Design Spotlight: Shepard Fairey + Obey Giant

At some point today, this limited edition screen print of Debbie Harry will be available to the public here.

Original photo by Bobby Grossman. 450 prints will be available at $70 apiece and I'll fight you for one. She is oh-so-beautiful! And so is the impactful style of Shepard Fairey. You must know him for his power-packed Obama Campaign poster designs. Did you know his is also the creator of the OBEY GIANT tagging movement? What started as a social experiment is now a cult following. He is a modern-day design legend. This is not the last you will hear of Shepard Fairey on this blog; I do adore him.

Design Spotlight: Janine Rewell

Suntan design created with tanning booth and vinyl stickers, 2008. Twenty-three year old Janine Rewell from Helsinki is featured in this month's issue of PRINT. In her interview, she observes: "For Americans, everything has to be written down. You have to be really clear about the concepts. For other countries, you don't have to explain so much."
Rewell bring up an interesting point; a frustration that I have with many of my clients. The need to be wordy, literal, politically correct, obvious - often hinders the creative process and, as a result, the quality of the finished piece. The U.S. tends not to be as conceptual as say, Europe, when it comes to design. We can gain so much by adopting their simplistic, provocative styles. In order to encourage conceptual progress in America, it is necessary for designers to risk rejection by continuing to present their clients with original ideas. If we stop, the artistic inventiveness of visual communications will fade.
Please share your comments! You can view the rest of Janine's article here. And if I ever use a tanning booth again, THAT is how I want to look when I walk out.

The Book

When I initially purchased The Art of Looking Sideways, by master designer Alan Fletcher, its primary use was as a doorstop. Its brick-like presence was assigned to me as required reading for a graphic design course in college. Needless to say, it didn't see much action for the first several years. It was a few years after graduating that I actually started to sift through the book, and what I found was quarkiness, randoms, and inspiration. Phaidon describes it as "An inexhaustible mine of anecdotes, quotations, curious facts, useless information, oddities, serious science, jokes and memories." It is exactly that. When I am trying to get in creative mode, this is a go-to book for me. I highly recommend it.

To us, "looking sideways" means using a new perspective to experience the everyday; on art and photography, on places yet to be discovered by us. So now you know the inspiration of the name of this blog! It is possible we are infringing on some copyright laws by quoting the title, so who knows how long it'll stick! But they can't say we didn't give em credit.