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If your long, arduous week has left you looking a bit sickly and slightly grey in colour, Patrick Savile might well be the man with the cure to pep you up for the weekend. A freelance illustrator and designer with experience working for Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon and Pop magazine populating his back catalogue already, his Personal Zone (real section of his website) is full of abstract, sci-fi-influenced landscapes and textural objects floating bizarrely over fantastical scenes. There – we can see the bright yellow of the screen reflecting off those pallid cheeks already.
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Munich-based agency Herburg Weiland’s portfolio of editorial design and branding is sophisticated, refined and cooly bold. This is reflected perfectly in the posters, identities and covers they’ve created for numerous galleries and magazines.
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There’s a touch of mystery about Eiko Ojala’s most recent body of work, Everyday, a series which plays on the sinister ambiguities that can be concealed beneath a sheet of fabric. Shifting away from his well established paper-cutting-esque techniques to embrace a more fluid line, subtle changes in gradient and sharp edges are all that’s needed to bring a suggestive strangeness to his usually chipper illustrations. Softly undulating fabrics disappear into black holes, and kitchen knives carve threateningly into dining room tables. It’s a strange new world for Eiko, and we’re feeling it.
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There’s a wonderful serenity and peace to Chinese illustrator Jun Cen’s work, as washed-out pastels waft and simple shapes sweep across the page. Currently working in New York, his illustrations have appeared in The New York Times, Nobrow, and ELLE MEN China. Jun’s diverse client list means his portfolio is a mix of everyday scenes and figures, combined with grander, more mythical imagery. It’s this ethereal work that I’m drawn to more as Jun interprets the world in his own way, giving lightness and delicacy to heavy sumo wrestlers and Grecian fighters.
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Pipatra Banpabutr has been photographing day-to-day life and street culture in his native Thailand for the last six years. Gripped by the way in which the country is being reshaped by western influence, the photographer has turned his fascination into a self-published personal project titled Siam So Chic. The vibrant series is mostly rooted in Bangkok but includes work shot all over the country, capturing feverish slices of metropolitan life in the tropics and pitting colourful street scenes against quieter moments at the barbershop or the zoo as old-world Thailand meets new.
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When Nike Jordan approaches you with NBA champion Kobe Bryant’s name and existing brand identity, and asks you to create a fully functioning bespoke typeface to accompany it, the pressure is on you to deliver something good. Fortunately, Sawdust, AKA Jonathan Quainton and Rob Gonzalez, is more or less au fait with work of this calibre, having worked on typography and identity projects for clients like The New York Times and Coca-Cola.
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I’d love nothing more than to be a fly on the wall in the meeting at Milanese tire company Pirelli in 1964, when somebody like the work experience guy first suggested making a raunchy calendar. “Except, we’ll only use supermodels,” I imagine he’d have muttered nervously, to the big dogs smoking cigars in their leather chairs. “We’ll get all the best photographers to shoot it, and we’ll only give it to VIPs and really important clients.”
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Seems you can’t move for a festival these days: it’s “racially-insensitive headwear” this, “Hunter wellies” that, “glamping” the other. But it’s not all fields and whimsical, dopey skirts. Festivals are now out of the countryside and into the cities, and they’ve got heaving line-ups to boot – something illustrator Babak Ganjei knows only too well, having been tasked to draw every single act playing this year’s Visions festival. The one-day east London-based event takes place early next month, and as showcased in Babak’s sweet doodlings, will see the likes of Fat White Family (you know, the naked, mashed-up ones), Camera Obscura (you know, the twee ones with the hovercraft) and Swedish crooner Jens Lekman taking to Hackney.
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Street photography has changed irrevocably from the days when photographers used to take to the streets clutching a small Leica camera, blacked out with gaffer tape, to steal shots of their unsuspecting subjects from the hip. These days iPhones have made everybody a photographer, which makes the ability to nail that shot – the one that captures the essence of a place and its inhabitants, all the more precious.
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Artist Yolanda Dominguez is not one to shy away from using her practice to expose the social inequalities which underpin contemporary society. In previous projects – 2013’s Fashion Victims and 2014’s Gallery for example, we’ve seen her respond to Bangladesh’s factory disaster, in which more than 1,000 textile workers were killed when their workshop collapsed, and question our invasion of online privacy in the digital age, respectively. She often uses “culture jamming” techniques, utilising a given medium to subvert its own discourse, and in doing so evokes visceral responses and stirs up critical conversation around these much debated topics.
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Ed Cheverton (or Chedward Beaverdam, as his website would have you call him) is an illustrator whose knack for chopping up reams of brightly coloured paper and arranging them into slices of joy has him set on a road to success. He’s a master of anthropomorphism, whether on paper, where an offcut is transformed into a tiny cheeky head with the aid of two eyes and a mouth, or in 3D form, making funny little toys out of wood, plastic, cotton reels and the like. He was also one of our Graduates of 2013, which makes us one of his number one fans, and legitimises all of our gushing. Right?
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Working for free remains one of the most hotly debated topics when it comes to creative work. Should you ever do it? If so, when? What should you expect in exchange? And if you shouldn’t, why not?
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We regularly harp on about the union of great music and great design, but when projects like Geographic North come into our vision so regularly, who can blame us. The label is about graphic design as much as it is about music, founded by design graduate Farbod Kokabi and radio music director Farzad Moghaddam back in 2008. They were later joined by pals Bobby Power and Lee Summers, who formed the formidable team that now releases records with beautifully abstract, clean and bright sleeves and covers.
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Last year Nan Goldin happened across a box of photographs taken in Boston in the early 70s when she was moving studios from the Bowery to Brooklyn. 50 of these images – which have remained largely unpublished until now – make up a new show at Guido Costa Projects in Turin. The exhibition looks back to Goldin’s Boston era as a turning point in her career, marking her first steps into the decade of work she coined The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.
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Surely the toughest client there could be is yourself. So it’s always rather intriguing to hear about design agencies rebranding themselves, and imagining the endless wranglings such a project must entail. We reckon London-based design agency Dalziel&Pow hasn’t done too bad though, launching a newly playful identity to bring it firmly up to date. According to the consultancy, the previous logo “just didn’t feel like us anymore – not all that surprising considering it was created over 15 years ago.”
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Back in 2013 photographer Martin Zähringer launched a platform designed by Charlotte Heal to give seen-but-not-heard models a soapbox to stand on. Is In Town has been running online ever since, featuring shoots with fresh-faced up-and-comers – mostly shot by Martin and a small cast of collaborators – and accompanying conversational interviews. The model-driven project has also quite recently moved into print with a black and white publication and the second issue, designed by Laura Tabet, is fresh off the press with five covers all shot by different photographers. The magazine is distributed by Antenne Books and is stocked everywhere from Colette to the The Photographers’ Gallery.
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British Vogue has partnered with CANADA filmmaking collective to launch the first in a series of films for its Vogue Video offer. The film, called Ouch! That’s Big features model Anna Ewers and was styled by Vogue fashion editor Fran Burns. Shot in Barcelona, the short shows Anna having her foot tended to before probably my favourite song of 2013, Suuns’ 2020, kicks in as a fanfare to the stylish antics ahead. Weirdness, glamour, sumptuous architecture and a bump to the head ensue…