Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog

Don’t know about you, but I’m excited about the new season premiere of LOST coming up (Tuesday, February 2, 2010 at 9PM EST, in case you didn’t know). Designer Ty Mattson of Mattson Creative can’t wait either. In fact, while designing an invite to the premiere at his home, he came up with several cool retro-style poster designs. I’d love to see some of these available as actual printed posters.

All the designs on Doublenaut’s site are wonderful, but this one for The Swell Season just floored me with its loveliness and simplicity.

I keep meaning to draw your attention to this book, but I keep forgetting. Last night I took it off the shelf to use as reference, and was reminded of what a great book it was. Anyone familiar with GigPosters.com knows it’s the site for modern music posters. And with the CD going the way of the LP, and its cover art with it, these posters are fast becoming some bands and artists’ primary means of representing their music visually.

The Gig Posters book features over 700 posters, 101 of which are full-page. And it’s a true poster book; each page is perforated and ready to be torn out and hung on your wall.

But I’m keeping mine intact; it’s far too useful as a reference volume for creative typography and combining design with illustration. And since most of these posters were originally screen printed, it’s a great resource for working with limited colour palettes, too.

Previously: GigPosters playing cards

There’s so much good stuff here it’s almost overwhelming. David Klein designed and illustrated numerous travel posters for TWA and many broadway show window cards during the 1950s and 60s. His abstracted shapes and playful typography are a real inspiration. In addition to the examples of his brilliant graphic poster work, the site includes a detailed biography and career history of Mr. Klein.

Collectors note that Tepper Galleries in NYC will be hosting an auction of Klein’s work on November 12.

This fantastic collection of illustrated versions of popular Hollywood movie posters from Poland puts the current movie poster trend of a bunch of Photoshopped faces to shame. They’re certainly closer in spirit to theatre posters than they are to what we’re familiar with as movie posters.

Related:
Polish Poster Design
Bob Peak
The Death of Movie Poster Art

(Thanks, Gabby!)

Died Young Stayed Pretty looks like an interesting film about the mysterious rise and fall and rise of the indie rock poster scene. Directed by Canadian filmmaker, Eileen Yaghoobian:

Yaghoobian travels across the United States and Canada to offer a look into to the world of some of the giants of this modern subculture including Art Chantry, Brian Chippendale, the Ames Brothers, Print Mafia and Rob Jones who have worked on posters for groups like Arcade Fire, Broken Social Scene, Radiohead, White Stripes, The Melvins, Ween, Marylin Manson, Sonic Youth, Pearl Jam, Queens of Stone Age, Bob Dylan, Marianne Faithfull, The Shins, and the list goes on.

Also of interest:
Rattle and Roll
Punk art is dead
Michael Hacker

Back in design school, one of our assignments was to create a travel brochure for a destination of our choice. Naturally, I chose the moon. That’s why I love this look at various vintage-looking science fiction travel and propaganda posters — including work from Wall•E and Futurama.

Shown here, one of several brilliant pieces from Steve Thomas.

I’m in love with the bold cartoony work of Michael Hacker. His site features comics, gigposters, and other work for the Austrian-based design and illustration collective Atzgerei.

Go see energetic and exciting pop comics, illustrations, and posters over at Michael DeForge’s (aka KingTrash’s) site.

UPDATE: Also check out his blog here.

Thanks to Eliohouse for the link.

The Barack Obama campaign just launched a new online art store to support their movement.

The first item on sale is a new print by Shepard Fairey. John blogged about the first Obama print by Fairey over here.

Also of interest:
Barack Obama Sketch