Where the Wild Things Are: Tribute Site

[Jared Chapman illustration]

TerribleYellowEyes is a collection of artwork inspired by the beloved children's book, Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak (soon to be a major motion picture). Fabulous!!!

Endangered Dunny: Carpenter-style!

P+P favorite, Tad Carpenter, created a Dunny for KidRobot's newest Endangered Species Dunny Series. His figure is an owl with glow-in-the-dark eyes. The set includes 15 designs by 13 artists including Amanda Visell, Aya Kakeda, Elizabeth Berdann, Chuckboy, Frank Kozik, Jeremyville, Joe Ledbetter, Kronk, Michelle Valigura, Mr. Shane Jessup, Sket One, Triclops Studio, Touma and our pal Tad! Each figure sells for $8.95 each in blind box and KidRobot is completely sold out so you'll have to check with your local vinyl toy shop or the evil-bay to find one of your own!

Comic for the Day

XKCD features stick-figure cartoons. This one was particularly poignant.

Milton Glaser Works

Now you can snap up a bit of design legend Milton Glaser through his new Milton Glaser Works website. Get your hands on limited edition Giclee prints of illustrated portraits of musicians or snap up one of Glaser's iconic posters such as his illustration of Bob Dylan. My favorite is portrait of his rabbit Mookie which Glaser had a love/hate relationship with.

Eye Candy: Naïve book

Naïve focuses on the resurgence of Classic Modernism amongst the young designers of today. The 176 page book by Gestalten shows off everything from illustations to book covers to poster art by various designers who have been influenced by modernist designers such as Saul Bass, Charley Harper and Alexander Girard. Snazzy.

Oooo, pretties! (Jessica Hische makes us drool again)

Somewhere in the vast expanses of the internet, I found this beautiful piece of typography:



It turns out to be a baby announcement for John Hendrix and his wife to celebrate the birth of their child. It was designed and letterpress printed by Jessica Hische, a designer/illustrator living and working in Brooklyn. I found the actual artwork on her blog, I Love Type. Amen, sister!

(Turns out, we love her work. We've featured her in the past but now, we get to see her blog too! Woo hoo!)

Felicia Koloc: Charmed, I'm sure.

Thanks to the new intern at work, Noel, I got connected to Felicia Koloc, a young designer from Ringling School of Art & Design. Her work is charming, playful and beautifully featured on her website. I find it incredibly uplifting to see the enthusiasm and ingenuity of new designers.

iStat: Find out what's going on inside your Mac

iStat menus is a very customizable menu bar application. It allows you to monitor temperature, fan speeds, data rates, RAM usage, CPU usage and more. Its crowning glory is the ability to customize your date and time to include a pull-down calendar and world clocks. The application is donationware so give it a look. Mac only.



[Shout out to my brother-in-law for the tip.Yep, my whole family is Mac. Totally rocks.]

Eye Candy: Pantagrapher strikes again

[1. Slot, 2. > <, 3. t, 4. Chain Link, 5. Doors, 6. Exclusive, 7. Used, 8. Tilt, 9. Dos]

Mike Innocenzi is a photographer who capture the textures and colors of Chicago with razor-sharp clarity under the name Pantagrapher.

Font Fight

Another silly video battle between Helvetica and Arial brought to you by the fine folks at College Humor.

Eye Candy: Girard Dolls

Ana and I have House Industries on the brain today. She mentioned the Neutra Slab Face and I wanted to talk about Girard dolls. Ana mentioned them back in February, but I wanted to push them back into the spotlight since we found the adorable dolls today at work and we couldn't help drooling over them. Beautiful inspiration!

Neutraface Slab

House Industries has added a new font family to the Neutraface juggernaut. Neutraface Slab is a collection of five display faces, four text weights with italics and a stencil style. Neutraface Slab is an Open Type font family that includes a wide array of features like small caps and multiple figure styles. To make the deal even sweeter, House is offering 20% off all font collections and t-shirts through May 31, 2009. Enter the code "SLABSALE" at checkout.

TypeCon 2009

The Society for Type Afficianados (SOTA) is hosting TypeCon in Atlanta this year from July 14 through the 19th. Registration for the event will be open soon and more information about the events and speakers will be available soon. We'll keep you posted as more information becomes available. In the meantime, you can block out the time on your calendar and start bugging your boss to pay for the trip.

Eye Candy: A Year of Mornings – 3191 Miles Apart

The beautiful photo blog 3191 Miles Apart captures the mornings of Maria Alexandra Vettese and Stephanie Congdon Barnes. Both women live on opposite coasts and trade photos back and forth across the country every morning. The fruits of this virtual photographic conversation have been captured in a lovely book by Princeton Architectural Press. Still smitten? A Year of Evenings will be out in the summer and limited edition prints from both books are on sale on 3191 Miles Apart.

More iPhone fun!

I posted about Poolga last October but I thought it deserved to be mentioned again. Poolga is a free resource for desktop wallpapers for iPhones and iPod Touch from some of the most inspiring illustrators -- Darren Booth, Malota, Lazlo Kovacs and dozens more. The wallpaper artists are selected by invitation only so the work is top notch. Just the links to the illustrators/artists' personal pages make it worth a visit (even for you iPhone haters, Kirsten!).

Who doesn't need a little pocket inspiration?

[More images available at their Flickr page too!]

Eric Kass: Identity Design

Funnel, aka Eric Kass, is a identity design powerhouse. He has created identities for photographers, retailers and many others. He also maintains a blog of inspiration, a shop full of delightful paper goods and a gallery and working studio. Color me four shades of impressed.

Design Crush: Present & Correct

Present & Correct out of London creates, finds and curates the cutest shop ever. Everything about the site from the design to the products to the photos is so damn sweet that it makes me want to buy one of everything. There is something wonderful and lovely how P&C deftly mixes original in-house designs with vintage finds and products from around the word. Neat!!

Illustrator: Blanca Gomez, Cosas Minimas

It seems I'm quite smitten with the work of Blanca Gomez and I didn't even realize it. I have featured her work here on P+P on at least two other occasions without realizing it -- once in a post about the inspirations for the Chronicle Books team and once for the cover of Uppercase Magazine.

I decided it was time to give her center stage.

Blanca Gomez is a Spanish designer and illustrator living in Madrid. She often creates her work with simple shapes and bold splashes of colors. Her work may be created digitally or with cut paper with equal grace. She has created work for Moo, Uppercase, and many others.

More information and places to buy her work:
Velocity Art and Design
Cosas Minimas Blog
Flickr
Etsy

Eye Candy: DVNO video

Justice - DVNO from Freedom Record on Vimeo.

Electro duo Justice puts out great music video called DVNO which pays tribute to various cable and production station IDs. See if you can identify all the original influences. If you are stumped, check out this Font Feed post where Yves Peters breaks it down and let's you know who is who.

[Thanks to Jake for the tip!]

Lab Partners

Lab Partners is a design and illustration duo working out of San Francisco. Their visual style reminds me of vintage children's books and Mary Blair. Simple shapes and great sense of color combine to make charming posters, cards and illustrations.



For more information, check out their:
Flickr
Etsy
Blog

Staying Hard with James Victore

For those of you in NYC, the AIGA NYC brings you witty, out-spoken designer/illustrator James Victore in his "HOW TO STAY HARD: AN EVENING WITH JAMES VICTORE" on Tuesday, March 26th. He'll talk about everything from client work to personal work to balancing that work with his family. To be part of this can't miss night, please go to the AIGA and reserve a space today.

Illustrator: Hanna Konola

Created with one-part naivete and one-part stripped-down modernism, Finnish illustrator Hanna Konola's drawings are refreshing and understated.

Frank Chimero is busting out the Venn Diagrams

Because sometimes, a picture really is worth a thousands words. Or a good chuckle. Check out all Frank Chimero's Venn Diagrams on Flickr.

FormFiftyFive: Blog Love!

Filled with 258 pages (and counting) of design inspiration from around the world, FormFiftyFive is a great resource for design, illustration, photography and more. With over a dozen contributors, the content comes fast and furious and ranges from low-tech to high-tech, inspiration to tools of the trade.

Bookmark it, and visit often!
[They keep this up and we'll be out of a job!]

Tilt Shift Photography

I've been seeing a lot of people playing around with the tilt shift photography technique lately. Tilt shift is a photo technique using a high camera angle and a lens with shallow depth of field (or tilt-shift lens) to create the appearance of real life being in miniature. It can also be mimicked using Photoshop or other photo editing software.

One of my favorite examples is the opening title sequence for Joss Whedon's Dollhouse.



Check out more exmaples of tilt shift photography at Smash Magazine, Tilt Shift Photography and Tilt Shift Miniature Fakes on Flickr.

[Tip thanks to Drawn!]