Beirut

Beirut are one of my favourite bands right now, and I rather like the artwork that adorns their albums. Although these images are essentially different from one another, they all derive from an obscure 'arty' vintage aesthetic, fitting the aura of the music quite well.







They use the beautiful accordion :)



..as does this boy. I am obsessed with Yann Tierson compositions.

Book Design Competition

I like the sound of this. The synopsis makes me think of The Virgin Suicides and Confessions of a Girl Gang by Carol Joyce Oates. Here's one of the entries.



Many of the other entries are a bit poo...

There seems to be some sort of blog for it.

Good NY Times book cover blog here.

Things I Have Learned

Things I Have Learned in My Life So Far is a site where arty types visually represent personal platitudes. Photography, animation, film, illustration and typography are used by a number of contributors to convey maxims such as 'I am bored but not boring', 'love makes me irrational' and 'laziness is bad for the soul'. Quasi-philosophical musings in a graphic format, should be lovely but a lot of the ideas are a little undeveloped.



(That's one I ought to remember.)

Memory Floor Plan

Leslie Wok is a graphic designer. She created this plan of all the rooms she has lived in, the size of each referring to her memory of them. I used to draw floor plans obsessively when I was younger (I had unorthodox ways of entertaining myself, and an unconsummated desire to become an architect) and I like the concept of combining hard, impersonal graphics with blurry memories.

Cat T-shirt

Today I bought a t-shirt with a cat on it from Zara. Browwwww.

End of Year Poster

Matt came up with a great idea for the End of Year Show Promo Competition, and asked me to put some type on it. The concept is 'The Big Show', portrayed through miniature people! Fingers crossed!



New blog about it here.

Chocolate Scrabble

Oh, Wow. Two of my favourite activities combined by Mary & Matt. Don't try and tell me eating chocolate isn't an activity.



Found this originally on Design Sponge, along with other typographic paraphernalia.

Holga

I've been doing a bit of Ebaying recently, managed to get a Holga camera and an old film SLR camera for under fifty pounds.

Holgas are medium format toy cameras, championed by photographers for their low-fi charm. Here's what you can achieve with some light leaks and double exposure! Perfect for original holiday snaps.


Found this here.

There is a great book full of lomography called Don't think, just shoot!

Communal Blog

Matt and I created a new blog for viscom students and tutors.

This is great for posting those things which do not sit quite rightly on one's own blog, but could be of inspiration or amusement to others.

William Morris

I used to detest William Morris, maybe as a reaction to my parents overly patterned home. Since moving out, my opinions have changed about a great deal of things, not least about Morris.



At their worst, patterns clash and overcrowd a space. When used with compositional insight, for example next to block colours and white spaces (not the same thing!), they take on quite a presence.

He was also quoted to have said "have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful", which I count among my many mantras (can one have more than one of those?).