09/03/10
What does your website sound like?
Do you have a blog or a favourite website? Visit Code Organ, pop in the URL and hear the code sing!
08/03/10
Lardwatch #43 (change done come)
Well, now I woke up this mornin’… them two pounds done come and gone. And folks, they’ve been the hardest two pounds I’ve ever shed. I have been swimming like a looney and I have also started cycling to work again. When my boss, Mr Matt ‘20-miles-in-his-lunch-hour-yeah-just-a-short-run-really’ Bullock, heard I that had brought my bike in last Friday, he suggested a 12 mile bike run at lunchtime. We only did ten in the end as he could see I was struggling, but that ride, added to the cycle to and from work, brought the total of miles cycled that day to a grand total of 20. Blimey!
I also had the most active Sunday in years yesterday, combining as it did a freezing seven o’clock in the morning near-ten miles cycle ride to Wymondham, then two hours running around a forest playing Skirmish with Joe at Indy’s birthday party and then an hour cleaning blitz around the house with the Dyson on our return. Phew! Hopefully that will have kick started the next two pounds to exit my frame. Actually, I had a really nice moment yesterday after the Skirmish game – one of the other grown ups said to me “It’s when you run around for two hours that you realise how unfit you are”. I didn’t say anything, ’cos I wasn’t tired. How smug am I? Let’s see if I’m still smug next week…
Below: That’s me on the extreme right, post-Skirmish trying to look hard. And failing. Picture by Claire Holmes.
05/03/10
Fri-llustrator-day #37
This week’s Fri-llustrator is the artist and film-maker, Joe Magee. He began his career as an illustrator working for newspapers, contributing to The Guardian, The New York Times and Newsweek among others. I first saw his work in The Observer, fell in love with it and have followed his career ever since. He famously got sacked from The Daily Telegraph for superimposing ‘certain messages’ (ie rude) in braille on the illustrations he created for them. How any blind person could have read, and therefore taken offence from them remains a mystery (the Telegraph never embosses its type or images).
Nowadays he’s a grown-up artist, making award-winning personal work (last year he won a D&AD Award For Outstanding Achievement) covering a wide base of disciplines from print making to moving images (he ran film-making workshops in Vietnam and Singapore for The British Council in 2008) and producing multimedia for Bill Bailey’s stage shows. Also in 2008, Mr. Magee was the focus of a special issue of WERK, a limited edition arts publication based in Singapore.
See the broad range of his work at the Joe Magee website, Periphery. Featured here, from top:- Beard Function 1997; Palm Reading 2003; Steve Jobs, illustration for The Guardian (forgive the reproduction, it’s from my pin-board).
All images © 2010 Joe Magee
04/03/10
Laughing at the clients from hell
Are you a web designer? Graphic designer? Maybe another type of designer? Whatever you are, you are sure to spend the rest of the day laughing like a drain at this clients from hell site, featuring real quotes from real clients that anonymous designers have suffered. For some reason, I imagined Fred Willard saying most of these quotes, which made it twice as funny.
02/03/10
Comics go crowdsourcing
Love comics? You’ll love Zuda. Artists and writers are invited to upload their creations to the Zuda Comics website, where once accepted, the strips are voted for by Zuda’s readers. The winning entries are then granted their own running series. The high quality of the work raises this project head and shoulders above the usual web comic sites and the interface is superb. But we should expect nothing less from Zuda’s parents, DC Comics.
There are some terrific strips. The ones that got my vote were the western werewolves of High Moon (above), the sci-fi manga/bande dessinée style of Goldilock and the noir-ish Night At The Western.
Via @Ske7cher
Image © 2010 DC Comics.
01/03/10
Lardwatch #42 (what’s the excuse, THIS time?)
OK, OK, in the last Lardwatch, I promised you news next week. And that week became 21 days instead of seven, the longest week I bet you and I have ever had.
So, what’s occurring?
Nothing, that’s what.
Truth is, I have been stuck at 12 stone four pounds for all that time and I can’t shift it. Admittedly, I havn’t been on a strict diet, but I’m not sticking it down my neck either. I have started eating salads at lunchtime and have also started swimming regularly ’cos I can’t get out on my bike due to the bad weather and my school run commitments. However, the bad weather won’t last forever and I hope to be back on my bike soon – I need to because my boobs are becoming bigger than Jordans.
Fingers crossed that by next week, it’ll be weight loss, instead of dead loss.
26/02/10
At home with Dieter Rams
I was in London earlier this week, meeting my Bath-based friend Mark (that’s Bath the place, not the washing instrument) for our annual culture-and-comics spendathon. In order to keep our comic purchases down to a minimum, we indulge in several displacement techniques like eating, hanging out in design bookshops (tempting, but not as much as comic shops) or visiting exhibitions.
Which is why we found ourselves at Less is More – The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams at the Design Museum. I wouldn’t necessarily count myself as a fan of product design, but I was intrigued by the works of Herr Rams after seeing a fabulous interview that Tom Dyckhoff conducted with him for The Culture Show. Among the many contemporary product designers that Rams has influenced is Apple’s own Jonathan (Jony) Ive, which The Culture Show illustrated by comparing the similarity of some of Ive’s work for Apple to that of Rams’ work for Braun.
Walking around the exhibition, I was staggered to discover that some of the pieces that looked as though they were designed only recently, were in fact designed decades ago. I loved the simplicity of the work – looking at it gave me the same thrill that I get from ‘Swiss’ graphic design, sharing as it does the same user-centric discipline. After seeing all this beautiful work, we left the Design Museum in a state of grace. However, Mark and I could contain ourselves no longer, which is why a hour later, we found ourselves at GOSH! (via Ed’s East Diner – for a man cannot shop for comics on an empty stomach). As usual I could have gone completely mad and bought a truckload, but behaved myself (to the tune of £50) and we left after an hour before my willpower crumbled. I bought Paul Grist’s Rabbit Hunt, Seth’s It’s A Good Life If You Don’t Weaken and Black Jack by Osamu Tezuka for Number One Son.
12/02/10
Fri-llustrator-day #36
For this week’s Fri-llustrator-day, we’re continuing with the emigré Belgian illustrator theme begun last week, by visiting the brilliant Benoit Jacques. Mr J came to England and illustrated for the usual suspects, before leaving for France to produce books, sculptures and paintings. I’ve long been a fan of his work, since discovering him through the pages of The Guardian.
Visit the Benoit Jacques website (screengrab above), a lovely, funny, Flash driven affair, to see more.
All images © 2010 Benoit Jacques
11/02/10
Whoops, I did it again
Even tho’ I should be watching my pennies, when Sean Phillips announced via Twitter that he’d put up some Incognito books for sale on Amazon and that they’d arrive with a sketch of your choice, how could I refuse? Especially as I chose to have a sketch of the beautiful, but deadly, Ava Destruction.
Above left, front cover; above right, title page with sketch of Ava. Not pictured, Mrs K hitting me over the head with a tray for spending more money on comics.
08/02/10
Lardwatch #41 (the lyin’, food-rich and the bathrobe)
No real lardwatch this week folks as Mrs K and I feel so fat we daren’t even get on the scales. Exercise is getting harder to fit in and we had a VERY large meal on Saturday at St Giles House in Norwich. The food so was rich, that our bodies spent all night busily (and noisily) digesting it, instead of turning off the power and allowing us to sleep. And speaking of turning off the power, we had a very unusual end to the evening. As we were sitting in the lounge of St Giles House after our meal, listening to the sofas groan under the weight of our stuffed frames, there was a power cut. Not just at St Giles House, but throughout Norwich City centre. We actually had to give our credit card details by candle light and walk back through a pitch black Norwich, finding our way to the car in the nearby multi-storey car park with a bat that the restaurant had kindly lent us. We did wonder if all of the power had been diverted from Norwich directly to our stomachs to tackle the calorific catastrophe to our diets, but no, EON energy were just having a blip.
Next week on Lardwatch: real news, weightloss and Kristen Scott-Thomas (and I hope you’ll remember that two out of three ain’t bad).
05/02/10
Fri-llustrator-day #35
I have recently discovered a vast army of cartoonists publishing on the web – the quality ranging from amateur fan art to the slick professional enjoying the freedom to produce more personal work. Not quite sure where today’s Fri-llustrator fits into that, but I don’t care because I really love his work. David Libens is a Belgian cartoonist, based in the US of A, who draws in this wonderful free style that I adore. Drawing literally from his own experience, he makes beautiful, personal comics about life as a transatlantic cartoonist. It’s funny, ever since I discovered Reiser and Wolinski back in 1981, I go weak at the knees everytime I see lovely loose drawings with French captions.
I’ve illustrated this post with some of my favourite pages from his sketchbooks that he posted on his page at grandpapier.org and if you enjoy the wealth of material you see there, check out Badaboum Twist, David Libens personal blog.
All images © 2010 David Libens.
03/02/10
I heart Heart
One of my favourite illustration agencies/collectives is the groovy transatlantic Heart. Not only do they feature a roster of nearly all of my favourite illustrators (some of which I’ve featured in my Fri-llustrator-days) but they are also in the habit of sending me lovely goodies, like posters and a beautiful 2010 Diary, which I’m now defiling with my ghastly handwriting.
Anyway, they’ve just updated their website and it’s well fab, issit – I especially liked the Heart artists portraits drawn by other Heart artists. And if you keep hitting the Heart logo on the home page, the screen refresh changes the main illustration (see the cropped version of Ben Kirchner’s contribution above).
Lovely work, lovely site.
Image © 2010 Heart/Ben Kirchner.
01/02/10
Lardwatch #40 (skinny starts here)
Good news, Lardwatchin’ Lardwatchers – my odd power walk, lone cycle ride and the salads for lunch are working! On the first week of seriously trying to shed the pounds, I can report that the Earth’s gravitational pull on my good self has decreased by two pounds. Let’s hope that next week, I’m even more weight-less (geddit?!).
Steve who?
A designer at Virgin Money, Steve Kirkendall does lots of luvverly creative stuff, when he’s not doing amends. This site is about graphic design, illustration, comics, animation and web design. But mainly, it’s about Steve Kirkendall.
If you want to say "Hi" mail him at:– steve at kirkendall dot co dot uk.
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