New York Berlin
Christoph Niemann is a talented, award-winning illustrator with a great sense of humour who recently moved to Berlin with his family. His illustrations have appeared on the covers of The New Yorker, Newsweek, Wired, The New York Times Magazine and American Illustration. He is the author of many books, among them The Pet Dragon, which teaches Chinese characters to young readers, I LEGO N.Y. and, most recently, SUBWAY, based on The Boys and the Subway, the first entry of his Abstract City blog.
Christoph’s web site is christophniemann.com (I’ve posted about his work previously, here and here).
(from Facebook—who knew?)
Today I chanced across a lovely collection of Vintage Advertising and Poster Art, here. Much, much, more along the lines of the thumbnails above at the site… enjoy.
Montreal, Canada
INDIGO’s Mother Tongue project has been drawing in some excellent contributions from the far corners of the planet (of which a small sampling are shown above).
(Sorry… links are broken).
(see more biting war & peace cartoons by Mr. Fish here)
Winnipeg, Canada
I’ve long held that “we live in stories,” (a notion I first heard expressed in those four eloquent words by colleague Bruce Brown of Brighton, UK, at a Vancouver GDC conference I was participating in a decade ago). This leitmotif was driven home once again for me yesterday morning while attending a keynote presentation by Gerald Kuehl to hundreds of Manitoba art teachers at the Winnipeg Art Gallery.
Gerald enraptured those present with passionate, poignant story-telling of his ventures into Manitoba’s and Nunavut’s far-flung communities of First Nation peoples… where he has devoted the past decade-and-a-half to the exquisite portrayal (by means of graphite on paper) of elders—the spontaneous standing ovation at the end of his presentation could hardly do justice to the devoted narrative loosed by his illustrative talents.
This evening Gerald shared an e-mail with me from someone else in the audience on Friday (I hope it’s OK if I pass that on here): “Wow… today was so moving. I can’t begin to find the words to say how much of what you do touches my heart. I cried throughout, it was so good. You understand us and what we have gone through as a people. I wish there were more people like you. I wish people didn’t hate us just because of who we are but, they do. It’s everywhere and then I have the very good fortune to meet someone like you, someone who does not judge. You are such a good man with a good heart. As my future daughter-in-law says, “I may be white on the outside but, I am brown on the inside.” And this is something you can say too. Thank you so much Gerald and I thank the Creator for showing me you.”
The images above are of Charlie Learjaw and Luke Moose. You can view more of Gerald’s incredible graphite portraiture on his website here. In case you’re wondering, Gerald spends approximately one month on each portrait—he only works in monochrome, in part, because he is colour-blind).
Hewitt, Texas (USA)
“Most city maps are insufferably hard to read. Street names are never big enough, map keys are too complicated, and neighborhoods are rarely delineated; you could wander into the heart of West Oakland and never know it, if not for the symphony of Glocks going off around the corner.
A clutch of city maps by the Hewitt, Texas-based cartography firm Axis Maps offers a clever solution. The maps use typography as the sole visual clue. So, everything from streets and highways to parks and waterways are labeled with text. The bigger the thoroughfare or the landmark, the bigger the words. So far they have maps of Chicago and Boston; New York, SF, and DC are coming up.” (Examples of the Chicago map are shown above).
Read more about these clever maps here. Thanks to typophile friend Matt Warburton for the link.
(from Climbing magazine)
Knots: they attach us to ropes, connect slings to trees, substitute for dropped gear, secure tents, create belay anchors. Like the Force, knots surround us, protect us, and bind our galaxy together. Even a sport climber whose shoes close with Velcro knows a few knots. But here are a few things you might not know.
1) The word “knot” is related to knob, knoll, and knuckle, but not to knowledge. It is knoten in German, knot in Dutch, knut in Swedish, nudo in Spanish, and noeud in French.
2) The Inca’s only “written” language was a system of knots tied into necklace-like “documents” called quipus, or “talking knots.” Some scholars think quipus recorded only numbers, but others believe that they also told stories and encoded historical events. A select class of Incas apparently interpreted the knots, and the code has never been definitively deciphered. Knots were also used for record keeping in ancient China, and the Chinese Book of Changes, almost 2,500 years old, associates knots with contract and agreement.
(I’ve long been a knot-enthusiast. Three years ago, I designed, illustrated, and published a booklet entitled Top Climbing Knots for the Alpine Club of Canada—copies are still available through the Manitoba Section of the ACC).
Ottawa, Canada
Canada Post today released its largest stamp to date. Like the wildlife definitives that preceded it, the Blue Whale stamp was produced using a combination of two printing techniques: intaglio (for the whale in the foreground) and offset lithography (for the colours in the background). Each stamp, illustrated by Suzanne Duranceau (and featuring the work of master engraver Jorge Peral), measures 128 x 49 mm (5″ x 1.9″).
The blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus) is the largest animal ever known to inhabit the earth. It can grow up to 33 m (108 ft) long and can weigh up to 180 metric tons (198 tons). The blue whale’s gargantuan proportions remain hidden beneath ocean waves, only to reveal themselves for a brief, awe-inspiring moment whenever this majestic creature rises to the surface to breathe—a whale watcher’s dream on Canada’s Pacific and Atlantic waters. Due to severe hunting practices in the 1900’s, the blue whale is listed as an endangered species under COSEWIC (Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada).
Thanks to Matt Warburton for the heads-up.
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We all have moments like this, right?
Classic dilemnas… with seemingly no-win outcomes.
