Happy halloween y’all! I know it’s a time of year more heartily celebrated state-side but the genius of this lightshow will not go unappreciated the world over. There’s tons more on the Californian’s ‘KJ92508’ YouTube channel here. Turn your sound on and enjoy, this is awesome!
I love the work of Genève’s Neo Neo. It’s contemporary but with a throwback twist. Conceptual but minimal. Playful but structured and considered.
Jointly led by Hoang Thuy-An and Xavier Erni, their box of tricks extends to art direction, identity, book design, magazine, brochure, stationery, posters, packaging, album covers, signage, set design, illustration, website, custom typography.
Primarily working in the culture and leisure sectors, Swiss studio Demian Conrad‘s work is stripped back to its bare essentials, finding beauty through form and relationships between elements. That’s the best way I can encapsulate their sumptuous work.
“With a research-led approach, we are interested in how technologies and processes relate to form and meaning. In 2010 we developed a printing process named WROP™ in which we could create a unique random printout using an industrial offset machine. The studio has become a R&D playground looking for new territories. We are currently exploring alternative methods that use traditional printing and new cutting-edge digital printing techniques.”
Tw. @demianconrad
Kimberley Chan has certainly done her hard graft on the London streets. After graduating a year ago she has managed to get a handful of placements under some great talent and now currently peddling her trade at FutureBrand. One to keep an eye on for the future.
Tw. @sosillee
Born in Bogotá, Colombia, Julian De Narvaez attended the National Art Institute IUNA, Buenos Aires. Among the recognition of his work was the first National Exhibition of Illustrations by the Colombian Chamber of Books in 2008. Since ’02 his work has appeared in various media publications both in his native Colombia, Mexico and further afield, commissioned by editorial and design agencies across England, United States and south America.
His stunning craftmanship and control of depth, detail, use of colour and the construction itself is a wonderful throw back to Lewis Carroll and all those beautiful old children’s books handed down through generations – a style of hand and a twist of the sinister seldom embraced in reproduction in modern times.
The Tate, Liverpool will be showing an exhibition about the influence of Alice in Wonderland on subsequent generations of visual artists from November 4–January 29 2012. Read more about it here.
De Narvaez is currently represented in England by Folio Illustration Agency.
Split either side of the Atlantic, NR2154 have a solid background in publishing but by no means leaves them short in the world of design. With beautifully manipulated typefaces, deeply thought out solutions and most delicate of sophisticated touches, NR2154 seem to have a knack of a creating cool, crisp work which stands out by its elegance.
After a long hard (haaard) slog building his design agency Bloodybigspider into a successful business with some great clients (Ernst & Young and YMCA to name a couple), Stephen Holmes escaped south London, moving shop to a nice studio on Old Street where he now calls home.
Over the years, as many of us have, he’d often come up with ideas and concepts he’d think were great, but just weren’t appropriate for clients and so, begrudgingly, they be banished to the maybe one day pile.
Says Holmes; “I’d always wanted to make them – the products of our own whimsy and overactive imaginations – into a reality somehow, and then, when looking (and struggling) to furnish my flat in Walthamstow it seemed obvious. What better way to use our occasional downtime – quiet Christmas breaks, that week in August when everybody’s on holiday – than to get working on that maybe one day pile and turn it into a collection of prints?”
“I liked the idea of prints that weren’t run of the mill, that were a little quirky and eye catching (hence the name – we don’t follow the herd), and so Unherd was born – a website selling good quality prints that might dent the bank slightly, but won’t break it.”
Unherd launched earlier in October and are working hard to build up the site gradually (Holmes says they’re currently working on a series based on the London Underground). There’s something for everybody in their Collections; they’ve tried to make it as easy as possible for people to get exactly what they want. Prints are available in several sizes (A sizes for simplicity), framed or unframed, and with no cheeky hidden extras (don’t you hate it when you get through to a checkout and clock VAT, delivery, cost of stickytape, blah blah blah added on, thus Unherd have sensibly made all their prices “inclusive and totally transparent”.
There’s some lively and cool prints available to adorn your walls, and better still to celebrate the launch they’re offering a princely 10% off all prints (details on the site). Check it out, and give them a follow (no pun intended…*) Click here to see more…
*probably
Tw. @UNHERDPRINTS
Melbourne’s own Round produce work that has been consistently recognised over the last 7 years with countless awards for their creativity and willingness to relentlessly push boundries. To say these guys are simply on-trend would be doing them an enormous injustice, they are way ahead of that, riding the curve with wholly original outcomes that both engage and inspire whatever the application. A truly awesome agency…
