Talk about "visual junk." If your notion of Dada is no more than a Duchamp urinal then please click on over to UbuWeb (with your French-English dictionary) and peruse their Dada Magazine archive. Founded by Tristan Tzara in an attempt to broaden the reach of Dada's core ideas throughout Europe, Dada (the magazine) published works of art, prose and poetry and survives as a wonderful example of early DIY subculture publishing both in content and form. Of the three issues available online, Dada 3, published in December of 1918, is the most striking of the titles sporting some innovative page layouts and a terrific cover design (inset). Notable contributors over the years included Giorgio de Chirico, Robert Delaunay, and Wassily Kandinsky just to name a few.

Labels: Art, culture-jammer, Dada, Drawing, Duchamp, ephemera, graphic design, Kandinsky, self-publishing

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