Hyperlinks

1. Peter C. Baker and Linda Huang discuss her design for his book, Planes. A fascinating insight into the process of experimentation, rejection and iteration that goes into a book cover.

2. From Ghostsigns author Sam Roberts, BLAG (Better Letters Magazine) is a new online and print publication for and about the international sign painting community, celebrating exciting work and sharing knowledge and resources. The first issue is cracking – the French Dispatch behind the scenes feature is particularly good. Also: major URL envy.

3. Found via the wonderful Present & Correct blog, Paper Shipwright publishes downloadable cardboard model kits of ships, lighthouses and all things nautical. As someone who spent an absurd amount of time obsessively PVA-ing Games Workshop’s Townscape buildings together as a child, this is all exceedingly up my street. Bring on the paper cuts!

4. Tor.com’s favourite books about the craft of writing, including wisdom from the luminary likes of Ursula K Le Guin, Stephen King and Ray Bradbury. Reminds me of my favourite Bradbury fact: he wrote The Fireman – the short story that he would later develop into Fahrenheit 451 – on a coin-operated typewriter. It cost him $9.80.

5. My first creative role (at Revolution Software) involved wandering around York, taking laughably low-resolution photos of old walls and rusty old boats for use as in-game textures. Things have moved on somewhat – here Kristóf Rosu talks about the photogrammetry workflow used for creating three-dimensional photographic scenery for Sniper Elite 5.

6. Tim Easley’s sleeve artwork for Modified Man, sculpted entirely out of plasticine, is quite something. Apparently it took around 80 hours to complete! Just imagine the smell of it.

7. I’ve linked this before, but it’s fab enough to share again: Google’s street view camera taking photos of itself in mirrors. Strong “Tarantino pottering around his house” vibe. WITH ROBOTS.

8. Window-shopping for prints on the Condé Nast store while watching Love Island (this is very much how I roll), I came across this batch of seventies/eighties New Yorker covers by artist Gretchen Dow Simpson. Sublimely serene … imagine Edward Hopper and Adrian Tomine going away for a a nice weekend getaway by the seaside.

9. Brandon Schaefer tweeted this earlier; John McConnell on designing book covers for Faber and Faber: “Every sales director wants to know if they can have the title bigger. So I say, ‘The book is only six inches wide and you cannot get it any larger. I've blown it up as big as I can. I simply cannot get it any bigger.’ But what they really mean is, ‘Can you make my book stand out more in the shop?’ Nothing stands out in American bookshops because they treat every book as a product in its own right they're all screaming so loud. They have their volume knobs turned up full blast. So when you look around, it's a blank-out, you see nothing. The trick is to go the other way.”

10. Absolutely not going the other way: Dave McKean has illustrated the Folio Society’s new edition of The Gormenghast Trilogy, creating 142 artworks for Mervyn Peake's pioneering work of fiction. And boy are they pretty. These books will always look like Ian Miller in my mind, but this may very well change that.

Another test

My ears and eyes are still ringing from watching Mad Max: Fury Road. What an incredible film. It's not perfect – it could've done with a little more quiet to emphasise the loud – but an audacious and unique experience nonetheless. It's good too see a proper stunts film, and not just a bunch of CGI cars flipping about. The Incredible Suit's review is pretty spot on:

Kudos to those films' creator George Miller for returning to his brainchild in the winter of his seventh decade and transforming it from cult curio to psychotic explosion of rocket-fuelled insanity with Mad Max: Fury Road. Max still isn't all that Mad, but his new film is so deliriously bananas that its very title deserves a place in thesauruses everywhere as the go-to synonym for crackers. It's a carnival of carnage (also lorrynage, bikenage, buggynage and tanknage) so eye-poppingly demented that it's hard to believe it's the work of a human being, rather than some furious, acid-tripping demon with a grudge against moving vehicles.

For a bit of post-film reading/thinking (don't try either of these while watching the film), check out Ballardian's excellent and thorough post on the links between Mad Max and JG Ballard. Turns out he was a big fan of Mad Max 2 (aka The Road Warrior), describing it as "punk's Sistine Chapel". This is what he told Rolling Stone back in 1987:

I loved The Road Warrior – I thought it was a masterpiece. For ninety or so minutes I really knew what it was like to be an eight-cylinder engine under the hood of whatever car that was; the visceral impact of that film was extraordinary. And seen simply from a science-fiction point of view, it created a unique landscape with tremendous visual authority.

I think it's fair to assume JGB would have rather liked Fury Road. If you haven't seen it yet, do. And make sure you see it on the biggest, loudest, two-dimensionest screen you can find.

Test

Craig Mod on what he’s learnt from his first year of running Explorers Club as a paid membership program. Interesting stuff for those who want to make a living from their blogging, newslettering, etc. / For a random smattering of magazine covers in your twitter feed, follow my other twitter account, @somemagazines. Current highlight: i-D’s 1983 Sade cover that looks like it could have been designed yesterday.

Why do so many book covers look the same? Blame Getty Images. Featuring the ubiquitous Man in Fog, Woman Sleeping on Gravel, and everyone’s favourite lady with a bird cage, Bird Cage Lady. / From the docks to an architectural spectacle – Gestalten explore the history and beauty of freight container architecture. / An ant colony has memories that its individual members don’t have. Okay, not remotely design-related, but fascinating stuff for the myrmecological-minded.

Other links

Horizontorium of the Bank of Philadelphia by William G Mason, 1832. Appears three-dimensional when laid flat, using artly perspective magic. 

“We’d rather stay married” – Emily Oberman and Paul Sahre on designing with wit, coming up in the ’90s and why they’ll never work together.

The right mix of approachable but urgent – Tom Etherington talks to It’s Nice That about his cover design for Greta Thunberg’s No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference.

SuperHi talk to Hoefler & Co’s Troy Leinster about how he ended up in type design, the importance of continuing education and the experience of transitioning between disciplines.

How medieval manuscript makers experimented with graphic design. 

George III’s vast collection of military maps and prints has gone online. Enough high resolution beauty here to keep you distracted for the rest of the week.

Criag Mod

Craig Mod on what he’s learnt from his first year of running Explorers Club as a paid membership program. Interesting stuff for those who want to make a living from their blogging, newslettering, etc. / For a random smattering of magazine covers in your twitter feed, follow my other twitter account, @somemagazines. Current highlight: i-D’s 1983 Sade cover that looks like it could have been designed yesterday. / Why do so many book covers look the same? Blame Getty Images. Featuring the ubiquitous Man in Fog, Woman Sleeping on Gravel, and everyone’s favourite lady with a bird cage, Bird Cage Lady. / From the docks to an architectural spectacle – Gestalten explore the history and beauty of freight container architecture. / An ant colony has memories that its individual members don’t have. Okay, not remotely design-related, but fascinating stuff for the myrmecological-minded.

Another poster

Another week, another poster! With these designs I’m treating them as real briefs for promoting films rather than fan artwork for those already familiar with them; hopefully striking a mystery/intrigue balance beyond wink-wink recognition. Hopefully that’s how this one works. I reckon this oily-bath idea would also work rather well for Under the Skin … might give it a go.

Case Study

New work for Saraband, the cover for Graeme Macrae Burnet’s Case Study. A fantastic book, good to see them giving this one a big push – it has its own minisite and everything! Jolly nice hearing feedback on my design on BBC Scotland; tempted to make Janice Forsyth saying “fantastic cover” (around the 2:21 mark) my new ringtone.

Amélie / The Witch

I designed this poster for Jean Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie, then by some bizarre cinematic happenstance found an almost identical shot from Robert Eggers’ The Witch. Now there’s a double bill for you.

There Will Be Blood

Another week, another poster! With these designs I’m treating them as real briefs for promoting films rather than fan artwork for those already familiar with them; hopefully striking a mystery/intrigue balance beyond wink-wink recognition. Hopefully that’s how this one works. I reckon this oily-bath idea would also work rather well for Under the Skin … might give it a go.

Spectres of Fascism

Here’s my cover for Samir Gandesha’s Spectres of Fascism, published by Pluto Press. A fine excuse to deploy Jonathan Barnbrook’s contemporary blackface Bastard Spindly, designed in 1988. Some background from Barnbrook:

William Morris said ‘the more mechanical the process, the less direct should be imitation of natural forms’. This idea—that the tool should be acknowledged in the form of the design—directly influenced the development of Bastard’s letterforms. Bastard was digitally assembled using a modular system; whilst acknowledging the rhythm and drama of the historical blackletter form, this process transformed the typeface into something aligned with contemporary modes of production. Bastard draws upon a variety of typographic sources from the Gutenberg Bible to Albrecht Dürer’s geometric experiments.

Seriously though, is there a font with a better name than Bastard Spindly?

Echo Base

I couldn’t possibly allow Star Wars day to pass unmarked, so here's a thing I made a few years ago for Matthew Kenyon's book on game culture, Every Day Is Play. Echo Base, A little Gerhard Richter-esque tribute to the first video game I ever played, The Empire Strikes Back  on the Atari 2600. It may not look much to you, but those fifteen pixels are the best damn ship I've ever flown.

No Surface All Feeling

This year’s Secret 7” design, for Manic Street Preachers’ No Surface All Feeling. Just a little something to help raise money for Mind. Plus it’s rather liberating designing without text for a change – generally not something art directors are too keen on.

Madame Bovary

A little personal project this one – Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. The picture is Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot’s 1870 painting A Woman Reading. I’ve posted/deleted this four times now. The problem with personal projects is that there’s no client to take it off my hands, so I end up tweaking and tweaking and tweaking and …

Alien: Covenant poster

Good crikey, just look at this poster for Alien: Covenant. I've actually been working on a little Alien-related personal project of my own recently, and just when I think I'm halfway happy with it … this appears. How am I supposed to compete with this? It's as if Rodin took the afternoon off and asked HR Giger to finish off The Gates of Hell in his absence. Stunning/infuriating.

Residents: Inside the Iconic Barbican Estate

As both a professional photographer and resident of the Barbican Estate resident, Anton Rodriguez has combined his passions to make the excellent Residents: Inside the Iconic Barbican Estate. The book explores the interiors and inhabitants of 22 flats; a sun-drenched blend of iconic modernist furniture and personal stories. There's also an essay by Katie Treggiden, looking at the history of the site and exploring why there is such an interest in peeking behind those curtains. It's a wonderful book about a wonderful place – probably the closest you'll get to actually living their yourself.