issue is on newsstands now; it’s the one with Kate Moss on the front. I can’t post the four covers here, at least not yet, but I will tease you with the logotype for one of them:

For the rest of this cover, plus three other brand-new ones, see page 288 of the December Vanity Fair. I’m excited to be in the same publication as this guy and these guys, among other fine contributors.

[UPDATE: In August 2007, I finally posted all four covers.]

During the process, I submitted a few design concepts that we decided not to pursue, including an earlier version of the cover below, wherein genetic material from this magazine has been spliced into the DNA of this magazine. I reimagined most of this one over the weekend, so it’s more or less oven-fresh. (As you’ll discover if you check out Vanity Fair, a different but related concept did make it into the magazine.)

This cover I posted a few weeks ago is also an outtake from the Vanity Fair assignment. Yes, I know: Too many boob jokes recently. But sex sells magazines!

I probably won’t be doing too many more of these covers—I want to start doing more stuff like this. I have one other cover in mind that I’m planning to create and post in February, for reasons that shall become clear…

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categories: Art and Design, Best Of, Magazines, The Magazine Covers

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To mark Halloween, I bring you the splendid artwork below, which my lifelong friend Rob Harrell created several years ago when he was experimenting a lot with scratchboard techniques. I’ve always thought this would make a perfect New Yorker cover. Anyway, Happy Halloween. More to come soon…

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categories: Art and Design

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categories: Art and Design, Magazines, The Magazine Covers

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…but what if we change a few letters and add the empty noggin of a dangerous but determined man?

(In January, I posted a great Absolut riff by my pal Rob Harrell.)

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categories: Art and Design, News and Politics

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Here’s a fantastic trove of every Mad cover from the magazine’s October/November 1952 debut all the way up to the current issue, October 2005. This is the 1952 premiere issue:

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categories: Art and Design, Magazines

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Linotype has just released FontExplorer X, an iTunes-inspired font management program for “font sorting, font shopping and font discovery.” I haven’t had a chance to install it yet, but the concept looks great.

[via one of my favorite sites, Design Observer.]

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categories: Art and Design

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My pal Clive Thompson, a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, Details, and other mags, has an excellent piece in the latest Wired about “the ‘fab revolution’—the advent of cheap, easy-to-use tools for crafting physical objects, such as laser cutters and 3D milling machines,” as Clive puts it on his first-rate science-and-technology blog, Collision Detection. “Essentially, I argue that the physical world is about to become as flexible as information. Just as computers and the Internet made bits infinitely malleable, precision-guided fab tools will make atoms easy to tweak.”

To immerse himself in these new technologies, Clive used them to create the body of a one-of-a-kind electric guitar. He enlisted the services of eMachineshop, a New Jersey-based company whose website and proprietary software allow customers to design a wide range of physical objects—everything from furniture and toys to sporting equipment and medical devices—that are then manufactured by eMachineshop and sent to the customer.

The first graphic below is Clive’s design as it existed it in the software; the second is Clive rocking out at home with his new guitar.

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categories: Art and Design, Music and Audio, Science and Technology

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As Matt Haber observed last week, the cover of Radar’s September/October issue was art directed by George Lois, the advertising genius who created dozens of classic Esquire covers between 1962 and 1972. The new Radar cover is a parody of a Lois Esquire creation that caused a big controversy in early 1968.

Here’s what no one’s noticed yet: For some time now, George Lois has been happily recycling his old Esquire covers for a bunch of other magazines. The one below is on the newsstand right now. Click on the image to see the Lois original.

[This post originally contained two more George Lois riffs, but I don’t think they worked as well as the one above, so I took them down…]

(Go to this page for more stuff like this.)

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categories: Art and Design, Best Of, Magazines, The Magazine Covers

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There are some cool design-geek T-shirts over at Typotheque, and I’m so going to order this one. Strč prst skrz krk is a famously vowel-less Czech tongue twister that translates, more or less, as “Stick your finger down your throat”:

Also available on the site: the designer Johanna Balušíková’s seven-shirt Colour of the Day collection:

According to Typotheque, the shirt collection was the result of “an investigation into colour associations and their relationships to specific days of the week”:

A survey was conducted where the following question was posed to 75 creative field workers from 20 different countries: what colour do you associate with each day of the week? The result is a series of t-shirts, one for each day of the week, the colour of each having been selected by majority vote. The shirts could either be worn according to the calendar days, or more intuitively, according to the actual mood of the wearer.

I don’t associate specific colors with specific days. But I’d love to wear each of these shirts on the appropriate day for a solid week, just to freak people out. It would be like labeling one’s underwear, only much more public.

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categories: Art and Design

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According to Work magazine’s Work Blog, which is where I found it, the detourned New York subway map below was created by an artist named Marc Grubstein, who actually distributed it to unsuspecting New York tourists a few years back. I wish I had a high-res copy of this.

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categories: Art and Design

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The creeps at Bad Touch Weekly have put Michael Jackson on the cover again. This must be BTW’s sixth or seventh Jacko cover in a row. Jeez.

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categories: Art and Design, Magazines, The Magazine Covers

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You know those magazine covers I design for this site? This one and this one and this one and this one and this one? Well, for your convenience and possible amusement, I’ve finally gathered them together on a new category page called The Magazine Covers. Those covers also appear alongside other magazine-related content on the broader Magazines category page.

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categories: Art and Design, Magazines

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The latest issue of Stay Free! contains an excellent and lengthy interview with Bill, the man primarily responsible for the flash-mob phenomenon of 2003. Bill is a very smart man, and he has lots of smart things to say about the phenomenon he inspired. Here’s an excerpt:

I had conceived [flash mobs] specifically as a New York thing. People in New York are always looking for the next big thing. They come here because they want to take part in the arts community, they want to be with other people who are doing creative stuff, and they will come out to see a reading or a concert on the basis of word-of-mouth. Partly they want to find out what everybody else is so excited about, but partly they just want to be a part of the scene. You have this in other places too, but I feel like there’s something in New York that makes it kind of a city-wide pastime. Part of what I liked about this idea was that it would be very frank about the pure scenesterism of it. What is it that would make people come to the flash mob? Well, it would be the fact that if it went off as planned, lots of other people would be coming. The desire to not be left out was part of what would grow it. I didn’t have all of these grandiose notions about it at the time; I mostly just thought it was funny. But I thought of it as a stunt that would satirize scenester-y gatherings.

The interview was conducted by Francis Heaney, whose blog you should be reading.

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categories: Art and Design

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For a feature package on the tabloidization of many broadsheet newspapers, Poynter Online runs an illustration showing what The New York Times might look like if it shifted to a tabloid format:

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categories: Art and Design, News and Politics

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First Shakespeare porn, now this (probably not work-safe):

Who knew that Mr. Incredible and Elastigirl were into hot incest action? Or that Elastigirl likes to engage in sticky, athletic sex with Syndrome, her nemesis?

And the Incredibles aren’t the only cartoon characters doing very naughty things behind the scenes: Futurama’s Leela loves getting it robot-style from Bender. Even the characters from The Family Guy are getting reamed in every hole. It’s all happening at the Drunk Toon Party:

Welcome to the Drunk Toon Party! Lots of famous cartoon characters, like world-known families, villains and super heroes, young chicks and guys craving for sex, - are all gathered here! This party brings you extreme hot party fucks, chick blowjobs and drunk lesbos…. Could you possibly imagine that toons could do things like that? Oh, yea