Though I'm still mourning the loss of Final Vinyl in the East Village, that won't stop me from seeking out and patronizing my local record store this Saturday, April 19th, on Record Store Day. Get out there and support your local music retailer--more specifically, the ones selling vinyl!

Labels: 45rpm, 7-inch, album covers, cassettes, Jamaincan Record Label Art, music, record labels, records, tapes, turntable, vinyl

If you're in the NYC area and you haven't made it to MoMA in a while, now would be the time to do so. Design and the Elastic Mind is a new exhibit which examines how designers of all kinds are exploring advances in science and technology—not to mention the changes in how we both view and relate to the world around us—in order to rethink who we are and how we spend our limited time here on spaceship Earth. This exhibit, which takes a few hours to really soak in, makes it clear that we are on the verge of, if not deeply immersed in, a fundamental leap in our thinking, doing and being. There are sublime examples of how data sources such as internet traffic and prison incarceration-vs.-spending can be visualized in new ways and for new means. The innovative concept of "thinkering" is often evoked in the demonstration of how everyday objects can have uses and lives beyond their original purpose. In many of the projects on display the roles of scientist, inventor and designer are virtually interchangeable though they are mainly presented in the context of design. Even if you do make it to the exhibit I highly recommend spending an afternoon clicking around the wonderful website that MoMA created which reflects the character of the exhibit in its approach to user experience and information design. As a visual designer I was inspired by Design and the Elastic Mind to look beyond the current hype of green and sustainable design and reexamine not only what I do but how and why. I'll keep you posted on what I discover.

Labels: Art, design, environment, information design, MoMA, New York

Okay, so I'm a few months late posting this, but here it is nonetheless. The 2008 version of TheBrainDesign's Publikum Calendar is a socialist nightmare of graphic design and visual anarchy somehow corralled into a website, downloadable calendar and video documentary--just to name a few of the outlets for this inspiring international effort. The designers and artist represented hail from all over Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. If nothing else, it's visually interesting stuff. And, yes, these images to the right are each different months of the Publikum Calendar.

Labels: Art, Drawing, graphic design, self-publishing, Typography

By now you've surely been handed one of those sleek, satin-finished mini-cards with full-bleed photos or graphics on one side and contact info on the other. And, surely, you've wondered where they come from and have yet to attempt to Google "narrow business cards" for fear of the 600,000 search results you would receive. Well, here's the skinny on those slim biz cards: Moo. I've made a slew of these for NoRelevance.com and was pleased by the idiot-proof step-by-step process it took to produce 100 cards from a Flickr set. Oh, did I mention that? You can access your photos and sets from such popular sites as Flickr, Facebook, LiveJournal and more. All this for $19.99 plus shipping. Surely there's a better deal on the web, no? Perhaps, but the ability to spread those 100 cards over several different photos was the hook for me. I upload ten different photos and get ten cards each. You can only have one version of the flip-side, but that's hardly a down-side.

Labels: printing, self-publishing

Dubbed "Space Art in Children's Books," this very simply presented website is a treasure trove of pre-space era through post-Apollo mission illustrations which appeared in astronomy and science books beginning as far back as 1883 with Agnes Giberne's romantic visions in Sun, Moon and Stars : A Book for Beginners. As a child of the Apollo era, just barely old enough to remember the famous lunar touchdown, I'm thrilled to see such a collection of wondrous images available online. To the moon...and beyond!

Labels: Art, Drawing, ephemera, space

Ever been read the Riot Act? Now you can make that dream a reality with the help of LibriVox, a massive online archive of public domain literary works made available as free downloadable audio books. The site, which claims to be "open source" and completely volunteer-run, contains a plethora of audible classics such as the likes of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Jack London's White Fang, and Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. If you can deal with the occasional changing of reader voices (sometimes male, sometimes female) and varying audio quality (all pretty much good enough), there are numerous audio formats to choose from, feeds for podcasts, links to text versions of most books, and material available in nine different languages. Time to catch up on those classics!

Labels: audio books, ephemera

Do you? I'm not sure you do, unless of course you start browsing the many family photos in this online memory project. DoYouKnowWhatItMeans.org hopes to avoid the type of catastrophic loss of visual history as which happened with the floodwaters of Katrina. Many photos seem to have survived a hurricane or flood or two, which would not be beyond the realm of possibilities for residents of New Orleans who seem to suffer a major "natural" disaster every generation or so. The snapshots instantly bring me back to my childhood. I have fond memories of "hurricane parties," where several families on a street would convene to one house with the kids all running around the back yard and the dads setting up a giant cauldron atop a propane stove to boil crawfish, crabs and shrimp. Once the rains and heavy winds began the party would move indoors where the moms played Bourré under hurricane lamps, the men tweaked their transistor radios and the kids pulled out their Nash Roberts hurricane tracking maps waiting for the inevitable eye to come...

Labels: ephemera, mardi gras, new orleans, old paper, photographs

While I do own a lot of the 45s in this collection, NONE of my singles have their original picture sleeves. This is where my jealousy of Michael, Erwin & Alex begins. These guys are the proprietors of Demon Fuzz Records, what appears from their photos to be quite the vinyl record store located in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. I've never been there in person (unless it was unknowingly in 1991), but I have been on their website, which sports such wonderful record cover and picture sleeve galleries as "Mysterious Ladies" (Ritual), "Products" (Steinski), and "Singles Bar" (Nina Simmone) among others. Join me as I gaze in the greenest of envies at the seven-inch picture sleeves of Ray Barretto's Soul Drummer or Willie Henderson's Funky Chicken...

Labels: 45rpm, 7-inch, album covers, music, records

Pedal on over to Taliah Lempert's unique collection of bicycle "portraits" and see if you can find your own...model that is. The bikes in her artwork belong people she knows and, she claims, represent an extension of their personalities. She has a loose painterly style that fits the portraiture concept and clearly has developed a mastery of capturing her subjects' likeness. Oh, and check out her coloring book, while you're there.

Labels: Art, bicycles, Drawing, environment, hand-painted

If you're wondering what I do when I'm not collecting visual junk...see the package I designed for Bush Condoms. Created by the same folks that brought us the Bush Cards and the Slanted Bush Cards - Second Term decks, Bush Condoms aim to make this election season a lot of fun. Check 'em out!

Labels: 2008 election, Bush, fascist

If you've ever been crate-digging and stumbled upon an LP or 7-inch with Jim Flora's cover art, you most likely bought it regardless of the music the record contained. At least, that's been my experience. These covers are truly works of art and often outshine the music therein. Long the stuff of record geeks' collections, Flora's art has managed to slowly infiltrate the public's consciousness largely by the efforts of one man. Irwin Chusid, a long-time WFMU DJ and Jim Flora archivist coined the term "Outsider Music" and was responsible for bringing to light such important, but previously overlooked artists as Esquivel, The Langley Schools Music Project and Raymond Scott just to name a few. The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora is the second book on the artist by Chusid, who is by now considered the authority on the subject and even co-maintains the official Jim Flora blog. As the title suggests, Flora's normally playful graphic style is taken for a more sinister ride in the works featured in this book, which also includes several unpublished sketches and paintings. The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora is an absolute must-have for both music and art lovers, fine or otherwise. And if you are going to be in the Seattle area now through October 24th, be sure to catch the exhibition of the same name currently on view at the Fantagraphics Book Store to see many of these works first hand.

Labels: album covers, Art, Drawing, Jim Flora, music

I've now received as gifts both the paperback and hardcover versions of 45 RPM: A Visual History of the Seven-Inch Record, an interesting and amusing survey of 45 RPM record sleeves from the 1950s through the 1990s. And while my preference is (obviously) for label art, I can't help but to pull these books out from time to time and flip through the actual-size reproductions of such visually interesting covers as the Plastic Ono Band's "Give Peace a Chance" donning a photo of one of Yoko Ono's installations or a Jackie Gleason "Lonesome Echo" single with a custom Salvador Dali painting on the cover or the Rat Fink-inspired Man... or Astro-Man? seven-inch. Quite possibly the main selling point for me is the index in the back of the book that lists all of the meta data on each record including, whenever possible, designer and illustrator. Turns out I have a couple of Burt Goldblatts in my collection.

Labels: 45rpm, 7-inch, album covers, ephemera, music, records, vinyl

Once again, digging through my library I find a book I meant to write about a while ago but got passed over: Reinventing the Wheel, by designer, critic and Paul Rand biographer Jessica Helfand, is a wonderful reference of pre-HTML, interactive information design. Whether they were meant to assist in determining the crop yields of hybrid corn or to help identify the branch and rank of a person in military attire, the information wheels (or volvelles as they're formally known) featured in Helfand's book so often demonstrate the perfect balance of form and function that so many of us strive to achieve in even our simplest of design projects. Circular designs in general (see: 45 RPM record labels) present unique design and typographic challenges. But Reinventing the Wheel's examples weren't merely round canvases that needed to be adorned with type and color, they were born out of the necessity to solve sometimes complex data-mining tasks with a simple twist of a disc. If you've ever taken apart an info wheel and seen the absolute anarchy hidden beneath the upper, slotted disc, you probably already appreciate the technical skill and grace required to simply make it work. This invaluable book is as much a collection of what's been done as what is possible.

Labels: graphic design, Jessica Helfand, volvelles

I once again bow in humble submission, this time to two Flickr groups, Signpaintr and Faded Signage, the latter sporting over 7,000 photos of hand-painted/hand-made signs taken by over a thousand members from all over the world. There are active discussion boards within each group as well as RSS feeds to keep up with all the latest additions.

Labels: ephemera, hand-painted, signs

No, not that Michael Jackson. He was known as "The Beer Hunter" and his knowledge on the subject of our fermented beverage of choice was so sublime that no one would seem to challenge it. Mr. Jackson's influence in elevating beer out of its game-day, six-pack abyss and into a level of sophistication once reserved for wines is incalculable. He was a founding voice and staunch lobbyist for the craft beer movement in in Europe and indirectly helped spawn the microbrewery industry in the United States. He was also quite the connoisseur of distilled spirits authoring definitive books on whiskey and single-malts among other subjects. His books probably had the most influence on expanding my love for great beers of the world and led, ultimately, to my fascination with a style of beer that has a unique history and lore: bock.

Labels: beer, bock