He’s just launched his new site and my smug feeling about getting vague.ly out the door have been squashed. It’s an awesome portfolio site alone, but his mid century style illustrations are even better. I came across Frank’s work after visiting his site Questionable Characters, Frank and his mate Ben both answer side by side all sorts of questions with a mixture of text, image and video.

Questionable Characters site:

Via: Drawn!

Well I’ve found a use for that .ly domain I bought the other day, say hello to Vague.ly interesting work by Cookie. I hurriedly created a portfolio section on Made in England before I went on my big walk, which I’ve been updating since I got back. But because it’s based on a blog’s chronological CMS backend it’s a bit of a chore to browse through and find stuff I want to show people in a interview…

So I decided to look for another portfolio platform, previously I’ve used carbonmade, it’s dead easy to use but a bit restrictive with what you can do make it look like. Then I found Indexhibit, created by Daniel Eatock & Jeffery Vaska, which for my purposes is not far off perfect. First off I wanted to customise the CSS as the standard Eatock theme was a tad bland for my liking. I didn’t code the CSS for Made in England, that was my mate Nico, but I have learned a few bits here and there while trying to tweak it. Luckily Indexhibit is so simple that with a little bit looking how Nico had done it and a good deal of trial and error, I manged to get vague.ly looking ship shape in less than a day. Uploading content is a piece of piss too, in just two days I’ve got the bulk of the work done, still more to come though.

Also the reason I’m doing this is because I’m looking for work, I’m a pretty handy Illustrator as well as working in the digital industry for the past 10 years as Designer/Art Director. If you like my stuff and want to team up, you can reach me here: cookie {at} made-in-england.org

Here’s a screen grab of Indexhibit’s backend:

Iusually start my posts about weekly desktops by apologising for the missing my weekly target, well this is no different, I’ve not posted a desktop since April! This Monster Desktop isn’t knew though, I found it randomly on my hard disk yesterday, makes a pretty cool desktop though ;) Download it here »

Born of the fact that Youtube comments are often funnier than the content itselt - That was epic decontextualises video comments to make modern pieces of poetry. Also they made a nice bit of typrographic animation of it too. See also a lil’ bot of Youtube sunshine.

Found on the excellent blog -  BOOOOOOOM!, they have a project going on of a somewhat similar ilk -the Free Encouragement Project. All they ask is you send in your encouraging words via email here: encouragement {at} booooooom.com. Well that’s part 1 anyhow, not sure what’s going to happen in part 2, but I’m looking forward to it :) There’s some genius bits of prose on there already, my favourite of which is ‘Your handstands are awesome’:

You’ll need to make a bit of time to have a good look round Dr. Odio’s Flickr collection, it’s pretty extensive. If you like bizzare images, retro future stuff, circus freaks, strange love, evil rabbits and monsters, then you’re on to a winner here.

Via: Graphik Addict.

My girlfriend Nicky and Asi have just launched an interesting project – This book will be famous. It’s a kind of pass the parcel/6 degrees of Kevin Bacon type thing, basically you fill up a page with a doodle or something, then sent it to the most famous person you know. Hopefully it’ll be filled up with some fairly interesting stuff, by some fairly impressive people and then they’re going to auction it off to support the NSPCC. Good luck guys, looking forward to see how it pans out.

Based in East London, the Lazy Oaf ladies make bright pop graphic t-shirts and all sorts of other things, I especially like this Pencil Scarf.

There’s a good deal of vintage looking illustration around these days, a reaction I suppose to the too perfect results of using a computer. Well I’m all for it as you might of guessed from the look of my blog, I love all the off set colours, halftone effects and paper textures. There’s always the tendancy do over do it (myself guilty in the past..), but an excellent example of this done right is Patrick Leger’s work, lovely stuff.

Via: Yewknee.

Rex has just put his winter 2008 reel on his blog, including some of his work on LittleBigPlanet, his new animation series for MTV - Grip Wrench and some stuff he did at Poke for Orange. Awe inspiring stuff, I’m massively jealous of his skills.

Kinsey has updated his site with some new works, I’m totally mesmerised by this Zebra piece entitled The Audacity of Hopelessness.

Totoro is one of my favourite animated films, and a lot of other peoples too by the hundreds to amazing art works produced for the Totoro Forest Project. All the work has now been auctioned off the raise money for the National Trust Totoro Forest Foundation, but you can see all the Totoro inspired work in the online gallery.

If you’re a musician and have an iPhone, this FourTrack app from Sonoma Wireworks has got to be a must. But also if you’re totaly un-musical and lying in bed with a hangover like me, it’s bloody great fun too! I’ve been harmonising all morning and making sweet beautiful music ;) Just look at that sumptuous interface, worth the £5.99 download price just to look at it.

Via: Signal vs. Noise.

Ilove Benedict Radcliffe’s tubular cars, the first is surreal, looks like a photoshopped computer wireframe. But check out the pedalo Lamborghini, amazing! Apparently he’s try to flog the double ended Golf / metting room, if you fancy it?

Cheers for the link Dil.

These images look they’re from a sci-fi film about the colonisation of Mars of something! The Boston Globe have posted 32 photographs of Antarctica from the past several years. The vivid colours and contrast of the images are amazing and not disimilar to this trend in modern illustration. 

Via hellokinsella.

This was of those rare times where I saw an online ad and really felt the need to click it. Come on, design your own tequila bottle and have it put into production, who wouldn’t want to take part it that? Well maybe I’m a bit biased with my recent Margarita addiction. Wait a minute, just seen that it’s not a competition… you have to pay them to print your design on a bottle, $225 no less! Not sure if I really want to design my own tequila bottle quite as much any more…