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Tag: video

Where Hollywood’s Printed Props Are Made

Special effects designer Adam Savage (Mythbusters) visits the warehouse of The Earl Hayes Press, a prop house that’s been making printed material for Hollywood movies for over hundred years. Fake newspapers, magazines, currency, and product labels all came from their printing presses. Historian and archivist Michael Corrie of YouTube channel Props To History walks Adam through some of the iconic props that originated by the press, including Blade Runner‘s ID badges and, incredibly, the passports and letters of transit from Casablanca. So good.

(via Waxy)

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Love and Rockets: The Story Behind the Great American Comic

A documentary on the Hernandez Brother’s groundbreaking alternative comic Love & Rockets will launch the new season of KCET’s art and culture series Artbound, streaming on the PBS app October 5, 2022.

Love & Rockets turns 40 this year, and if you have $400 USD burning a hole in your pocket, Fantagraphics are collecting together bound facsimiles of the original fifty issues in a special eight-volume boxed set. (Although I would settle for a slightly more affordable Love and Rockets #24 t-shirt myself!)

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Work in Progress with Coralie Bickford-Smith

It’s been a while since I posted about author, illustrator and designer Coralie Bickford-Smith. In a new video for Penguin Books she talks about her creative process, her work on the original Clothbound Classics, and Penguin’s new Little Clothbound editions.

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PRINT’s Next Chapter

This animation by creative agency Pearlfisher for the relaunch of PRINT is fun.

When PRINT launched in June 1940 (!), its first issue was a technical powerhouse from the foremost minds of the graphic arts. Then, in 2019, something remarkable happened: PRINT died. The company that owned it declared bankruptcy, and PRINT suddenly disappeared into the publishing ether from which it came.⁠

⁠And then, later that year, something even more remarkable happened: Debbie Millman, Steven Heller, Andrew Gibbs, Jessica Deseo, Laura Des Enfants, and Deb Aldrich banded together and formed an independent enterprise to save PRINT from its demise and former besuited overlords. ⁠

⁠Now, in 2021, PRINT has moved on to its next chapter. So, yes, PRINT is dead. But it’s also more alive than ever.

PRINT

While I am glad that PRINT is back from the dead (congratulations to all involved!), it is a bit disheartening that their first book cover design article is on a trend that has been widely written about elsewhere (as recently as last month!). :-(

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Why Cooper Black is Everywhere

For Vox, Estelle Caswell talks to Steven Heller and Bethany Heck about the history of Cooper Black and why it’s been pop culture’s favorite font for so long.

(via Kottke)

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Work in Progress with Stanley Donwood

Artist Stanley Donwood talks about his artwork for Radiohead, his collaboration with author Robert MacFarlane on Ness, and his own book Bad Island, published earlier this year by Hamish Hamilton (and slated to be published in the US by W.W. Norton this fall).

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American Uprising

Inspired by Eugène Delacroix’s ‘Liberty Leading the People’, artist Kadir Nelson explains how he illustrated the July 2020 cover of Rolling Stone to accompany Jamil Smith’s cover story on Black Lives Matter.

Nelson also illustrated the cover of June 22 issue of The New Yorker. The magazine has an interactive version of the cover, entitled “Say Their Names”, on their site.

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Coralie Bickford Smith: How To Become An Illustrator

In this really lovely video, designer, author and artist Coralie Bickford-Smith explains how to become an illustrator (even if you are shy!):

Coralie’s latest book, The Song of the Tree, was published in the UK last month.

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Chip Kidd: Why Books Are Here to Stay

Here’s designer Chip Kidd talking about the enduring appeal of books for TED’s Small Thing Big Idea series:

I posted Chip’s 2012 TED Talk on book design here. But apparently he also did a talk on “the art of first impressions” in 2015 that I missed somehow:

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Centuries of Paper

Great Big Story visits the Richard de Bas paper mill, one of the few places in France where paper is still made by hand.

(via Kottke)

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AIGA Medalist, Alexander Girard

In April this year, AIGA posthumously honoured designer Alexander Girard (1907-1993) with an AIGA Medal, recognizing “his effortless ability to move across innumerable surfaces and scales, his life-long innovative and inspirational cross-disciplinary design practice, and his undeniable impact on mid-century modernism in America.”

Alexander Girard was a designer who defied easy categorization, mostly because he worked—and excelled—in every field. Tireless, creative, and immersive, Girard was most comfortable when absorbed in a project, and he managed to complete a staggering catalog raisonné in his lifetime: houses, department stores, trendy restaurants, less trendy restaurants, logos, a terrazzo material, an airline, a folk art museum, even an imaginary land with its own language…

…Girard’s colorful, geometric, typography-driven, and folk-inspired personal aesthetic became indistinguishable from the midcentury look still sold by the Michigan-based company [Herman Miller]. As later brand director… Sam Grawe wrote back in 2008 for Dwell, “colors hitherto considered gauche—magenta, yellow, emerald green, crimson, orange—became a part of the company’s formal vocabulary, and in time, the world’s.”

Herman Miller — the company with which Girard is most closely associated — recently posted an extended cut of the tribute video made for the AIGA’s celebration of Girard’s life and work:

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How Reid Miles Created the Blue Note Look

In the latest episode of Vox’s Earworm video series, producer Estelle Caswell takes a look at the classic record covers of the jazz label Blue Note designed by Reid Miles and frequently featuring the photographs of Francis Woolf:  

(via Michael Bierut)

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