Hasta La Ideas

This is how the XL Records offices in LA now look thanks to a collaboration between UK artists Stanley Donwood and INSA to create a series of animated ‘gif-iti’ pieces for the launch of the new Atoms For Peace album…

INSA in fact painted the building four times in order to make the frames for the gif files (shown below), which make up the Hollywood Dooom project. The finished work, when viewed online, looks like this:

And the main entrance looks like this:

Here’s a close-up of the corner of the right side of the building:

As INSA writes on his blog, “I worked with Stanley’s awesome and iconic lino cut imagery of the destruction of LA, which is the [Atoms For Peace] album cover artwork”.

Commenting on thisiscolossal.com, the artist says, “My challenge was to take two very static items, a beautiful lino-cut and a less beautiful box of a building, and bring them to life. After a week of sweating in the Los Angeles late summer sun re-painting the whole building several times I got there. Animated as a continuous gif it may only live online but some would argue that is where most now live their lives.”

The result is a rather superior paint job for the XL offices, plus some mind-bending gif action in support of the Amok record, which is out in February next year. And INSA is no stranger to bending minds, as some of his previous gif creation testifies.

Artwork from Donwood’s 2006 cover for Thom Yorke’s The Eraser record also adorns the XL London office:

CR in Print
The January issue of Creative Review is all about the Money – well, almost. What do you earn? Is everyone else getting more? Do you charge enough for your work? How much would it cost to set up on your own? Is there a better way of getting paid? These and many more questions are addressed in January’s CR.

But if money’s not your thing, there’s plenty more in the issue: interviews with photographer Alexander James, designer Mirko Borsche and Professor Neville Brody. Plus, Rick Poynor on Anarchy magazine, the influence of the atomic age on comic books, Paul Belford’s art direction column, Daniel Benneworth-Gray’s This Designer’s Life column and Gordon Comstock on the collected memos, letters and assorted writings of legendary adman David Ogilvy.

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