Frank Chimero

Frank Chimero

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:

Questionable Characters

Via: Drawn!

New Portfolio – Vague.ly

Vaguely interesting work by Cookie

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:

Indexhibit

That was epic

That was epic

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’:

your handstands are awesome

This book will be famous

This book will be famous, hopefully!

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.

Patrick Leger

Patrick Leger

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’s Reel of Show

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.