The fine folks at QOOB have commissioned 10 folks to create original short films on the topics of speed and freedom promoting Alfa Romeo's new Mi.To car, kicking off a serious promotion spree that involves a film-making contest. So far, films by Trey Hock and myself have been released on the QOOB site, with more to hit soon...

Unsure if this one has made it to the U.S., but if not, it is fully worth Googling. Swiped description, hence the grammar:
*The Record Covers / Takeaki Emori
*2940yen, Jun 2005, ISBN: 4-86020-135-3 Hardcover
New design guide book for graphic designers, of lining up 238 record jackets selected by 17 graphic designers / creative directors. Editing and planning by Takeaki Emori. If you have brilliant ideas and design sense in addition to the strong D.I.Y. spirit, you don't have to get formal education on art or design to venture into the jacket design or typography at the low cost. This book is aimed for those new generation designers (or those who simply have interest in the graphic designs). If you love music, culture, fashion, design, the book will be a huge inspiration for you. The designers who selected the record jackets include the following: ABAKE (from UK. Art director for Air, Daft Punk, Kitsune) EYE (Yamataka EYE. Boredoms.) Hideki Inaba (NIKE ad artwork director) Laurent Fetis (from France: artwork design for Tahiti80, Beck / graphic design for the film "CQ".) Masami Akita (Merzbow) Moog Yamamoto (Buffalo Daughter) Naohiro Ukawa (Prof. of Kyoto University of Art and Design; designer, VJ and writer) SYRUP HELSINKI (from Finland. Ad artwork for TOYOTA and NOKIA.)

The definitive guide to visual art in New York and baby sister to insane D.I.Y. mega-project Tokyo Art Beat has launched!

Tonight: A celebration of ten years of LOST, L.A.'s primero graffiti magazine, celebrating the anniversary and the release of the new LOST book. 

The book contains highlights of the past decade editor/designer EyeOne has spent documenting LA writing. Includes imagery by Atlas (if you haven't caught the documentary on his work, watch it now!), Pale, Cab, Haeler, and more. Screenprinted board covers, numbered limited edition of 2000.

Even if you are not a graffiti fan per se, the LOSt book is a musthave for folks interested in Angeleno culture. More about LOST here. 

LOST is a picture-perfect example of designer as author. 

Well, the first print run of Parallel Strokes is almost gone. To help move the last 200 copies, I printed up some fancy 2 color gradated canvas tote bags. Buy 2 books and get a tote free. Be nice and a poster'll get thrown in there, too.  Bags printed by Sweatshop Union, Osaka's raddest screenprinter. Well, Japan's raddest screenprinter, to be honest.

Thursday, May 1 the CalArts graphic design T-Shirt Show. T-shirts designed by design students, faculty, and alumni will be sold to raise money for the CalArts AIGA student group, for workshops, shows, and other events for the students.

Where: CalArts, Tatum coffee shop
When: May 1st, 7:30pm - 11pm

The shirts are always super-rad at this event. Go early to score new designs from famous alumni!

CalArts' graduating graphic design MFA class  is selling sets of the visiting artist posters on ebay. There are a few sets of all 24 posters and several sets of 6. The auctions will be going up throughout the week, so check back often.

They are selling them to raise money for a class trip and for the AIGA student group.

Own a piece of history. 

AtRandom #3: Public Libraries<
Personal Libraries Made Public,
Public Libraries Made Personal
May 31th, 6:00 ~ 10:00 pm
Lectures begin at 7:30

A temporary library and panel discussion about books

Presentation and Panel discussion will include:
Stuart Smith (Getty Publications)
Willem Henri Lucas (Willem Augustus, UCLA DMA)
Tahli FIsher-Harkham (Family Bookstore)

The "Temporary Library" will include over 60 books curated and donated by Anne Burdick, Emmet Byrne, Simon Johnston, Victoria Lam, Gail Swanlund, Alex De Armond of the Werkplaats Typografie, Michael Worthington, Martin Venezky, and many more.

AtRandom #3 is inspired by the past of the historic building that we’ve held our events in for the last 2 years. For one night, we will turn the Eagle Rock Center for the Arts back into a public library. Designers from around the globe have offered us, for this one night, access to a selection from their working library. We have assembled these titles into a public library available for this one time.

To cap the event and place the library firmly in a contemporary context we have invited 3 fantastic designers who will give presentations on their recent book design work and a group panel discussion on their aspirations for design and the book.

AtRandom #3
May 31th, 6:00 ~ 10:00 pm
Lectures begin at 7:30
Price: FREE (donations always welcome)

Center for the Arts, Eagle Rock
2225 Colorado Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90041

PDX Fest is just one short week away!!  The full festival schedule is currently online and advanced tickets are now available.  Head to www.peripheralproduce.com for all the details!   Also, check out the article about Peripheral Produce and PDX Fest in this month's PAPER Magazine!

PDX FEST 2008 WORKSHOPS AT THE NORTHWEST FILM CENTER!
We are very excited to join forces with the Northwest Film Center again this year to present three super FUN, super AFFORDABLE, filmmaker workshops during the festival taught by three of our dear visiting artists - Travis Wilkerson, Shana Moulton, and Craig Baldwin. These workshops are an excellent opportunity to get to know our featured guests a little better while gaining hands-on experience with a new technique or two straight from their secret bag of cinematic tricks!

All workshops will be offered at the Northwest Film Center's School of Film, located at 934 SW Salmon. Pre-registration is definitely encouraged as these classes could fill up! To register or if you need more information about any of the workshops, please contact the Northwest Film Center at 503-221-1156 (x25) or www.nwfilm.org.

Click to read more ...

My book, Parallel Strokes, is available now via the book website.

Click to read more ...

 

One of my favorite labels these days is Creation Centre, an experimental electronic label run by Trevor Sias of Music Related. About the label in his own words:

 "Creation Centre was created as a platform to get music to people faster than traditional record pressing and distribution. Creation Centre believes that artists' creativity can be held back by slow release schedules, distribution delays and other hassles. Plus, Creation Centre is an exploration of a new distribution idea, already in use by software manufacturers. All releases on creation centre are free. Though if you like, you can give the artist a donation, as much or as little as you choose. If anything at all. Creation Centre keeps none of the money. All of the donation goes completely to the artist. Please tell your friends, post links, and enjoy Creation Centre."

There is some really amazing music available. In particular, the Marxy EP, Mesomeso EP, and Sias' alter-ego Pandatone's EP. All are worth checking out. 

Sias moonlights as a motion graphics designer and animator. To he and those who create content outside of the workplace, I salute you!

Tentacles, Horns, and Scales
April 19th Thrash Out in Koenji, Tokyo.
Artshow, toy release, sneak  attack.
Featuring all new works by Koji Harmon , Bwana Spoons, and Martin Ontiveros.
Sponsored by Dekline footwear.

 Come join us for good times, art, toys, prizes, and a few big suprises.
Thrash Out is the Flagship store and gallery of mind bending vinyl pioneers Gargamel.

Gargamel makes toys that look like Jolly Rancher coated diamonds.

Koji, Bwana, and Martin make art and toys that explode with color, depth, and endless imagination.

Collector and fan Takaomi Fujiki put it best when he said “Happy Beam Discharge!”

For more info as it becomes available,

Click to read more ...

Our pals Michael and Deirdre are in town and today we headed over to Hakone for some onsen (hot  springs) and relaxing. While there, we visited the Hakone Open Air Museum, which I must say, is the best museum experience I have had in ages. In particular, the children's "Castle of Nets" play structure/sculpture designed by Toshiko Horiuchi Macadam is just amazing. I was unfamiliar with her work prior to the visit, but you can see from the photo that Ernesto Neto draws a lot of inspiration from her work. Horiuchi Macadam's work is all crocheted, and creates non-planar play structures that can support heavy loads with minimal stress, as well as being easy to install. Her rainbow palette rules, too. If you are in Japan, GO! (or go here if you are in Korea [great selection of images of her work at that link])

Also amazing was the massive modular play structure there designed by Peter Pearce. Second image is of Michael chilling 30 feet up in the air in the Bucky-esque structure.

 

The seventh annual Portland Documentary and eXperimental Film Festival (PDX Fest, for short!) is just two short weeks away! This year the festival will be taking place at the historic Hollywood Theatre from April 30 – May 4, 2008.  We will also be hosting an exciting sidebar program of video installation work and multi-media performances at galleryHomeland. This year's festival is easily our biggest yet featuring five jam-packed days of provocative, artistic and firmly uncompromising films and videos from around the globe.  The full schedule is now up for your eager eyes at www.peripheralproduce.com. Check it out!

Click to read more ...

I had the extreme pleasure the other night of visiting Robundo with Chris Palmieri and Eiko Nagase of AQ along with Christian Schwartz the night before last.

Robundo is a hybrid Japanese digital type foundry, type reseller, publisher, and manufacturer of really exquisite small tabletop letterpresses in the vein of old hobby presses. Riso's Print Gocco home screen printing kit is rad, but Robundo's Adana 21J is the next level tool for printing type properly at home.

Katashio Jiro, the owner of the company, is a really amazing fellow who is a treasure trove of Japanese and Western typographic knowledge. He brought out Japan's single oldest type specimen for us to check out (shown below) - a national treasure which he pulled out just for for us!

 

 

Thanks very much to Katashio-san for inviting us to come visit Robundo and for hosting Christian's great talk on he and Paul Barnes' design of the Guardian family of typefaces. The lecture was great, and meeting so many distinguished Japanese typographers was a really huge treat!!

I usually don't go in for design contests, but the guys at Underware have a pretty rad one going on. They designed a custom incised version of Fakir for the design public to use to try their hand at designing a 7" record cover for the band Orange Sunshine, a proto-metal band (a la Witchcraft/Blue Cheer/Sleep).

Winner gets 2000 Euros wirth of typefaces. With Underware, that is nothign to sleep on! Even if you don't win, you still get a copy of the record. Win-win situation. Get on it! 

Through 20 interviews with 29 key figures in the Tokyo art world and 6 essays by art specialists, Art Space Tokyo fleshes out a thorough exploration of the Tokyo art world and the issues that revolve around these spaces.

The guide is lavishly ornamented with over 50 beautiful pen and ink illustrations by Nobumasa Takahashi, bringing readers intimately close to the voices and spaces within.

Topics include:

- Japan's position within the rise of the Asian art scene
- Takashi Murakami and the relationship between contemporary art and manga/anime
changes in the Ginza area's position in the Tokyo art world
- an account of connecting with the Tokyo art world as a foreign curator
- converting subway luggage lockers into galleries
- 100 artists renovating a 160 year old warehouse
- contemporary Japanese architecture and urban regeneration in Tokyo
- the current state of Japanese art publishing and art criticism
- international art fairs in Tokyo
- the collecting of artwork and the history of Japanese auction houses
- art and performance in Tokyo's public spaces
- graffiti in Tokyo

Tokyo's first true contemporary art fair opened this week. It's a really big deal with a lot of new and original work. If you are in town, GO.

This month over at Néojaponisme: a micro/macro look at Harajuku's place in the fashion landscape globally and locally; two analyses of what it really means to be an otaku; and Tokyo's first contemporary art fair. All this and our editor-in-chief is also having a kid!

On April 8th (Tuesday), Tokyo super-designer Chris Palmieri will be hosting the next TAB Talks, featuring a presentation and Q&A with type designer Christian Schwartz. Christian has created custom typefaces for publications and companies like Esquire, Wallpaper*, The New York Times, Bosch and Deutsche Bahn. His typefaces for the Guardian were an integral part of the newspaper’s acclaimed redesign in 2005.

The talk will be held in English with Japanese translation, at Gotanda Sonic in Gotanda. Hope to see you there!