Book cover, 1972 (front)
Found these awesome Indian book cover designs from a couple decades ago on A Journey Round My Skull, my go-to blog for all vintage graphic design. Unfortunately, the designers for each of the book covers weren’t listed. You can see the fronts and backs of each book (I only posted either front or back here) and it’s really amazing to see how well integrated the whole of the design is and how designers during that time were just mainly illustrators.
"Between You and I", 2006
Hasisi Park’s photos are at times crude yet tragically endearing. She’s worked with clients like Converse, various fashion lines for Seoul Fashion Week, and has also been featured in a couple fashion/art magazines. I love Hasisi’s info page, as the items listed there have almost nothing to do with usual bullets info pages and CVs, but instead reveals happenings that perhaps impacted her creative work. Though it’s difficult to truly understand someone through looking at a webpage, I feel like I’ve become to feel her work a little bit more.
If you’d like to spend a lovely Saturday morning in the company of drag queens on the set of any early 90′s public access children’s show, please watch Pickle Surprise by Tom Rubnitz. Tom was a video artist most often associated with the New York East Village drag queen scene of the late 1980s. His video tapes were mainly inspired by pop culture and Las Vegas style shows. A number of his works featured RuPaul and members of the B-52′s. He also made the 1987 documentary Wigstock: The Movie about the annual drag queen festival. He unfortunately passed away in 1992 from an AIDS related disease, but left behind some great cinematic works.
I’ve noticed this with many Japanese photographers: the simplicity yet complex compositions, familiar yet abstracted subject matter, and their ability to bring me back to a moment from a movie where I think definitively, “I’ve felt this before”. Photographer Ryo Kawanishi is no exception to this. Looking at his site, I feel almost like I’m listening to a Happy End soundtrack (oh wait, I am) in some Asian suburb. Without really using any mentions of locality in his work, he is able to take me there. He seems to be represented by the webgallery TRYNOME which houses other talents.
"Into the Wild"
Erica Magrey is an New York based artist and musician exploring the ways in which fantasy shapes reality and identity. Much of her work takes a cue from sci-fi and kids’ TV shows, employing costumes and handmade miniature sets to portray alien worlds and beings. There’s some humorous writings on her site that would give you more insight into her idiosyncratic and wild videos but I couldn’t post them here but they’re all graphic images…so go to her site and read ‘em!
Whoop Dee Doo, hosted by your awesome friends, Jaimie and Matt, is a kid-friendly faux public access television show featuring pre-planned performances accompanied by live audience participation (Kind of like a radical talent show!!). The show is based in Kansas City, Missouri, but has traveled and worked with many amazing arts organizations all over the country. Some of the awesome places we have worked with include the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska, Deitch Projects in New York, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, the Smart Museum at the University of Chicago and more!
Photographer and designer Andy Callahan hails from Leeds/Brighton. He’s also one part of duo MOUNT MILK, who for the exciting stuff I feel like they may be working on, still has nothing on their website- may this be incentive to change that! I’m really interested in this kind of design work recently that places a large emphasis on photography and laying out of the design in the composition of the shot.
