Announcement! Beautiful/Decay friend Jessica Hische‘s first font, entitled Buttermilk, is now on sale at myfonts.com. The font is good for “magazine headlines, book title type, initial caps, holiday cards, wedding invitations, you name it.” In related news, a shirt Jessica designed for B/D Apparel will be coming out soon!
San Francisco-based photographer has a few different ongoing projects, but the one I like the best is the tentatively named “The Inhabited West.” The series consists of aerial photographs parts of the American landscape: “pursuing themes of mapping, vertigo, human impact on the land, geology, and various aspects of the sublime.” Some interesting points on how we’ve constructed our world around nature, and how the two interact.
Philadelphia-based designer Alex Hohlov, aka Veone, does some nice procedurally generated abstract pieces when he’s not doing commercial work. The illustrations convey a strong sense of motion…it reminds me of what flying through hyperspace might look like.
German artist Heike Weber creates paintings and drawings by utilizing techniques of heavy repetition. Some of these pieces are purely textural, like the blue ballpoint pen drawings (after the jump), though I think the ones I like the best are in his “Kilims” series, which seem to reference Eastern calligraphic styles.
Inspired by the recent photography book Store Front: The Disappearing Face of New York, commercial illustrator Bryan Christie has begun posting some new recreations of NYC storefronts on his blog. The illustrations are done in his familiar style – very slick and clean 3D stuff, which creates an interesting disconnect from these stores’ urban environments. There are three of them so far, hopefully more to come.
One piece of advice we impart to our interns at Beautiful/Decay is that a well-designed, professional business card is one of the most critical tools anyone seeking a job can have- especially in the creative field! So, Beautiful/Decay is presenting a competition to see who can design the best business card for themselves and/or their business. Please send us your most innovative, eye-catching card graphics! The most creative card will win 500 free cards printed courtesy of UPrinting.com! (Note: We will be posting the winners on the blog–so if you don’t want your personal information broadcasted please also send a version of the file with dummy text.)
Deadline: July 28th, 2009 6:00pm PST
Guidelines:
-Email submissions to: contactbd@beautifuldecay.com with the subject line: Business Card Contest
-Format is 2 x 3.5″
-Business card graphic includes front & back, full color
-Winner may select any paper type
-For all template & file specification requirements please visit UPrinting’s guidelines.
Who Killed Biggie Smalls?, mixed media on masonite, 2003
Pennsylvania-based illustrator Jim Horwat has an affinity for pop culture. His works frequently reference popular narratives, like the mystery of Notorious BIG’s death, and the plots of various movies, especially well known horror flicks. His strongest pieces are the ones that try to explain as much of the story as possible in one big frame, creating a pastiche of images not unlike some of Will Eisner‘s sequential artworks.
Man (possibly someone in character) traveling northwest at 60 mph on U.S. Route 101 in the vicinity of Hollywood on a late Sunday afternoon in March 1991
As you may recall from reading the blog over the past week, Saturday was the Funk Rumble block party in Downtown LA (Chinatown, to be precise) at which Beautiful/Decay was a vendor. Now this information is pretty much incidental, except to say that I live a fair distance from Chinatown, so the drive back from Funk Rumble was a lengthy one, especially due to the amount of traffic at the time we were traveling. Happily though, I wasn’t driving as I usually am (thank you, fellow intern Corinna), so I got to engage in my favorite freeway traffic activity – looking at all the other people sitting in traffic next to me.
The allure of this mode of observation isn’t lost on St. Louis-born photographer Andrew Bush. In his series 66 Drives, Bush captured candid portraits of drivers, mostly around LA. One thing I find particularly interesting about these photographs is that you can begin to see resemblances between cars and their drivers, not unlike the fabled idea of dogs resembling their owners. You can see how much the car is an extension of a driver’s personality.
