Katrien De Blauwer

Belgian collage artist – or as she describes herself, photographer without a camera – Katrien De Blauwer has taken up permanent residence in my tabs recently. Drawing upon – or rather cutting up – a vast collection of vintage magazines, her works are small, unrefined, yet delicate; as much about the yellowing of paper and imperfections of print than the actual images they disrupt.

She’s published a number of collections, with titles like You Could At Least Pretend To Like Yellow and Why I Hate Cars, but a more affordable taster can be found in Port #26. I’ve yet to see any of her pieces in the flesh (this selection is taken from Artsy), but I bet they smell incredible … if that’s any measure of art.

Projekt 26

“The artists shunned conventional layouts and hierarchy by integrating type and graphics rather than viewing them as separate elements. It may have been partly because fonts weren't available, so every letter was hand-drawn.” — Creative Boom chat with Projekt 26 about the increasingly influential field of Polish poster design.

Common art

Some accidental compositions found within flickr commons results. Simply a case of search, scroll and screenshot. An incredibly addictive and satisfying form of procrastination – I’ve completely forgotten what I was looking for when I found these.

Michael Crichton

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Michael Crichton on the importance of editors (in The Paris Review, 1994):

In my experience of writing, you generally start out with some overall idea that you can see fairly clearly, as if you were standing on a dock and looking at a ship on the ocean. At first you can see the entire ship, but then as you begin work you’re in the boiler room and you can’t see the ship anymore. All you can see are the pipes and the grease and the fittings of the boiler room and, you have to assume, the ship’s exterior. What you really want in an editor is someone who’s still on the dock, who can say, Hi, I’m looking at your ship, and it’s missing a bow, the front mast is crooked, and it looks to me as if your propellers are going to have to be fixed.

He was talking about writing, but this also captures the essence of a good designer/art director relationship. Working in isolation, it’s all too easy to lose sight of things. So many run-aground covers have been saved by an art director coming back to me with simple – and in retrospect, obvious – feedback. Sometimes it’s just a tweak of shade or size, but that extra perspective is invaluable.

Grace

Inspired by the incredible work of digital colourist Marina Amaral (get your hands on her book The Colour of Time if you haven’t already), I’ve been learning how to colourise black and white photographs, with some pleasing results that have found their way into other aspects of my work. For example, once I’d brought this Leigh Wiener portrait of Grace Kelly to chromatic life, I had to go one step further and turn it into a poster for 1956 film The Swan. Another one for the portfolio.

Carl Sagan

In the UK, it’s World Book Day (which almost explains why my son’s playground is full of kids dressed as Pokémon). A good excuse for this fantastic insight from Carl Sagan:

What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. One glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years.

A good reminder that books are a bizarre, brilliant, surreal and in no way inevitable invention.

Nora Ephron

Nora Ephron wrote this about blogging in 2006, back when everybody was at it:

One of the most delicious things about the profoundly parasitical world of blogs is that you don’t have to have anything much to say. Or you just have to have a little tiny thing to say. You just might want to say hello. I’m here. And by the way. On the other hand. Nevertheless. Did you see this? Whatever. A blog is sort of like an exhale. What you hope is that whatever you’re saying is true for about as long as you’re saying it. Even if it’s not much.

It’s startling how quickly we’ve taken for granted this incredible new freedom to publish something, anything, nothing. I’ve fallen in love with blogging again; my own little corner of internet that I can spill my thoughts into without fear of them being washed away by the social media tide. Most of it may be inconsequential whatever, but it’s my inconsequential whatever.