Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog

Designer/Illustrator Whitney Shaw has made herself some lovely business cards. There’s already plenty to see on her site, but I’m anxious to see what else will be added in the “coming soon” boxes.

An inspiring collection of Japanese graphic design images from the last half-century over at A Journey Round My Skull (which incidentally is an awesome blog). The above image is tagged, “Yoshitaro Isaka, 1966, ad”.

Just when I thought I was done blogging for the evening, up pops this post in my feed reader. Enjoy this sampling of wonderful Slovak book cover designs from the blog A Journey Round My Skull.

Just received this hugely inspiring book in the mail – Naïve: Modernism and Folklore in Contemporary Graphic Design.

The book is a big beautiful survey of the resurgence of naïve art – a great reference book for the library. The book includes work by designers and illustrators like Matte Stephens, Heads of State, and Tad Carpenter.

Inspired by twentieth century American legends such as Saul Bass, modernist graphic artist Charley Harper and textile designer Alexander Girard, a troop of young graphic designers are rediscovering silkscreen printing, classical typography, hand-lettering, woodcutting and folk art and integrating them into their work.

T-shirt design by Peach Beach

Check out more snapshots of the book after the jump.

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Super talents David OReilly and Jon Klassen teamed up to produce this jewel of a video for U2’s new single, “I’ll Go Crazy If I Don’t Go Crazy Tonight”. Beautiful!

(link via CartoonBrew)

I was in Brooklyn this past weekend and visited the studio of Grady McFerrin – a great designer and illustrator behind this awesome Driveway Moments diorama for an NPR calendar. Here’s a peacock diorama too and a bear one and a bird one.

Here’s a quick snap I made of the original Driveway diorama with my iPhone:

Grady also does tons of rockin’ stationery for Chronicle Books, like this beautiful Photo Album:

Check out McFerrin’s site here.

I’m such a book junkie.

There’s a new one out for all you kitsch-mavens, advertising art gurus, and mid-20th-century style hounds. Warren Dotz and designer Masud Husain have just released Ad Boy: Vintage Advertising With Character, a compendium of cool brand identities culled from what must be a spectacular collection of ephemera. Although it is a followup to his previous book Meet Mr. Product: The Art of the Advertising Character, Warren says this one is quite different. Although I haven’t yet got my hands on a real live copy, there is a preview available on Amazon. The table of contents shows the book is arranged by subject matter: Mechanical Men, Scottish Plaid, Genies, etc.

I asked Warren if he had information on the creators of all these mascots, but he said it’s so hard to trace that he doubts if he has even 10% of the designers’ names. If any of you old retired illustrators and designers are the culprits and you read this blog – gee, a lot of us advertising and illustration historians would sure like to know who did what and when!

Hey, we just released these fancy retro NFB T-shirts. The shirt features the classic 1969 “Man Seeing” logo designed by Georges Beaupré. You can order the shirts here.

Also… I want to get some help from you… Which designs should we print next? Please check off your favourites in the little poll below.

21-87

About Puberty and Reproduction

Adventures in History

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Seb Lester is a typographer who designs fonts, animates with type, and creates typographical compositions like this one. He calls this category of typography “illustration”.  As an illustration scholar, I think this makes great debate fodder: does a figurative treatment of type evoke a precise enough visual statement to say that it illustrates the concept? Or does it just evoke a mood? If we call this kind of typography illustration, what does that make the other stuff we usually call illustration?

Some awesome, inventive and often political pop culture and graphic remixes over on 9000’s Flickr photo stream.

via TheTiniest on Twitter.

Also, you can follow me on Twitter too if you’re so inclined…

Created by Vancouver designers Sue Lepard and Matt Heximer to celebrate Canada Day, Adanac is “an iconic font representing aspects of Canadian culture and history.” And bless their souls, you can download it for free! Here’s a few more gems:

I’m thrilled to have stumbled upon Joel’s (previously; previously) gorgeous new site last night during a bout of insomnia. (Though all his work is so wonderful, it did nothing to help me fall asleep again.)

Joel’s site probably comes the closest I’ve ever seen to being absolutely perfect for an artist’s work. No wasted space, beautifully simple in design; all the artwork is on display large and in charge, resizable and filling your entire browser window; and this probably makes it work nigh-flawlessly as a mobile/iPhone-version too. And though it’s entirely Flash, every page still has a unique URL. Nice.

The elegant and dramatic site is the combined work of designer-trio ALSO, and coder/illustrator Dale Sattler. The results of this collaboration speaks volumes to the great things that can be accomplished by teaming up with the right people. Great work folks!