Ever feel like your life is a never ending conveyor belt of groceries? I know, I know, and so do the employees of the Northern Cambria Giant Eagle. Join them on the lowest rung of the ladder in E.R. Barry’s latest piece of short fiction for the Quality/Quantity issue of Block Club. The dreary, infinite grocery belt was one of my favorite illustrations to work on yet.
- Julie
Newsflash: selfies existed before Instagram.
An age-old tool called the camera lucida, used a prism to reflect an image onto a piece of paper, which you would use to trace your drawing. A recent Kickstartr raised money to make a new batch them, called the NeoLucida. Unfortunately, they’re already sold out and apparently won’t be making any more of them. Check out a video of the re-designed tool on This Is Colossal.
-Ben
Images courtesy NeoLucida.
I just returned from the TYPO conference in San Francisco and I am beyond energized.
Over the course of the two-day conference, I had the pleasure of seeing a super impressive lineup of talks by some extraordinary designers, illustrators, typographers and tech founders.
I’m still digesting everything. I learned a lot and I came home with a ton of energy, but the one thing I took from this conference more than anything else is validation. Here are some highlights:
Jessi Arrington opened up the conference with a talk about being honest with yourself and making the most of your strengths. Her story is very inspiring. You can watch her talk at the link above.
When Jeff Veen, a VP at Adobe and founder of Typekit; and Erik Spiekermann, who needs no introduction, offered advice on company processes and culture, they essentially walked the audience through what we already do at Block Club. It was extremely validating.
I really connected with and learned a lot from Peter Bil’ak, a typographer, publisher, graphic and choreographic designer, and editor (among other things) who made the case that working in a variety of disciplines and exploring the unknown makes for better, stronger work. I couldn’t agree more.
I already know that we have an incredible thing going here at Block Club, but to be validated by some of the biggest people in your business is an absolutely wonderful thing.
I’m so looking forward to sharing what I’ve learned with my team.
You can see some of the talks here.
-Brandon
I have not worked with ink in quite some time. I picked it back up over the holidays while working on some beer coasters for a friend. So I decided for Issue 31 of the magazine I was going to switch it up and use that medium for my illustrations.
Sketching and brushes and ink and scanners and photoshop.
Love the process.
-Tim
A few side by sides of my illustrations for Emily-Rose Barry’s short fiction New England Home Magazine for the Comfort issue. The final piece in the magazine is on the left, while the right is the inked drawings. What a difference texture makes!
- Julie
So the latest issue of our beloved Block Club Magazine is out, issue #30. We based this issues theme around the idea of Comfort. I was lucky enough to work on illustrations for one of the feature stories that focused on density and sprawl of cities and suburbs.
The idea we came up with was for one great big island that represents the big city, surrounded by smaller man made islands that everyone is now traveling from. Our thought was to show how we now isolate ourselves from each other, but still are connected to and yearn for the city lifestyle in some fashion or another. I also created closeup little landscapes of the suburbs, city and travel to top off each spread and to close it out a little sunset scene on the island city.
-Tim
A few months ago I posted about my love for old taxonomy illustrations. While I was researching them for a story in Block Club Magazine, I stumbled across the beautiful work of Katie Scott and I’ve been kind of stuck on it since. She has a great talent for flowing, complex illustrations, pattern and natural forms. Among traditional illustrations of various flora and fauna, she has an incredible series of fantastical human anatomy. It’s so beautiful and detailed that at first you might think it’s the real thing, until you realize a human shoulder doesn’t really look like delicately folded flower petals.
-Julie
Back in the spring, we worked on a really fun project with The Community Foundation’s GrowWNY.org. We were tasked with creating a collateral piece that would spread awareness of the organization and its online Go Outside Map.
We envisioned a large-scale fold-up map that would highlight more than 50 of the 200-plus outdoor destinations featured on GrowWNY.org’s online Go Outside Map. We designed the map to complement the color palette and simple aesthetic of the GrowWNY brand. Vector illustrations are simple in shape. On the reverse side of the map, a chart and accompanying icon system indicate the activities and amenities at each destination.
A perforated tear-off portion encourages people to make a green pledge, declaring, “I GROW WNY BY______”. Spreading the word is as easy as photographing and posting on their social network of choice using the branded hashtag: #IGROWWNY.
View the full case study and additional images here.
-Brandon
Everything Tidy: French artist Armelle Caron plays with and pulls apart the notion of urban identity, deconstructing the iconic layout of several gridded cities in a clean-cut visual accounting for. Urban anagrams, of sorts.
- Maggie
On the lookout for some new stationary and holiday cards, I recently stumbled into the online Rifle Paper Co. shop. I’ve seen their cards once or twice before but never remembered the name, so I’m happy to have come across them again.
If you’re in the market for new recipe cards, Rifle Paper Co. is quite the sweet find: you’ve got a few to choose from between the big spoon, the lemon card, and the hanging garden.
Alternatively, there are some lovely offerings for party invitations, notes, and holiday cards, as well as several beautiful stationary sets. Check it out!
- Maggie
Designers Jon Gray and Jamie Keenan throw around some theories on what attracts readers to a book cover. Some silly, some serious - it’s mostly just light psychological hypothesizing and it’s all in good fun, but if you were to really investigate, there’s a whole slew of psychology studies on aesthetics out there that can back up any good design principle. It’s endlessly fascinating to me that a naturally talented designer will simply intuit the visual landscape that brain studies can only play catch-up to after the fact, confirming that, yes, this or that specific design type is inherently cognitively pleasing.
Also, I guess I’m just in a mid-Monday brain fog, but I completely missed the entire underwear angle of this great Lolita cover re-design when I first saw it. Whew! All for the best, I suppose.
- Maggie
Lately I’ve been researching old taxonomy illustrations for a certain magazine I know. I love the organization, the detail and the soft, faded colors. In my research I have stumbled across the amazing work of German biologist Ernst Haeckel (first four images above). His illustrations from the late 19th century are in a class all of their own and right now there is nothing I want more than to track down a copy of this book. Some people, sheesh… they just have a whole different pair of eyeballs.
- Julie
It’s not often that I come upon a website that really knocks my socks off. These Are Things is a site that did just that. Well, I have sandals on at the moment, but those literally came off when I saw this site.
The site is run by Jen Adrion and Omar Noory and features a very cool vertical scrolling effect that takes you through the site and drops you off in well designed areas that only make you want to explore more.
Be sure to take a stroll through their site, check out their work, read their blog and then check out everything one more time as you most likely missed some very cool details the first time around.
- Steve
Illustrator Jason Ratliff delights in the mundane, as his Walking Shadow series turns every day drudgery into a secret world of color. Nothing exists but form and shadow, allowing for Ratliff’s use of mosaic silhouettes to take center stage. As Ratliff’s characters become vessels of light and color, they feel very much in line with the artist’s self-proclaimed penchant for “a light dose of whimsy.”
Prints of Ratliff’s work are available here, while increasing requests have pushed the illustrator into an attractive series of iPhone and iPad cases marked by his more popular prints.
- Maggie
San Francisco street art legend Margaret Kilgallen, AKA Matokie Slaughter, melts my heart. I especially look to her work during weeks where I feel like I’ve been staring into a computer screen just a littttttle too long, obsessively nudging things a pixel this way or that. Master of lettering, Kilgallen saw the value in imperfection. Taking cues from American folk art and hand-painted signage, she painted cheeky wordplays and illustrations on both tiny scales (scraps of wood, boxes) and massive scales (gallery walls, railroad cars) until her death in 2001 at just 33 years old.
- Julie
I like things that are handmade and I like to see people’s hand in the world, anywhere in the world; it doesn’t matter to me where it is. And in my own work, I do everything by hand. I don’t project or use anything mechanical, because even though I do spend a lot of time trying to perfect my line work and my hand, my hand will always be imperfect because it’s human. And I think it’s the part that’s off that’s interesting, that even if I’m doing really big letters and I spend a lot of time going over the line and over the line and trying to make it straight, I’ll never be able to make it straight. From a distance it might look straight, but when you get close up, you can always see the line waver. And I think that’s where the beauty is.
