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This has been blowing up on social media over the weekend and it’s not hard to see why. French photographer Léo Caillard has found a super-cheeky way of playing with our perceptions of past and present with his Hipster In Stone project. By depicting classical sculptures cloaked in the immediately recognisable garb of the flat-white-swilling, rolled-up-trouser-wearing archetypes, Leo has produced a series which is not only very funny, but leads us to question just how easily swayed we might be by someone’s outward appearance. Either that or ancient Rome was quite a lot like modern Dalston. You decide!
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We’ve featured Thomas Cristiani & Antoine Roux on the site numerous times, partly because they seem to be the only artists on this planet that genuinely do have access to Bernard’s Watch. Amid making spectacularly contemporary visuals that fall like a feather between the world of art and graphic design, the powerful duo can be found getting down and dirty with some good, old fashioned graphic design. They’ve cottoned on to the fact that bright colours and nudity are what we want to see, and by throwing in their truly impressive, classical design and typographical knowledge into the mix, they’re almost indestructible. Have catalogues for art shows ever looked so mouth-wateringly good?
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With more fantastically designed invitations flying through our door than we knew what to do with recently, we decided to compile a list of our favourite degree show identities for you all to feast your eyes on. From websites chockablock with GIFs and video clips to beautifully-made catalogues, an invitation which literally jumped out of its envelope and several vacuum-packed collections of oddities (a rubber nipple, anyone?) if the invitations are anything to go by, this year’s degree shows promise a feast of fresh new creative talent for you all to get your chops around.
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You may remember a couple of years ago that brilliant illustrator (brillustrator? Anyone?) Marion Deuchars tickled us every shade of pink with her Let’s Make Great Art book which revelled in the sheer ruddy fun of the creative process. That’s what sprung to mind on receiving a copy of the Conditional Design Workbook from the team at Studio Moniker. Designers Luna Maurer, Jonathan Puckey and Roel Wouters worked with artist Edo Paulus to produce this super-fun hands on guide to some of the ideas that underpin the Conditional Design manifesto.
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How’s your head this morning? Angela Palmer could tell you – and she’d do it in the form of a painstakingly etched glass image of your brain. Inspired by the process of visualising and mapping natural forms, Angela takes details from MRI and CT scans and engraves them onto sheets of glass, which she then layers one on top of the other to recreate the human form and images of the brain. The result of such a process is an eerily elusive sculpture; from the front the viewer sees a full depiction of the interior architecture of the head in all of its three-dimensional glory, but from the side and the top it becomes completely invisible. Talk about mind-blowing (sorry).
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Almost two years ago exactly I saw Eve Lloyd Knight’s work at the Kingston illustration graduate show at Red Gallery in Shoreditch and was seriously impressed by her screen printed book, Pedestal. It featured joyful characters parading across strange giant landscapes and was printed with no small amount of skill. Then….nothing. Eve sort of disappeared into the ether and that was all I ever saw of her aside from a single spread in Nobrow 6 a few months later. So where did she go?
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We’ve had to put in a bit of a cap on the amount of projects we feature that are essentially objects on coloured backgrounds, but we let this one slide because the objects are real bird’s nests sourced from the actual wild. Bianca Tuckwell just scooped a first class honours degree from UCA Farnham, perhaps due to the absolute winner of The Growth That Is Our Own Cradle alone. These uncomplicated photographs of things which we know exist but never really get to properly observe is a perfect example of a project that looks simple to create, but actually involves a hell of a lot of work. Favourite nest? Song Thrush, definitely. Cosy.
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I’d imagine director Ivan Grbovic believes in doing things well, or just not at all. His latest video for Young Galaxy is a painstakingly created slow-mo CGI romp through the end of the world, set to the band’s dulcet tones. Now I’m as much of a fan of the tongue-in-cheek, lo-fi, low-budget music video as the next man, but when belters like this come along it reminds me how apt a full-on cinematic journey can be for the right piece of music. Hats tipped Ivan.
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Hark my liege! Word reaches us from our scouts in the western valley that The Weekender and its forces advances apace. No sire, there’s no time to send for the heralds we must flee this very night! You know what they say about The Weekender! It takes no prisoners. Now have your squire pack only what you need, we ride for safer ground immediately!
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“You left your donuts by my toilet” has to be one of the best lines from a YouTube parody, ever. After watching this rather high-budget spoof directed by Will & Grace producer Gail Lerner, Lena Dunham actually Tweeted “I’m afraid this might be better than our show” which is high praise indeed.
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So. Here we all are then, the cusp of the weekend, the mind-expanding promise of two whole days of wonder and glory. But to make the most of it you should be properly prepared and what better way to begin the whole darn shebang than with some art and design chat courtesy of our podcast? No better way we tells you!
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Catalogue are a Leeds-based design studio founded in 2010. Over three short years they’ve worked on some stunning projects for a variety of international clients, boutique London enterprises and even (less sexy perhaps) Leeds City Council. They’re also responsible for Library Paper, a biannual catalogue of impeccable graphic design and writing. Like many of their contemporaries they’ve also worked on a lot of bread-and-butter type branding projects, creating logotypes and business cards for all manner of enterprises. It’s these we’re focussing on this time, but rest assured we’ll be back to write about Catalogue again when the time is right.
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Do you like Vespas? Because if you don’t think that Piaggio’s greatest mechanical creation is a monument to Italian design just yet, we’re willing to bet that French creative agency Nomoon can change your mind with this craftily put-together little animation Vespalogy documenting the advancement of the classic scooter.
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It’s not often you see a creative project that allows animals to speak up with a distinctly human voice (at least not outside of Disney’s Lady and the Tramp), but that’s exactly what Martin Usborne’s most recent series, Nice to Meet You, looks to do.
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There are many different ways of getting someone’s attention. Throwing a scrunched-up bit of paper at someone’s head usually works, or a wolf whistle often will suffice, but then there’s also a designing a really fantastic, neon poster covered in fish. Job done! That’s exactly how James Geoffrey Nunn attracted us to him, like moths to a flame. His Flying Fish poster made for a “fish performance at Loophole, Berlin” is a beautiful combination of illustration and contemporary graphic design, with a good glug of fun mixed in for good measure. The best part is the rest of his portfolio is equally as grin-inducing.
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A great show here from Brandon Graham, a highly acclaimed comic strip and graphic novel artist whose work acts as a well-illustrated bridge between day-to-day mundanity and life on far-off planets. This exhibition celebrates the launch of his new book, Walrus, which is “a punning, humorous and sexy universe of machines, logos, women, and bumbling men, all cast in an alternate sci-fi universe.”
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I’ve always been intrigued by the London Underground’s rich history and so was very excited to be invited to a one-of-a-kind performance by the London Contemporary Orchestra at Aldwych, a station abandoned in the 1980s.
