Just the thing for your weary eyes – here's the Weekender!

Date
20 February 2015

After this week’s relentless onslaught of creative goings-on, we’re pooped. Happy, but pooped. Luckily it’s the weekend, and – what’s that you say? You’re cracking open a beer, but want to catch up on the best of the art and design world’s news and inspiration from the last week? Great! We’ve just the thing for you to cast your weary eyes across. It’s called The Weekender, and it’s hella refreshing.

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Izumi Miyazaki: Untitled

– This week we cam across Izumi Miyazaki’s never-ending archive of self-portraits and Photoshop wizardry. The girl can do things with imaging software that we’d only ever dreamt of.

– It might look fairly unassuming, but website Metaflop is actually an unbelievable resource which allows you to create your own typefaces like it ain’t no thing. Have a go here!

– This week it was the turn of designer, art director, and Gratuitous Type creator Elana Schlenker to show off her favourite books in our Bookshelf feature, and she did us proud with a unique (and colour-coded) selection.

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Elana Schlenker’s Bookshelf: Kay and Marshall Lee: America’s Favorites

– This week on the Studio Audience podcast we run through the latest in art and design news, and recruit audio entertainment newcomer Karl Toomey to talk to us about creative side projects.

– KesselsKramer are the masterminds behind this ingenious new ad for Umbro,, in which they bascially knock down every other high-budget sports commercial ever created in one fell CGI swoop.

Just in time for London Fashion Week, we’ve been travelling around photographing some of our favourite London creatives to ask them about what they really wear to work and why! Here are the first three – Rob Ryan, Hattie Stewart and Yuri Suzuki.

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Workwear: Rob Ryan

Look at that face! They don’t come much happier than artist Rob Ryan, whose intricate paper-cut work is produced mainly while he wears a dark indigo boiler suit, or some bright Lycra. You can’t say fairer than that.

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Workwear Hattie Stewart

Doodle-bomber and illustrator Hattie Stewart let on that when she’s not wearing pyjamas in the studio, she’s mostly in black comfy clothes littered with patterns, prints and trinkets from friends. And she bloody loves a pair of dungarees.

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Workwear: Yuri Suzuki

Magical inventor and sound designer Yuri Suzuki has a curious nature and eclectic tastes, as he proved when we turned up at his studio to grill him about his wardrobe. Plus, he gets special merit for his Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared T-shirt which is all kinds of excellent.

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Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari: The New York Times Magazine Cover

– Can you imagine any greater redesign undertaking than The New York Times Magazine? Us neither – we stepped behind the scenes in an interview with design director Gail Bichler.

– The Design Museum has just announced its nominations for the Designs of the Year 2015, and as ever the list is chock full of creative talent. Check out our run through of the Graphics category and our pick of five from other categories here.

– Do you believe book cover designers should read the text before starting work? We had a good old debate about it with the likes of Christoph Niemann, David Pearson and Linda Huang. We want to know what you think!

– And finally, we met up with indie comics publishers Breakdown Press to chat about making comics with the whole shebang.

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Sam Taylor-Johnson

– This week the media lost their shit over the release of the 50 Shades of Grey film, a veritable romp through E. L. James’ erotic romance. In the midst of all the furore and 50 Shades puns, i-D published this insightful, informative, and refreshingly honest interview with director Sam Taylor-Johnson, whose voice brought a whole new perspective to the debacle.

– Meanwhile, over on The Guardian, Oliver Wainwright gave his tuppence on the Designs of the Year nomination.

– In grizzly England Shrove Tuesday means pancakes, sure, but it also means that over on the other side of the Atlantic New Orleans erupts in a glorious carnival for Mardi Gras. Here are some oddly compelling old photographs of the carnival from 1938.

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Simon Whybray: If Youre Reading This Start Typing

– Beyoncé may have been the first to drop the surprise album, but Drake was more than happy to follow up with his own, entitled If You’re Reading This Its Too Late as written in his own handwriting for the cover artwork. Fortunately it didn’t take long for Simon Whybray to adopt the typeface for an interactive website. Meme away!

– Meanwhile, in The Daily Mash land, the announcement of a brand new album from Blur caused an uproar of Britons arguing about who loathed them first.Brilliant.

Rob Alderson

“Funny” adverts can go terrifically wrong sometimes so huge kudos to Tjjnk for these IKEA billboards which speak to the emasculated furniture-assembler in all of us. Very simple, very effective.

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Talking Heads workout DVD still

Emily Gosling

In last week’s Weekender, Billie reminded us just how brilliant Talking Heads’ True Stories is; and this week, more from the David Byrne camp, this time in the form of a spoof workout DVD based on the big-suited frontman’s outstanding dance moves.

“You are going to jog a lot. I cannot stress that enough. If you feel like ‘I get it I’m going to jog a lot,’ you’re not even close. You’re going to be jogging way more than that,” we’re warned. “Stop making sense, and start burning calories.”

Liv Siddall

Hallie Cantor wrote an article in The New Yorker called What I imagine my Boyfriend’s Ex Girlfriends are Doing Right Now . The article sets a scene in which about 12 ravishing, intelligent, stylish, clean women sit about discussing Hallie and bitching about her. It’s perfect. Go and read it over here and then send it to everyone you know.

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Mr Bear

Maisie Skidmore

Grafik posted a very sweet piece from their archive this week which sees Craig Oldham celebrating the joy that is this typeface, Mr Bear. It’s not often you get to spell your name in bears, so if you don’t mind, I’m going to relish the opportunity.

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Novella: Land

Billie Muraben

Novella are a band who not only make great music but also have a fine eye for a cabbage. Their first album Land is out this spring, this is the cover. Put together by bass player Suki Sou and guitarist Sophy Hollington, who we featured recently for her illustration work, it’s just totally dreamy.

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About the Author

Maisie Skidmore

Maisie joined It’s Nice That fresh out of university in the summer of 2013 as an intern before joining full time as an Assistant Editor. Maisie left It’s Nice That in July 2015.

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