Creatives

 

Check out the latest game by developers Fiasco Studios Peleda: a free-to-play sandbox adventure game based on the animated series by Vishus Productions. I may have a vested interest in this game having designed the user interface, knowing both the series and game creators and most of the developers but... it's a gorgeous, fun and quirky little game! Check it out on the ABC. My kids love it!

Rolemodels: A gorgeous set of very personal game cards sourced from 99 exhibiting artists. A huge variety of styles and all stunning.

Photographer Zoe Strauss

An article from Co.Design on Make Art Make Money: Lessons from Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career a book written to debunk the myth that creativity and commerce cannot (or should not) coexist by analysing the career of Jim Henson... I think I'll pick that book up...

RIP Iain M. Banks

Prolific and award winning science fiction author Iain M. Banks has sadly passed away this week. Perhaps best known to a general audience for his first rather disturbing book The Wasp Factory, my favourite (and one of my all time favourite books) is Use of Weapons which is a pretty challenging read with alternating chapters telling two stories in opposite directions in time.

Thanks Iain!

Vintage Books

Lot's of great illustrations via three vintage publications on Brain Pickings.

...Walt Disney's Our Friend The ATOM

...The Art of Kissing 

...A Cat-Hater’s Handbook

Stop Reading

After chatting with a friend over Christmas about how hard it is to NOT finish a book even though you're not quite enjoying it, I came across this timely advice from Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust, via Austin Kleon's Blog:

The Rule of 50
Nobody is going to get any points in heaven by slogging their way through a book they aren’t enjoying but think they ought to read. I live by what I call ‘the rule of fifty,’ which acknowledges that time is short and the world of books is immense. If you’re fifty years old or younger, give every book about fifty pages before you decide to commit yourself to reading it, or give it up. If you’re over fifty, which is when time gets even shorter, subtract your age from 100. The result is the number of pages you should read before deciding.

Top Ten Design books of 2012.

From one of my favourite and unashamed sources, Brain Pickings is their top ten Design books of 2012.

Infographic: The Future According to Popular Fiction

A timeline commissioned by Brainpickings by designer Giorgia Lupi showing all the major historical changes in our timeline according to popular fiction... 

YOU CHOSE WRONG

A Tumblr Blog dedicated to Choose your Own Adventure Deaths... Ahhh, memories...

War of the Worlds

I just recently finished H.G Wells' War of the Worlds and apart from being an absolutely fantastic (and recommended) read it reminded me of the equally great Orson Wells radio play of the same book was that of course rather controversially had a few people wondering if an alien invasion was imminent. Check out the 1938 Halloween broadcast...

New Cover

I've been busy trying to catch up on a few classics (in between devouring the Dresden series of books) and had an idea to do this myself (now I've said it out loud, hopefully I'll get around to doing it!) but here's a great Blog by Matt Roeser, a Boston graphic designer who redesigns the covers of book's he's just read!

Neil Gaiman Keynote Address

This is a pretty inspiring key note address by the broad and brilliantly talented author Neil Gaiman with great advice for aspiring creatives.

Penguin Top 100 Novels

Penguin has just released it's top 100 novels of all time with simple beautiful covers by Coralie Bickford-Smith

Sorted Books

I love these simple, creative ideas... The Sorted Book Project.

"The Sorted Books project began in 1993 years ago and is ongoing... The process is the same in every case: culling through a collection of books, pulling particular titles, and eventually grouping the books into clusters so that the titles can be read in sequence, from top to bottom."

Death for the (Booker Prize) WIN!

A great article and infographic illustrating how many characters you have to kill to write a Booker award winning novel... Quite a few apparently...

The Races of Mankind

A wonderful book from 1946 (now public domain and available on the Internet Archive) shares a charmingly illustrated, scientific reasoning as to why racism is wrong: The Races of Mankind. See an animated adaptation above.

With Mad Men set to return very soon, Co.Design has featured some nice Excerpts from the book
 Mid-Century Ads: Advertising from the Mad Men Era.

 

Great Expectations

Speaking of classic literature, I'm yet to read a Dickens novel but I plan to now- I just finished the rather stunning three part BBC production of Great Expectations. Hopefully you've been watching it too; if I'd posted this earlier, those of you lucky enough to access ABC iview might have been able to catch up on it, though the last two episodes are still available...

It is a rich, textured and gritty production with an authentic cast and complex characters telling a brilliantly layered story; worthy of a Cohen Brothers farce... Or is that just me?... Check it out if you can!