Feeling rambunctious? It’s no wonder, the Weekender is here!

Date
5 June 2015

Oh weekend, how you bewitch us with your siren song. Those two days of utter bliss, where we brunch together and laugh lazily while watching the clouds go by. But lately weekend, you’ve not been your sweetest. You get ratty when we don’t “favourite” what you’ve tweeted, shrug when we ask your opinion and you insist on talking about the Sundays you’ve spent with other people. Enter the Weekender, the relationship equivalent of getting a puppy to pave over the cracks. Excitable, distracting and full of unconditional love, we’re buying a lead and taking the Weekender for a walk on this humid afternoon. Join us, won’t you?

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Sebastian Schwamm: Giftychon

– Pat on the back to German illustrator Sebastian Schwamm this week for creating the most mind-boggling GIF we’ve ever had the pleasure of posting. I mean, I don’t even know where to look.

– This week you lot went mad for this glorious collection of Saul Bass’ rejected poster designs for The Shining, adorned with Stanley Kubrick’s very own handwritten notes, and it’s not hard to understand why.

– Google can incorporate touchscreen technology into textiles now, so that’s a thing. Want to know more? Here’s a short and strangely intriguing video explaining exactly how.

– 77 year-old Manel Vich has been announcing the players at Barcelona for 59 years, and in that time he has only missed three matches – two for surgery, and one for his daughter’s birthday. This gorgeous film by Johan Kramer celebrates Manel, The Voice of Barca.

– Illustrator and ceramicist Charlotte Mei shared her favourite books with us this week, featuring Manga, Akari and some pots by Picasso.

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Charlie Engman: Mom

– How exactly did Charlie Engman’s beautiful series of photographs of his mother Kathleen lead to an advert for e-cigarettes with Courtney Love? Find out in our interview!

– Monika Merva spent several years visiting the residents of Children City, a children’s home in Hungary, to create this beautiful series about the people she met there. Happy, melancholy, candid and awkward in equal parts, it’s a poignant tribute to the awkward years between childhood and adulthood.

– Our post about Tracey Emin’s beautiful new Penguin book covers was met with a barrage of incredulity on Twitter this week, which we didn’t quite believe was deserved. Editorial assistant Alex Hawkins takes it on here.

– “One trillion photographs were taken in 2014. 700 million Snapchat photos are exchanged every single day. Every minute no less than three hundred hours of YouTube video are uploaded.” So begins author and academic Nicholas Mirzoeff’s short essay on the impact image sharing is having on our brains, our bodies and our planet, in this week’s Opinion piece. Read it and then log off, people.

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Kia Tasbihgou: Peace

– We couldn’t get enough of up-and-coming designer Kia Tasbihgou’s brilliant anthropomorphic typeface Peace this week – the “P” of which tells the time. Check it out!

– This week the “grand dame of American abstraction” Agnes Martin returns to the Tate Modern with a grand and fitting retrospective. We went down to see what it was like, and it turns out it is very, very good.

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Caitlyn Jenner shot by Annie Leibovitz for Vanity Fair

– This week the world welcomed Caitlyn Jenner with open arms and the reaction (most of it) has been wonderful. Check out i-D’s article dissecting why Caitlyn’s choice of vintage corset is so revolutionary.

– Our favourite selfie sharing platform Instagram has announced plans to launch a fully operational ad business, and it looks like it wants to become the place for shopping.

– While the weather can’t decide which season it is yet, why not take advantage and catch up with this year’s film releases. Little White Lies has created this great list of the top 25 films of 2015 so far.

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Michael and Janet Jackson

– Known for being the most expensive music video EVER, Dazed Digital takes a look at all the stories surrounding Scream, Michael Jackson’s duet with his sister Janet.

Design Week detailed how the Design Council have called on government to “be braver in using design” by embedding it at a strategic level in order to make any progress.

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Jessie Gaynor for The Paris Review

Alex Hawkins

Chances are you’ve been on the sending or receiving end of drunk texting, but you probably haven’t thought what famous authors might say. Jessie Gaynor’s illustrations for The Paris Review take care of some of the guesswork. It’s literature on a lads’ night out in the digital age, which is great because I’ve always wondered what William Blake would have said if he exclusively spoke in Emojis.

Emily Gosling

This week we’ve been sifting though 900 – yes, 900 – submissions for our Graduates programme. It’s been long, but it’s been fun, and it’s been so inspiring and exciting seeing some really great work. One thing that’s not left my head though is Simon and Garfunkel’s song Mrs Robinson, from the film The Graduate. Another thing that hasn’t left my head is that scene in The Simpsons where Granpa recreates that “MRS ROBINSON!” scene from the film, so here he is bellowing those immortal words: “MRS BOUVIER!”

Beccy Fulleylove

Imitation is supposedly the sincerest form of flattery and just one look at this video created by film buff Jacob T. Swinney, it seems Quentin Tarantino takes this sentiment quite literally. The director is obviously a big fan of movies, but I never realised quite how much until this well put-together supercut of all the scenes Tarantino has referenced and recreated. Some of them are an exact copy, from Gone in 60 Seconds to the Flintstones, Bladerunner to Gone With The Wind – it’s pretty amazing.

Rob Alderson

Having recently come through the design awards season I have spent a lot of time thinking and talking about ranking and rating creative work in a competitive context. So it was interesting to see today that leading UK comedy website Chortle had asked its readers whether its star ratings for Edinburgh Festival shows should continue. Clearly Chortle founder Steve Bennett was uncomfortable with the reductive nature of this convention but the site’s readers voted pretty decisively for its retention. Worth remembering that a lot of people don’t mind a bit of subjective simplicity.

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