Design

Mike Hinge at 80

According to Ivan over at OnyxCube – the no.1 Mike Hinge resource on the web –  Mike would have been 80 years old today. To celebrate he has all sorts of special treats that he’s dug up to show including typeface designs and memories of old friends so go and check his site out, it’s a goldmine.

Over here though I’ve got a lovely selection of images saved by my good friend Elisa from various lots on eBay that were auctioned around 2003 when his estate sold a lot of his work on. Amazingly she forwarded me a whole folder she recently found on a hard drive that she’d kept, she also won the Kiwifan 10 piece (included here left). The images aren’t great because they were taken by the auctioneer but I’ve tried to make them look as good as possible – thanks Elisa!

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Red Skull Incarnate by David Aja

Love this Red Skull cover, don’t know who it’s by it’s by David Aja (thanks JB) – check his blog here for more.  Here are a few more things from him in a similar vein. Nice to see comics quietly catching up on the graphic design side of things. I just found it whilst looking for something else, hmmm, 3 skulls in the last five posts.

Posted in Comics, Design. | 4 Comments |

The Light Surgeons at the National Maritime Museum

So excited to finally be able to see this, I’ve been privy to some of the workings of this for the past year now (my wife works for them) and it opens this week in London at the National Maritime Museum. Part of a major new exhibition, although this will be a permanent installation, content-heavy video mapping based around the moon’s relationship to the sea, this is just a tiny part of it.

[vimeo width=”640″ height=”360″]http://vimeo.com/26328656[/vimeo]

 

Posted in Art, Design, Event, Film. | No Comments |

Remi Rough and Augustine Kofie in London

I was very excited to learn that Remi and Augustine were going to be painting a wall together in London whilst Kofie was in the UK taking part in a couple of exhibitions. Little did I realise that they would be painting a local pub on the high street of the neighborhood where I (and Remi) live. Said pub is the Bishop on Lordship Lane in East Dulwich, South East London and they spent two days in very changeable weather transforming the side of the building much to the surprise of the locals who don’t have anything like this round here. The first three images are by Timid, via Remi’s blog.

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Here’s a selection of pictures I took this afternoon and there should be a timelapse film at some point in the future. Kofie is off back to the US tomorrow and Remi has a new mini book out of Selected Paintings as well as an EP of new tracks, available here.

Posted in Art, Design, Event. | 2 Comments |

Spomenik – Jan Kempenaers and “The End of History”

via the Crack 2 blog, more here, utterly beautiful!

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“These structures were commissioned by former Yugoslavian president Josip Broz Tito in the 1960s and 70s to commemorate sites where WWII battles took place (like Tjentište, Kozara and Kadinjača), or where concentration camps stood (like Jasenovac and Niš). They were designed by different sculptors (Dušan Džamonja, Vojin Bakić, Miodrag Živković, Jordan and Iskra Grabul, to name a few) and architects (Bogdan Bogdanović, Gradimir Medaković…), conveying powerful visual impact to show the confidence and strength of the Socialist Republic. In the 1980s, these monuments attracted millions of visitors per year, especially young pioneers for their “patriotic education.” After the Republic dissolved in early 1990s, they were completely abandoned, and their symbolic meanings were forever lost.

From 2006 to 2009, Jan Kempenaers toured around the ex-Yugoslavia region (now Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, etc.) with the help of a 1975 map of memorials, bringing before our eyes a series of melancholy yet striking images. His photos raise a question: can these former monuments continue to exist as pure sculptures? On one hand, their physical dilapidated condition and institutional neglect reflect a more general social historical fracturing. And on the other hand, they are still of stunning beauty without any symbolic significances.”

Much more detail on Kempenaers‘ book of these stunning monuments here and you can buy his book of the photographs on Amazon

Posted in Design, Oddities. | No Comments |

Warren Ellis’ Chinese Whispers

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This has been going on for a while now over on Warren Ellis’ sprawling Whitechapel forum. The idea is that you get a few scraps of info about what has now become a classic comic or series, and have to imagine you’ve never seen or read the comic before but were given the job of illustrating the front cover of that issue or book. 

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The Fantastic Four, Spiderman (via Amazing Adult Fantasy), 2000ad, Superman, Zap Comix and more have all come in for a re-imagining over the last year and I’ve rounded up my favourites in the gallery below.

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More can be seen here and there’s also a Remake/Remodel series where you’re asked to redesign obscure characters from the past.

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Just My Type – Simon Garfield

I can’t recommend this enough, a very good read for designers or even people with a just passing interest in design. You don’t have to know your kerning from your baselines to appreciate the information in this great book. Simon Garfield take a humorous, but well researched, look at fonts and typography across the ages, from design giants like Helvetica, Univers and Gill to the underdogs of the lettering community.

Chapters on Comic Sans prove he’s no type snob, a fascinating story about a lost typeface that drowned in the Thames and even a few eye openers will keep you turning the page. Who would have thought Eric Gill was into that? Also the new Olympic font comes in for a good kicking before he’s done.

If you’re a student just starting, a seasoned pro or you just know someone who likes their design but is really hard to buy a present for, this book is for you. I only wish something like this was around when I was in college, it might have saved me from making some of those dodgy font decisions in the past.

Posted in Books, Design. | 2 Comments |

Katy Perry – ‘E.T.’ cover

Yes, I know what you’re thinking, Katy Perry, I would too, but…

Aside from the fact that I have a thing for women in black bob haircuts and none other than Noisia have remixed her new single into a dubstep ‘anthem’, check out the font on the cover.

No, really. I don’t know who the designer is but I love some of those letter forms, the K, A and E especially. Shame they had to go and spoil it with the terrible dot matrix font for KanYe, no less than he deserves I suppose.

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Mike Hinge

Mike Hinge was an illustrator, typographer and graphic designer, born in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1931. Early in his illustration career he worked for the largest ad agency in New Zealand before moving to Los Angeles, where he attended the Art Center of the College of Design. In 1966 he moved to Manhattan, where he worked as an art director for several ad agencies. His graphic designs were notable, and his colorful and psychedelic illustrations appeared on numerous science fiction paperback books and magazines during the 1970s, including Analog, Mediascene, Heavy Metal, Fantastic, and Amazing.

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Hinge also did design work for 2001: A Space Odyssey and produced illustrations for mainstream publications like Time magazine, including covers featuring Richard Nixon and Emperor Hirohito. He was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Professional Artist in 1973, plus nominated for 6 Locus awards in the ’70’s. His designs for typefaces and graphics won him several awards and were exhibited, including a show at the Brooklyn Museum. A book about his art The Mike Hinge Experience was published in 1973 and he featured in the 1982 artists anthology The New Visions. He died of a heart attack in 2003 and still remains relatively unknown outside of the sci-fi community, for more info check out Ivan Richards’ Onyx Cube blog for many examples of his original artwork.

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Posted in Art, Design, Poster / flyer. | 4 Comments |

New Wagon Christ video – ‘Chunkothy’

[youtube width=”636″ height=”382″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpPVPEoJdb0[/youtube]

Taken from the new Wagon Christ album ‘Toomorrow’, out now on CD, LP and download

The ‘Chunkothy’ video is directed and animated by Celyn Brazier at Nexus with Beccy McCray providing invaluable production skills. Bali Engel helped colour and provided the beautiful animated sequences for the insect loop and fishes. Margot Tsakiri-Scanatovits and Manav Dhir also provided colouring skills and contributed to the animation of the insects. Steve Mc Inerney constructed the final edit with perfect timing and imagination.

The animation was created in Photoshop, with most sequences on one layer. It was as simple as that really. No gimmicks, no tweeny motion tricks, no cgi.  Celyn created small beat guides for reference, sometimes following the rhythm, for example on the bouncy ball loops, but mostly as many random patterns and as much weird sh*t that she could possibly make in six weeks.

CREDITS
Celyn Brazier – directing, deigning, colouring, animating
Beccy Mccray – producer
Steve Mcinerney – editor
Bali Engel – colouring, animating
Margot Tsakiri-scanatovits – assistant colouring
Manav Dhir – assistant colouring

Posted in Design, Film, Music, Ninja Tune. | No Comments |