Seeing The Unseen

Back when I was at art school, I lived in sketchbooks more than my “finished” work; I found it easier and more comfortable to work out ideas there, leave things unfinished and mistakes visible, for some reason. Maybe that’s why I’m always obsessed with the chance to see the sketchbooks of professional artists whose work [...]

Look What You’re Doing

Apropos of a Twitter conversation with io9’s Julia Caruso, I found myself remembering the covers for Pulp’s This Is Hardcore singles the other day; the Chip Kidd-esque split images, the unsettlingly intimate photography (which gained a new meaning from the title of the single) and the sobriety of the type (with the band’s name only [...]

The Out Is Classic Design

Turns out the platonic ideal of 1950s pulp covers are the work of a man called Mitchell Hooks. Who knew? Well, these guys, but that’s not important right now. What is important is that we can all now join together in wishing that books still looked as awesome as this. Just look at the typography, [...]

Visual Stylings

A variation on Stuart Immonen’s Marvel 70th Anniversary Covers meme, only this time with two DC Comics dated October 1974 - the month of my birth - and using photos I happened to have on my iPhone.
Original:
Redone:

Original (and, by the way, holy shit that this came out dated October 1974):
Redone:

I still love that cover line [...]

:P :S ;)

I’ve been thinking about emoticons, recently. But not in the way that we think of them now, but remembering when they were new and, if not exciting, then at least odd and unusual enough to be interesting. For example, I have fond(-ish) memories of Ben and Jason’s 1999 album Emoticons, which capitalized on the then [...]

Knowing Is Half The Battle

Despite being of non-American origin and pretty-much pacifist insofar as I’ve really thought through the use of military might and armed conflict, I have this strange love for GI Joe that I’m not entirely sure that I fully understand. I discovered the franchise when I was eleven years old, perhaps, or twelve, when it was [...]

In My Life, I’ve Been Them All

As I finished up my bachelors’ degree in art school - What you Americans call “undergrad,” I think? - I started to keep a comic diary; this was when I was (a) very into the self-mythologizing, and (b) also feeling very disconnected from everything that was happening in my life apart from school, so it [...]

Because Stuart Immonen Demanded It!

So, artist, designer and all-round good guy Stuart Immonen came up with this unexpected way to celebrate Marvel Comics’ 70th anniversary:
Here’s the deal. Remember the Typophile Album Cover Meme? This is much like that, requiring you to re-imagine a Marvel Comics cover from the last 70 years as an actual contemporary novel cover. Follow the [...]

And I’ll Make You Okay, And Drive Them Away

Elliott Smith, I discovered twice; the first time was during Good Will Hunting, where I thought “This is a terrible film, but I like the music, it reminds me of Big Star,” and thought little more about it, and the second was when I was in the middle of one of those breakups where everything [...]

“It’s the Science of The Seventies, Man.”

These are honestly ads that appeared in Marvel Comics in 1975.

Man, anyone who wasn’t into electronics in 1975 was an idiot.