Posts from April, 2011

The character of a man can be determined by his…search history. So what does it say about  me when I habitually search for “eastern european abandoned?” Well, for starters it means I often stumble upon talented young unknowns sifting through the world with a camera, like Jan Van Reeth. Check out his work if you also search for such happy subjects.

Great type + great food, a marriage of two favorites that look so good you don’t want to ruin by eating. Anna Garforth  created this tasty poster using biscuits. After seeing this, I want to dice up some cookie dough with an Exacto so bad. Okay, now I’m hungry. Check out the rest of Anna’s  experimental work here.

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Paul Anthony Rouphail is a recent Carnegie Melon graduate + a current American ex-pat working as an illustrator in Peru (awesome. I want your life). His current body of work explores “synthesis of the surrealist and naturalist traditions infused with the American commercial and natural landscape.” It’s big, it’s lonely + it conjures visuals from both a worldwide + personal apocalypse.

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Yes. I have a weakness for all things German. And another one for the amazing HORT.
They were tasked to develop a new identity for the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation—once one of the if not the most important modernist school in Germany.
If you’ve visited their site before, their case studies present an in-depth look at how the work was developed, and reasoning why. So here it is:
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When we began working on the new identity of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation we decided to search for a solution that would relate more to the original ideas of Germany’s most influential Modernist school instead of relying on the visual clichés connected to Bauhaus – it seems almost impossible to use circle, square and triangle nowadays without it coming across as ironic or historicist. [...]The new identity was created by using strict typography, a minimalist layout, standardised formats and no colour. Being the most generic and incidental typeface, Courier was selected as the new corporate font. To guarantee a unique identity we changed the capital “A” of Courier according to Herbert Bayer’s well-known logo on the front of the Bauhaus Dessau building.
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I think it’s quite difficult to practice restraint in a way that leads you to this rebranding success.
LOVE.
happy week you guys.

more here:

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You’re crazy if you don’t read Booooooom – but if you haven’t heard about or seen this yet…you’re welcome.

Nava Lubelski is a multi-medium artist based in Asheville, NC. While she dabbles with a variety of materials, I think it’s her work with thread & canvas that really stands out. Throughout the series an amazing sense of biology is captured in the interplay between the cellular stitching and the webbed rips in the canvas.  Nava says her work explores the relationshiop between ‘impulse to destroy and the compulsion to mend.” Conceptual prodding aside, her mastery over thread & her ability to make it look like paint is pretty damn rad. Her thread & canvas work is currently on display at Artspace in Raleigh.

Are you one of those OK Great readers who absolutely loves all the funky and awesome shit that gets posted here on the regular, but can’t stand that all that awesomeness is just stuck behind your screen, unable to be held, caressed, or picked up on a sunny afternoon and enjoyed on your backyard picnic table?

Well fret not my friends, for this is a call to arms of the OK Great community.

Ferocious Quarterly is a journal filled to the brim with collected and curated works of kickass designers, illustrators, artists, and writers.  They’ve had two gorgeously produced issues so far, but they’re looking for some community love to help produce their third issue (have you heard? Publishing is pricey).  The idea behind issue 3:

All the contributions in “Made Handsome” will be named after real-life newspaper headlines. All of ‘em. The titles and inspirations will directly reference newspaper headlines from all over the world. Some headlines will most certainly be dark, some hilarious, some just plain sad. We see them everyday—pass over ‘em—and read the story. This publication will stop at the headline. And simply based on the artist’s first impression, they will create their contribution to “Made Handsome.” We are taking the world’s headlines and “making them handsome.”

It will take a herculean effort to get these guys funded in the next 50something hours, but as someone who’s spent the last year or so curating content for the web (ie writing this blog), I know it’s an even more herculean effort to do it in the print world.  So drop a few bones in the bucket, tell your friends, and hopefully we can make a dent in that goal.

I’m digging the characters and illustration style of Liverpool-based artist Harry Nesbitt.

Korean-based Studio Shelter created a fun Lego-based stop-motion short which brings human personalities to the blocks of color. This short tells the story of a happy Lego world that is quickly overrun with chaos and slowly drained of it’s color.

Spoiler alert: Lego bricks  humping. Yeah, you heard me.

seriously. i needed this to get the week started.

also: take a look at this. ridiculous. scratch the surface. Thank you VHILS—amazing talent. Amazingly fresh.

Love, CH