Monthly Archives: July 2009

Gridplane

Gridplane - Infographic

I was searching the web for infographic inspiration yesterday and stumbled across the work of JD Hooge on his site Gridplane. All his work is top notch, but I was particularly taken by his Data Visualisation project for Google. It’s just designs, no link to a working product, but hopefully Google will release to soon, looks great.

As soon as I saw his name, the first thing that came to mind was a pixel font I used to like back in the day – Hooge. Had a quick check and I reckon it was indeed named after him, as it seem Hooge and the maker, Craig Kroeger founded a studio together.

Cartoon Political Maps of Europe

Cartoon Political Maps of Europe

The always fascinating BibliOdyssey has un-earthed and scanned some of those cartoon political maps. I’m a big fan of maps and a big fan of cartoons, so seeing them both together always puts a smile on my face. Here’s the Satirical Maps post, here’s an older post – Dogs of War, specifically about First World War maps.

Here’s a few more that I like – Hark! Hark! The Dogs Do Bark, European Revue (Kill That Eagle) and Das heutige Europa.

I’m particularly puzzled by this one below, what on earth could be going on there ;)

The French Invasion, or John Bull, bombarding the Bum-boats

LetterCult – Custom Letters

Richard Perez

Holy shit, LetterCult have posted probably the most inspiring post(s) I’ve seen in a long while – Part 1 & Part 2. Featuring the best Custom Letters (built from scratch, not customised) of 2009. Been spending too much time today searching out the different people’s sites (annoyingly they don’t provide links), wait a sec, here’s a page with the links (cheers Francine).

There’s some familiar faces that I’ve blogged about before, so I’ll highlight a few favourites by people new to me:

Esther Aarts:

Esther Aarts

Esther’s got a nice freehand retro style, her Illustrations are great too, might do a seperate post about them.

Jessica Hische:

Jessica Hische

I’ve actually seen Jessica’s stuff before but never got round to posting it, lovely playful type treatments abound. Check out her blog here and she’s just released her first typeface here.

Richard Perez:

Richard Perez

This guys works is fucking awesome, a mix of illustration, design and typography and a real mix of different styles. The image at the top of this post is by Richard too.

Linzie Hunter:

Linzie Hunter

Her Spam Project cracks me up, plenty more great work where that came from too.

Via: Yewknee.

The World That Booze Built

The World That Booze Built

Here’s an entertaining and interesting article – In Vino, Civitas by James Bridle, author of Cooking with Booze. James’s idea is that we drank ourselves into civilisation, that the cultivation of grains was driven not by hunger but by thirst.

“Beer, as well as spirits, allowed us to crowd together into cities where the water was foul and undrinkable, and it allowed us set off on long sea voyages of exploration and conquest. These two opportunities – urbanisation and exploration, have fuelled all major human activity since the renaissance.”

I love his little diagrams, the one above cracks me up.

Superthriller

Superthriller

There’s no way I could ever be considered a connoisseur of contemporary music, most of my music collection pre-dates the 80’s.. But I have had a relatively modern band on high rotation at the moment so I thought they might be worth bloggin’ about in case any of you hadn’t heard them yet.

Superthriller make that rare kind of music that sounds great, but is so loaded with humour that it’ll crack up you up at the same time as you’re tapping your feet. The band is Andrew Roland and brothers Ben and Max Ringham, they formed on the back of their Avant-garde performance group at Shunt down at London Bridge (sadly soon to buried under a new skyscraper). As I’ve been looking round the web for info on them I’ve heard them described as like a cross between Prince, Beck & Tony Hancock! To be honest, I’d say that was a pretty acurate description ;) They also remind of The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band a bit. Their website seems to be down, but here’s their MySpace page.

The only album I haven’t got of their so far is The Blank Album – a beautifully presented, but entirely blank CD. You get a code and URL and have to download the tunes you like (from what sounds like a wide range of material) to burn onto the blank CD! A great idea I think, but perhaps a bit too much work for some people, this is what they say about it on their site – “ingenious idea that went down like a pork chop at a jewish wedding.. nobody paid the blindest bit of notice.. it is however a rather interesting album.

I’ve uploaded a few of their tunes to give you a quick preview. If you like them, get yourself a copy of Superthriller 1 & Superthriller 2 from iTunes.

Probably their best known track – Ahjustwannadance:
Ahjustwannadance

Me & you in heaven, like Tom Cruise but better – I Really Love You and Stuff:
I Really Love You and Stuff

You’ll get a geeky giggle out of this one – Upgrade:
Upgrade