Q&A: Adrian Tomine

Detail from a 2004 New Yorker cover by Adrian Tomine
US author Jonathan Lethem described comic book artist Adrian Tomine’s contemporary fiction series Optic Nerve as “deceptively relaxed and as perfect as a comic book gets”. Tomine’s stories of everyday people living out everyday lives, laced with a heavy dose of humour, have led to comparisons with fellow New Yorker Woody Allen. Simon Creasey caught up with Tomine during a rare visit to London to promote his latest collection of stories, Summer Blonde, which has just been published in the UK by Faber & Faber…

Olympics: designers being selected at random

Our naïve hopes that the 2012 Olympics might result in some landmark creative work were dealt another blow today with news that design studios are being selected at random to work on a project relating to the games…

Getty Launches Flickr Tie-In

Getty Images has launched its Flickr Collection – a set of images from the photo sharing community available for licence through the Getty Images site

BTAA Winners

Hovis, Go On Lad TV spot from MCBD
The winners of this year’s British Television Advertising Awards were announced last night at a gala ceremony at London’s Grosvenor House. It was another good evening for Miles Calcraft Briginshaw Duffy, who picked up the Thinkbox Award for Best Television Commercial of the Year for its epic Hovis ‘Go On Lad’ spot.
This is the latest big win for the Hovis ad, which recently picked up the top gong at the Creative Circle Awards, another celebration of UK-only creativity. The spot, which is a sentimental trip through the last 122 years of British history, is the strongest example of the wave of nostalgic advertising that seems to be sweeping the UK at the moment. But with such an over-arching emphasis on ‘Britishness’, it is uncertain how successful it will be within the international awards schemes.

Ecouté a Martin Parr

Is Martin Parr the first photographer to be honoured in popular song? French singer Vincent Delerm’s “Martin Parr” featured on his 2008 album, Quinze Chansons, and he is known to perform the song live complete with a Parr slide-show. While photography-inspired tunes crop up now and then (St. Etienne’s The Bad Photographer and, er, Tommy Steele’s Flash, Bang, Wallop for example) we can’t think of any other snappers inspiring songs directly. Until Gavin here came up with a cracker: Uptown Top Rankin by Anthea & Donna. Wallop indeed. Any more? Click through to see Delerm performing Martin Parr in Paris. (Thanks to the Rocket Gallery for the link)…

MWM Graphics Exhibition

Matt W Moore of US-based MWM Graphics opened his first UK solo show, Coincidence World, at Concrete Hermit gallery in London’s East End last Friday. Moore uses a variety of mediums – some of the work is collage, made cut up coloured paper. Digital prints on paper and canvas also feature as do hand-drawn images created using marker pen and watercolour. All the work shown displays Moore’s fascination with geometric shapes, colourful abstract patterns and letter forms…

CP+B: Loved, Loathed But Never Ignored

Whopper Virgins by CP+B
Crispin, Porter + Bogusky is an advert­ising agency that, to say the least, divides opinion. When bestowing its coveted agency of the year award for 2008 on CP+B, the US trade magazine Ad Age sounded almost apologetic, acknowledging that the announcement meant that “any number of curmudgeonly bloggers and envious creative types all over adland are fuming”. Its sister title, Creativity, observed that “the agency is unrivalled in the amount and the intensity of antipathy it arouses”. Most successful advertising agencies will suffer sniping from others in the industry, often motivated by simple jealousy, yet CP+B’s detractors are especially persistent and vocal – but why?

Step into my cardboard office…

Nothing is a new commercial creative agency formed by Michael Jansen and Bas Korsten that has just opened its doors in Amsterdam. While the city houses the KesselsKramer agency in a fairly unconventional building – a nineteenth-century church – the Nothing office is an unusual construction too, in that it is built almost entirely out of cardboard. They sent us some great pictures of the space, which was created by designers Joost van Bleiswijk and Alrik Koudenburg…

Solder print by Jason Tozer

Close, Jason Tozer’s recent exhibition at London’s Print Space Gallery, offered up a selection of pieces by the photo­grapher that played on the notion of things not being quite as they seem. Tozer closes in on micro-worlds in much of his work and displayed images of bubbles that look uncannily like planets, details of cracked […]

The Art Of Lost Words

text/gallery is a new experimental showcase for art and design projects inspired by the printed and written word, according to its website. The brainchild of curator Rebecca Pohancenik of Studio Zwei, text/gallery has opened its first exhibition entitled The Art Of Lost Words this week at London’s German Gymnasium which promises to showcase “new design and illustration inspired by language’s forgotten words”…

The Glue Society at Pulse New York

The Glue Society’s latest foray into the art world is currently on show at the Pulse Art Fair in New York. A witty comment on man’s relationship with bird life, the sculpture is a Ron Mueck-esque depiction of a tiny man defecating on the head of a huge pigeon.

Designers Against Tibetan Abuse

Detail from Si Scott’s poster, included with the Designers Against Tibetan Abuse book
The first project to come out of the non-profit organisation, Designers Against Human Rights Abuse – founded last year by Rishi Sodha – is a collection of art and design work that focuses on the Tibetan struggle…

1 … 1,295 1,296 1,297 1,298 1,299 1,300 1,301 1,302 1,303 … 1,407

More from CR

How Guinness embraced social

By loosening its approach to advertising, and engaging with its audience directly, the drinks brand has transformed with the times and won a whole new set of fans

How Lego creates meaningful brand experiences

We speak to Lego’s VP of global brand development Alero Akuya about the brand’s rare ability to straddle the physical and virtual worlds with ease – whether through its immersive new art exhibition in Paris or collaborations with Epic Games and Nike