Sadly, the original Star Wars trilogy conceptual artist, Ralph McQuarrie passed away 3 March from complications of Parkinson’s disease. Only just a week later, french comic book artist Jean Giraud (known as Moebius), probably best known for the western series Blueberry and the science fiction books The Incal died 10 March of cancer.
Ian Albinson put this piece together. Saul Bass made the best movie title sequences ever, no question about it!
I just ordered some back issues – five to be exact – of IdN a couple of days ago. Great mag with diverse, new topics in every issue. I first heard about it when Nine Inch Nails art director Rob Sheridan twittered about being featured within as a glitch artist.
Picked up this little gem at the Museum of Modern Art from my visit in Stocholm today. It’s yet another good looking book from Gestalten much in the same style as their previous book Naïve – Modernism and Folklore in Contemporary Graphic Design which I incidently bought on a trip to Berlin two years ago. The book is filled with beautiful images with that retro modernist style to them (kind of a no brainer as its title would suggest) although, as with its predecessor, I can’t help to think that the book lacks some in the text department. It would have been nice if there was at least something from the artists featured within. Still, it’s a great flip-through with high inspirational value.
I’m pretty sure that I’ve just experienced my most creative day/night ever. It’s strange how a little sleep deprevation, due to working the graveyard shift, can work wonders when it comes to spawning new ideas. I won’t go into any details but I don’t think that I’ve ever filled over eleven pages in my sketchbook in one day before.
Now, I’m sure not even half of the things I’ve put down today will amount to anything more than what they are now, scribbles in a notepad. But even so, with eleven pages of possible projects, all with different varations, something good is bound to come out of it.
Time to go to bed.
It seems, for some reason, that Joy Division and Radiohead – well, Thom Yorke anyway – is the most popular bands for designers and illustrators when it comes to inspiration. I can’t say how many portraits of Yorke I’ve seen in different forums and mags, but guessing at double figures wouldn’t be far off!
The question I ask myself is; can I really justify a viable existence with graphic design as a hobby and interest if I’ve never heard more than two songs from either band? And to tell you the truth, I wasn’t that inspired, either…
Well, to be fair, Joy Division do inspire good design. For some, at least.
What Peter Saville did on Unknown Pleasures is briliant!
I just came home from an all to short weekend trip to Barcelona. Very beautiful city with great food and wonderful architecture. Almost immediately I stumbled upon this great art bookshop. This always causes me trouble and despair as there are just too many books to flip through. I am probably every sales clerks worst costumer, spending lots of time looking at books and rarely buying anything as I tend to get too overwhelmed and indecisive. Guess this must have been this overly-paranoid-I-would-steal-something clerks lucky day as I finally setteled for this one.
Infographics, when done properly, is just wonderful to look at! I’ve read about it before but I have never looked inside. Great stuff and I will probably buy the sequel as well. Just need to let this one sink in for a while first.
Recently I have had a creative hibernation of sorts – by choice. Sometimes the pressure on one self, to sit down and make something, becomes too much. You’re tapped out. No ideas.
Best thing to do (for me anyway) is to do nothing at all, or at least something entirely different for a while, being certain that it will come to me one day.
This seems to be a well working strategy for me as I get really bored of my ordinary full time work very quickly which, in turn, sparks a inspiration surge. Boredom is, if not the mother, the midwife of invention/creativity. As it happened I browsed some Flickr galleries and noticed a guy producing very similar stuff as I have explored. A quick search with Google on the topic of beautiful geometry came up with this site.
This fueled a new creative flow (it didn’t hurt with a weekend trip to Berlin either) and now I have at least half a dozen ideas I’d like to try out. Many of them revolves around ciphers and different ways to translate text to symbols or colors as well as barcodes.
