Stumbled across these—on flickr™ here…

Tokyo, Japan

If you’re a fan of jazz and/or Blue Note graphics, there’s an incredible online resource here of album design and artwork (1930s – 1970s).

Abu Dhabi & Jerusalem

Greetings on this fine day to both Muslim and Jewish friends around the world… Eid al-Fitr for the former  (a Muslim holiday that marks the end of the Islamic holy/fasting month of Ramadan), and Yom Kippur for the latter (also a fast and the most solemn day of the Jewish holidays). Father Abraham (along with son Ishmael/Isaac) looms large in both belief systems… and of course in Christianity as well. Best wishes to all… let’s give peace a chance, eh?

Image: detail from Laurent de LaHyre’s 1650 painting Abraham Sacrificing Isaac, at the Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Orléans. See the full image here.

From all over the USA…

Chaz Maviyane-Davies writes: “Tell me it can’t be true. Following 8 years of disastrous governance, the Democrats field the best candidate this country has seen in generations, against one of the worst the Republicans have ever mustered, and the media’s political pundits would have us seriously contemplate more of the same. Is anyone ever going to learn?” From ‘30 Reasons,’  a 30-day email and internet campaign to encourage people to vote for Barack Obama.

“Our goal is simple: Use design to build a logical, multi-faceted argument for Obama and make it easy to share each reason with another person… We enlisted 30 graphic designers to create a poster that represents a reason to vote for Obama. Starting on October 5th, we will post a new poster online every day and email it to our list. Recipients can easily share the email with other supporters and friends who are undecided.”

See all the posters (to date) here: or sign up at www.30reasons.org to receive a daily email.

New York, USA

I met Dana Bartelt by chance on an airport shuttle bus to downtown Prague in June of 2002, during my first year as Icograda president. Two days later we crossed paths again at the Icograda Identity/Integrity Conference in Brno, Czech Republic, held in conjunction with the 20th Brno Biennale. Dana handed me a disk of images from Don’t Say You Didn’t Know/Posters for Palestine, an initiative she had spearheaded using propaganda art to shed light on the sustained (some would say nefarious) support the U.S. provides to Israel in its ongoing occupation of Palestinian land and its oppression of the Palestinian people. Among the images in the collection, Rajie Cook’s The Star stood out for the power and clarity of its statement re: organized Zionism as an internal force in American political life… a topic often considered taboo (and quick to trigger accusations of Antisemitism).

Here’s a snip about Rajie from The Electronic Intifada: “Born in 1930, Palestinian-American artist Rajie Cook has had a very successful career in graphic design. The ‘Symbol Signs’ that hang in airports internationally, communicating purely through icons rather than text, were designed by Cook and his design firm. He has been honored by President Reagan and the ‘Symbols Signs’ project has been acquired into the Smithsonian’s collection. However, Cook is not done creating work that intends to communicate. Born in the United States to parents originally from Palestine, the violence and continued injustice that consume his homeland spurs him to make Joseph Cornell-inspired boxes that comment upon various aspects of the conflict…” Read more about Rajie’s passionate work here, and visit his website to see more of his assemblages and posters here.

Poster images: The Star (1996) and The Dollar (2007), both © Rajie Cook.

Somewhere in the USA

Ohne Anmerkung… aucun commentaire… an oil painting by Ron English…

Poster image by Josh MacPhee of justseeds.org

Following is an alphabetical list of the countries bombed by the United States since the end of the Second World War (the citizens of these countries represent roughly one-third of the people on earth)…

Afghanistan 1998, 2001-present

Bosnia 1994, 1995

Cambodia 1969-70

China 1945-46, 1950-53

Congo 1964

Cuba 1959-1961

El Salvador 1980s

Grenada 1983

Guatemala 1954, 1960, 1967-69

Indonesia 1958

Iran 1987

Iraq 1991-present

Korea 1950-53

Kuwait 1991

Laos 1964-73

Lebanon 1983, 1984

Libya 1986 (and again in 2011)

Nicaragua 1980s

Pakistan 2003, 2006-08

Panama 1989

Peru 1965

Somalia 1993, 2008

Sudan 1998

Vietnam 1961-73

Yemen 2002

Yugoslavia 1999

Winnipeg, Canada

Here’s a cool ‘tool’ that my friend and colleague Adrian discovered recently…

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends. (from the Wordle website)

You can either enter text yourself or submit a blog/RSS feed for the Java applet to draw from. Visit http://wordle.net/ to learn more or to make your own “word cloud.”

Image shown: the “word cloud” image above was created using the Wordle applet and text from Circle’s website. You can view the image larger here on Adrian’s flickr site.

Winnipeg, Canada

Doing online image research has become so easy… it almost seems wrong. A quick search for “vintage matchbooks” using Compfight (my favorite flickr™ search tool of late) brought up these beauties (among hundreds more, such as here, here, here and here). I love old paper ephemera (such as matchbooks)—methinks the considerable limitations of scale, art creation, and printing techniques in early times simply served to raise the design bar.

Boston, Massachusetts

The “Design Journeys” project celebrates the stories and work of diverse designers and educators through online galleries and biographical essays, a special collection in the AIGA Design Archives and a traveling exhibition in 2009. The first seven featured designers’ entries have been published… see how the histories and work of these designers can inspire the next generation of young people from all backgrounds to consider design as a viable and rewarding career… view the Journeys here.

Images: three works by Chaz Maviyane-Davies (from top): Poster on the plight of Palestinian people, Self/Iraq Cultural Centre, 1980; Poster to commemorate the 100th year of the death of Toulouse Lautrec, Salon des Cent, France, 2001; Poster on AIDS awareness, Centre of Design of Rosario, Argentina, 2007.