Art & Design

And in other news, Jeff Koons has painted a boat. Apparently he
based this design on a WW1 camouflage pattern. Looks like Lego to me. It was commissioned by art collector Dakis Joannou. Make of it what you will...

There's a show in London this Thursday that looks pretty good. There's lots of super good people in this group show but I'm just mentioning Luke Best which is the work I'm going to see.

More here.

When designing something, it's easy to over complicate things, I do it all the time. What's the simplest element to your idea? Focus on that. Do you need a projector cradle or simply a flat surface?

When designing something, think about your audience carefully. Different people have different requirements. This alley in Berlin is used by cars and pedestrians.

It's taken a while but I have another interview up on the site. This time it's with We Made This founder; Alistair Hall. Alistair founded the popular London design studio four years ago and I  thought I would ask him a few questions about his design process and stuff like that. The interview is here.

I rolled through the Olympic poster exhibition at the Museum of Childhood the other day. If you're into graphic design at all, then you'll know all about Mexico 68 and the insanity that was the poster campaign for the 1984 Los Angeles games.I'd never seen the Mexico design in pink though! How tough is that?

Totally Mexico...obviously

There is a very descent collection of posters from across the years designed by various masters including Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Max Bill, Jacob Lawrence and David Hockney to name a few.Here's some craziness from a 1916 games poster.

I have just become a fan of Duncan Barrett one half of Crayon Legs. More please.

There's a nice little group show at Nog on Brick Lane running for the rest of this month. Not often you get to see some Matt Leines stuff on these shores. Some nice younger talent in the show as well as the names you know. There are some shots of the Matt Leines bits in my Flickr set.

This is ten kinds of crazy. Artist Erik Nordenankar wanted to crate the biggest drawing in the world. His GPS device became his pen and the world became his paper. I've seen many artists utilise the abilities of GPS, this is is perhaps the most fun though. Shame about what he drew!!

via zefrank

Wow. This is what infographics (a little passion of mine) is all about. This is for the GP Moto 2007 results. It's really quite lovely. Click around and see all the colours and little blocks move about. Ahhhh. Yes, I am a small child.

I love stuff like this.Turning some public advertising fluff into some pretty coloured squares. My kinda subversion. I am a fan of the Pixelator.

If you can't see this clip, view it here.

This is a film about the US underground independent poster scene. I find the poster scene in the US tremendously inspiring - that so many people can make a living creating artistic work for a corporate industry. In the UK I feel that we don't have anything as rich and varied and country-wide as the underground scene in the states. I'm looking forward to the film...

Interview number two comes from a couple of very talented illustrators working out of Montreal who go by the moniker of Seripop. They made a name for themselves illustrating gig posters and being one of the big names in the American poster movement. They are now beginning to move onto bigger things. I'm a pretty big fan. I think they're ace.

The interview is here.

Oh boy, someone has really been taking their vitamins. This is pretty impressive. This pop up alphabet book will be released by Roaring Book press in October, yeah I know that's quite a way off. Might be worth the wait though.

via Laughing Squid

Alex Bec is one of those industrious enterprising young designers that seems to do more than is possible with his awake time. So in order to find out how he achieves this and whether or not he does have an identical twin I thought I'd ask him some questions.

This is the poster for the Beautiful Losers documentary coming out soon. It was designed by Keith Scharwath and the typeface was by Geoff McFetridge. The film is premiering at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, in March.

If you haven't heard of Beautiful Losers it's a book and exhibition that was created a couple of years ago featuring the artists mentioned in the poster. You can read a whole chunk more about it here if your intrigue has been tweaked.

Via VLU

I've been loving Yanko design for some time. Whenever I see a design on a website that makes me go, what the... usually it's taken from Yanko. It's a design aggregation website where people can submit designs. They get a lot of hits.

Some seem to be very much conceptual where as some seem to be available to buy or at least license. Much of the stuff on there is some crazy future shtick but I like that. Really impracticable sometimes or not even useful but again it's still nice to see.

If ideas are your currency you need to be feeding your creative battery from any angle you can think of. It's often the thing you never see coming that inspires you to think in a another direction or to give you that trigger you're looking for to solve a problem.

As people always say in brainstorming groups (yawn) defer judgment, there are no bad ideas.

So, here's some that caught my eye:
A programmable keyboard that does a little more than usual.