Outside of the Monocle world, I am most familiar with Adrian Johnson. (Check out the Grain Edit interview). For whatever reason I come across his illustrations all the time. However, of the four listed above, Biesinger’s work resonates the most with me. I love his simple graphic approach and limited color palette. You can browse his work, Monocle and otherwise, on his website.
Just got turned onto Dutch studio Almost Modern this morning. I’m definitely a fan of their poster work; there are some misses here and there, but most of it is simple, minimal, and very effective design.
I’ve always loved the artist series over at Hillman Curtis. Very well produced and put together films; my only complaint is that they are so few and far between. Scott’s recent post reminded me to go back and watch this one on Milton Glaser. I love hearing design heavyweights like him talk about the big issues in design. As far as I know, he still teaches at SVA occasionally—how fascinating it must be to have him as a teacher!
I’ve been considering a workspace overhaul for a couple months now. For inspiration, I’ve been browsing the photographs at The Selby, a blog dedicated to the workspaces of creatives. Each post includes photographs of artists in their homes and studios, and usually a little handwritten interview at the end. A majority of their subjects are from New York or LA, but I’m hoping they’ll make it out to San Francisco one of these days.
With my space, it’s amazing I’m able to get anything done; clothes are everywhere, bookshelves overflow onto the floor, and wires tangle their way into everything. It takes me at least five minutes to find just about anything. In all likelihood, it will stay this way forever, but I figure if I spend enough time looking at other people’s workspaces, I might actually get motivated to make mine picture worthy. Then again, as most of the pictures indicate (and Scott has suggested before), a pristine workspace isn’t a prerequisite for productivity.
I’ve just started a film oriented design project in one of my classes, and I’ve been spending a lot of time browsing through the archives over at Art of the Title. Started in December 2007, Art of the Title is a blog dedicated to the film title sequence, and is a great resource for film buffs and designer alike. They post high quality videos of each sequence they chronicle, and usually have an interview with the creators as well. It’s amazing to see what can be done with little to no footage from the actual movie.
M.S Corely redesigned the Harry Potter Series to look like Penguin classics. They haven’t actually been published like this, but it looks like it would have been a fun project. (He also gave the Lemony Snicket series the same treatment.)
MyFonts released an iPhone version of their WhatTheFont identification tool last week. It has a very simple and easy to use interface. You basically just take a picture of a font, crop and upload it, and it will run the characters through a recognition database and give you possible identities for your mystery font. Works well so far (at least it was able to recognize Futura above), but it will be interesting to see how it does with some more challenging typefaces.
I’ve become seriously addicted to Dropular recently, and it seemed (at least up until their servers went down yesterday) that just about every other dropped image was one of Kim Høltermand’s stunning photographs. His work gets a lot of love in the blog community, and it’s great to see a talented photographer getting the recognition he deserves. I love his compositional style, subject choice, and I find his color palette sophisticated and appropriate. His images are imbued with a profound and mysterious tranquility which, given his urban subject matter, is a remarkable feat. There is a difference between solitude and loneliness—his photographs convey the former.
