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Tag: inspiration

Like Knows Like: James Victore

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In a new video for Like Knows Like, Brooklyn-based designer and educator James Victore opens up about his life and work:

 

And if you like the cut of Mr. Victore’s jib, he also has a YouTube series called Burning Questions (and a book).

(via SwissMiss)

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Happy Holidays

It’s been a stupidly busy December, but before I take a break from the blog for a couple of weeks, I want to thank everyone for supporting The Casual Optimist this year — it means a lot. Really.

Happy Holidays.

The amazing book cover above is from Maraid Design’s incredible, incredible Flickr photostream. Go take a look.

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Something for the Weekend

Project Thirty-Three, one of my favourite mid-century modern design blogs, is now using Blogger’s “Dynamic Views” template. It looks great using the new ‘Flipcard’ feature.

The Crash — Alan Hollinghurst talks about writing and his new novel The Stranger’s Child with the New York Times:

Mr. Hollinghurst said he modeled his work habits on another friend and novelist, Kazuo Ishiguro. “He has this thing he calls ‘the crash,’ ” Mr. Hollinghurst explained. “He takes a lot of time to prepare a novel, just thinking about it, and then he draws a line through his diary for three or four weeks. He just writes for 10 hours a day, and at the end he has a novel.”

He laughed and pointed out that for him the Ishiguro method was only partly successful: at the end of three or four nonstop weeks he is still years away from being done.

Also in the New York Times, author Adam Thirlwell (The Escape) on translation and David Bellos’ new book Is That a Fish in Your Ear?:

Google Translate, no doubt about it, is a device with an exuberant future. It’s already so successful because, unlike previous machine translators, but like other Google inventions, it’s a pattern recognition machine. It analyzes the corpus of existing translations, and finds statistical matches. The implications of this still haven’t, I think, been adequately explored: from world newspapers, to world novels. . . . And it made me imagine a second prospect — confined to a smaller, hypersubset of English speakers, the novelists. I am an English-speaking novelist, after all. There was no reason, I argued to myself, that translations of fiction couldn’t be made far more extensively in and out of languages that are not a work’s original.

Counter-Culture — Loren Glass on Barney Rosset and the history of Grove Press at the LA Review of Books:

Philip Larkin famously dated the beginning of sexual intercourse to the end of the Lady Chatterley ban and, more recently, Fred Kaplan has used Rosset’s campaign to situate 1959 at the crux of an epochal transformation. Whatever its larger historical significance, it surely marked a turning point in the fortunes of Grove Press. On the brink of a decade in which the geopolitical order would be transformed, flush with cash for the first time, and well connected to the international avant-garde, the West Coast scene, and the nascent counterculture in college towns across the country, Grove was positioned in the eye of the coming storm. At the nexus of an emergent international vanguard, Grove became a potent symbol of the counter-culture, increasingly drawing radical authors, readers, translators, professors, lawyers and activists into its expanding network.

Part two of Glass’ history Grove Press is here.

And finally…

A slightly weird  interview with the David Lynch in The Guardian:

Film is dead, Lynch tells me. It is too heavy, too much of a dinosaur, and its time has largely past. But digital is alive and well and pointing to the future. He admits he’ll miss shooting on celluloid (“because it’s so beautiful”), but is more than happy to shoot on digital instead – as and when the opportunity arrives.

Until then he’s happy pottering around his studio and slurping his coffee; painting his spooky black houses and singing his eerie songs of love gone sour. “I can understand why people might be frustrated with me: ‘Let’s give up on these side ventures and go make a film instead.'” He chuckles. “But all these other things feed into the future. And if the ideas aren’t there for cinema, and if the pressure is on, then you might pick a bad idea and find yourself forced to marry something you’re not totally in love with. So I’m happy to wait.”

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50 Watts

Will Schofield’s wonderful blog A Journal Round My Skull has been relaunched as 50 Watts using the Cargo platform:

The new name has something to do with Charlie Watts, Beckett’s Watt, Charles Wright & the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band, dim light bulbs, riots, cheap amps, chaos theory, and the friend who threatened violence if I didn’t drop my old moniker.

I didn’t threaten violence, but I certainly got the name wrong more times than I care to mention. 50 Watts looks great and I should be able to remember the name this time.

Make sure you update your bookmarks and RSS reader.

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Personal Projects

I’ve been thinking a lot about personal projects recently and so I found this presentation for 99% by Ji Lee, Creative Director for Google Creative Lab, really inspiring:

(via The Donut Project/SwissMiss)

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10+ Flickr Groups for Book Design and Inspiration

10 Websites for Vintage Books, Covers and Inspiration” is one of the most popular posts on The Casual Optimist, and here, at long last, is the promised follow-up: “10 Flickr Groups for Book Design and Inspiration.”

There are a lot of amazing photostreams with book sets — Covers etc, insect54, Kyle Katz, mjkghk, Montague, Paula Wirth, and Scott Lindberg to name just a few that I’ve come across — but I’ve decided to focus this post on my favourite group pools because they collate the best of these individual streams together.

I’ve also decided to highlight groups that are about specific subjects, genres, publishers, or designers, because I think these are more useful than the more general (but still interesting) book pools such as A+ Book Covers, Book Cover Club, and My Books

ABC Verlag Graphic Design books

1. ABC Verlag, Zurich — A collection of scans and images from Zurich-based ABC Verlag who specialized in graphic design and fine art books between 1962 to 1989.

1627

2. Antique Books — images of books, covers and illustrations that are a hundred years old or more.

Design and Paper: Number 13: Spread

3. Designers’ Books — “what’s on the shelves of designers and other smart creatives.” Not to be confused with the also excellent designers-books.com pool or Book Design pool.

Literature in America

4. Alvin & Elaine Lustig Design — celebrates the work of Alvin and Elaine Lustig, both renowned for their incredible book cover designs.

They Shoot Horses Don't They

5. The Penguin Paperback Spotters’ Guild — An astonishing collection of vintage Penguins, Pelicans, Peregrines, and Puffins. Also of interest: The Great Pan! Illustrated Pan Book Covers and Vintage Fontana Books.

Playback by Raymond Chandler Cover art by William Rose

6. Pulp Fiction — As you would expect: detective novels, crime fiction, adventure comics, trashy romance, weird science, blaxploitation and more. See also: The Old-Timey Paperback Book Covers and The Crime & Mystery Book Covers.

Thoughts on Design by Paul Rand

7. The Paul Rand Modern Graphic Design Fan Club — Like the Lustig Design group, this is not just a book pool, but it does, however, include many of Paul Rand’s iconic book designs, making it essential to this list in my opinion.

I Know an Old Lady, by Rose Bonne. Pictures by Abner Graboff.
8. The Retro Kid A collection of cool illustrated children’s books from the mid-1940’s through the mid-1960’s, curated by The Ward-O-Matic illustrator Ward Jenkins.

metropolis thea v marbou

9. The SciFi Books Pool Vintage science fiction covers from the 1940s, 50s, 60s and 70s.

computers

10. Vintage Paperbacks — The place for amazing paperbacks that aren’t Penguins. Curated by graphic designer and art director Gregory Boerum, the focus is on quality stuff with design interest from the 1960’s and 70’s.

So there we have it: 10 of my favourites. What are yours?

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The Silver Lining

The Silver Lining blog is so good right now it’s giving me a headache: Art, books, ephemera, photography… All the good stuff, all in one place…

That is all. Carry on…

(pictured: De Sainte in New York, book cover by Dick Bruna seen at The Silver Lining)

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10 Websites for Vintage Books, Covers and Inspiration

1. A Journey Round My Skull — “Unhealthy book fetishism from a reader, collector, and amateur historian of forgotten literature.”

2. The Art of Penguin Science FictionA comprehensive collection of Penguin sci-fi covers from 1935 onwards.

3. BibliOdyssey“Books… Illustrations… Science… History… Visual Materia Obscura… Eclectic Bookart.”

4. Book (Design) Stories — Felix Wiedler’s incredible collection of modernist design and typography books from Germany and Switzerland 1925–1965.

5. Book Worship — “graphically interesting, but otherwise uncollectible, books that entered and exited bookstores quietly in the 50s, 60s, and 70s”.

6. I Was A Bronze Age BoyComic books, crime fiction and pulp magazines curated by Mark Justice. Awesome name. Awesome blog.

7. Killer Covers of the Week — Pulpy goodness and vintage crime fiction covers expertly curated The Rap Sheet‘s J. Kingston Pierce.

8. The Pelican ProjectThings Magazine‘s collection of Pelican paperbacks organized by decade.

9. Pop Sensation — Rex Parker appraises, critiques and generally ridicules his vintage paperback collection.

10. Spanish Book CoversSpanish pulp: detectives, masked gangsters, pin-ups, skeletons, and zombies! (French language)

AND BONUS! 11. French Book Covers — But not entirely safe for work… It’s French. You have been warned.

Let me know if I’ve missed any other great vintage book cover sites. AND  I’m working on a list of book cover related photostreams and groups on Flickr so please pass on your recommendations! Cheers.

modernist book design in germany and switzerland 1925–1965 (and beyond)

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