Ampersands and other things

One of my favourite ways to let my creativity wander unrestrained is by doodling and drawing while listening to music. I don’t often get to combine the two into a single project so when Alison Avron asked if I would design a t-shirt for her, I was possibly a little bit too ridiculously excited. Inspired by her song Will You Be My Lover? the t-shirt illustration is a huge, doodly undertaking full of motifs and themes from the lyrics and a large amount of detail. I’ve been exploring this hand drawn, pen doodled style of illustration for a while and want to create more work like this. To get projects that allow me this creative opportunity is a awesome gift so thank you Ali! Make sure you check out her music and, if you’re in Sydney, go and watch a gig at her creative space, The Newsagency.

I’ve been a fan of Olly Moss’s work for years now. He was the first designer that I developed a work crush on way back in the beginnings of my design degree at university. To follow his work throughout the years has been like receiving a constant stream of excellent presents that get better and better every time and his most recent one has been the best yet. Moss designed the official 85 years of Oscar poster to commemorate the history of the annual awards night and what an amazing poster. It features 84 of those famous gold statuettes, each altered to reflect the Best Picture from every year of the Oscars. I would love to know what kind of timeline Moss had for this because the detail on every single Oscar is astounding (check out this gallery for close ups of each one). Each one could easily be its own print! Some of my favourites include Gone with the Wind (1939) and My Fair Lady (1964), for the great amount of detail in both; the two Godfathers (1972 and 1974) for their perfect use of restrained detail along with Titanic (1997) and Schindler’s List (1993). This poster is all about the details for me and I am sorely tempted to buy it, when they get around to offering international shipping.

Sources: moss.fm and Oscar gallery

I came across Nick Deakin’s work on Flickr (during that time when everyone was revolting against Instagram and going back to Flickr through their rather excellent new mobile app) and ended up favouriting so many of his photos that he probably thought he had a stalker on his case! Big black lines, cute characters and solid flat shapes are in abundance throughout his work and I’m rather partial to this rather adorable little Lolephant character.

Source: www.nickdeakin.com

Book Store Habits of a Typomaniac

Book shops are one of my favourite stores in which I can hide from the outside world. Everything is quiet and calm, there is usually some classical music playing softly in the background and you can escape into whatever story you wish. The extra bonus for me is the litany of different book cover designs on the shelves. There is all manner of fascinating visual material staring back at you from the walls and I invariably end up wandering around taking photos of various book cover designs and the typography that appears on them. To the poor people working in the book store, I probably look like someone taking reference photos of books to buy on the internet for less. It really is just my squirrel like tendencies of collecting interesting examples of typography to feed my typomania!

One of the book stores in the city held a special Christmas shopping night last week so off we trundled to get the present buying out of the way and, in my case, go a little bit bonkers with posting on Instagram. Below are some of my favourite examples of book cover design and typography that I found on the night and you can find the whole lot on my Instagram feed (@jacqueprior)

My absolute favourite find of the night was an entire pile of these Barnes & Noble Classics designed by Jessica Hische.

Various forms of brush script were in abundance across numerous covers. I’m now rather keen to ditch my to do list for today, break out the Indian ink, brushes and pens and create some of my own brush script experiments.

While I can appreciate the typography on this, I never want to see a return to the disaster of the 80s!

There was plenty of custom lettering on show, ranging from cute and quirky to regal and refined.

Sci-fi and fantasy book covers don’t have a great history of being well designed but these two had some lovely lettering that reflected their stories quite well.

I love how doodle style illustration* can possess so much stylistic variation in its execution. My favourite was the cover of Draw Me a House, which had die cuts for one of the windows and the letter box in the door.

Bright and bold illustrations, my favourite kind! The cover of A Guide to the Beasts of Africa reminds me of the awesome work of Georgia Perry.

And finally, a book cover that makes my geometric shape and bright colour obsessed self very happy. The book is apparently a rather good read so that’s two very good reasons to go back and buy it. Then the book store people will know that the weird girl in the corner taking photos of their books really does love them.

FOOTNOTES!

*This term slightly grates on me but I can’t think of any other term for this style of illustration. Does anyone else use a different name for it?