Friday 2 May 2008

Portrait of the Designer as Author




Heralded as one of the most influential and sort after book cover designers around today, Chip Kidd is as much at home writing about his musings and adventures as a designer. His debut novel The Cheese Monkeys - a semi auto-biographical tale reminiscent of The Catcher in the Rye was an honest statement on the challenges we often face as individuals, more importantly creative individuals. His follow-up The Learners is out now.

Four Feet From a Rat


Comic book veteran Liam Sharp has banded together some cream of British talent for Mother London's advertising venture Four Feet From a Rat. Liam's award winning publishing label Mam Tor was given the task of bringing together Chris Weston, Dave Kendall and Kev Crossley to produce four tales based in and around London. FFRAR will be published quarterly in Time Out then brought together as a collection at the end of the year.

The first issue released last month has already appeared in Creative Review, Computer Arts and ImagineFX - and both Mam Tor and Mother hope this will become the start of something very special.

www.mamtor.com

Dangerous Beauty: The Art of the Shiv



'A shiv is a weapon crafted from the limited resources of a prisoner's closed world. Crudely constructed from such things as spoons, shoelaces and upholstery tacks, shivs lie somewhere between the graceful and the grotesque. They're primitive, too — like outsider art, but produced deep on the inside.'

A little pointer to an old article from Design Observer. I find it fascinating how beauty can be found in anything if you look hard enough, and that it's human nature that is often responsible for using such devices in ways that are truely unforgiveable.