Hasta La Ideas

We’ve teamed up with London restaurant Canteen to offer our readers the chance to win one of five copies of Great British Food – the eatery’s first collection of British recipes. (more…)

Now available in book format, “Obsessive Consumption: What Did You Buy Today?” is artist Kate Bingaman-Burt’s winsomely self-conscious take on transparency and consumer culture. Beginning in 2002, in the face of growing credit card debt, Bingaman-Burt resolved to give new meaning to the term “retail therapy” by documenting her daily purchases, first with photographs and then with ink drawings.

The book chronicles three years of daily purchases, beginning on 5 February 2006. From the mundane (Tootsie Roll candies, pet food, Aleve pain reliever) to the more memorable (an iPhone, wedding bands, a dog), each image lends a permanence to the sometimes fleeting fulfillment that comes from the experience of buying something. To make her commentary—and spending patterns—an even more lasting and public record, Bingaman-Burt also includes monthly hand-copied credit card statements within the pages of the book.

Bingaman-Burt, who is an assistant professor of graphic design at Portland State University continues to catalog and post her daily purchases, revealing an obsessive but lighthearted compulsion that doesn’t end with her book’s publication. Her signature spare, hand-drawn illustrations can also be seen in the pages of ReadyMade magazine, as well as the craft-focused book, “Handmade Nation: The Rise of DIY, Art, Craft and Design.”

Buy Obsessive Consumption online at Amazon, Powell’s, or directly through Bingaman-Burt’s website, where she’s offering a limited-edition daily drawing and book package for $30.

Whether designing graphics for Patagonia tees or an album cover, artist Jason Munn keeps it consistently simple with images evoking the spirit of the message while maintaining their own distinct charm. His new limited edition book “The Small Stakes” (named for his studio) shows off his skills as a thoughtful and conceptual poster designer, including over 150 of his works.

Included in the SFMoMA collection (where his book sold out in an hour at the recent signing), the Oakland-based illustrator has admirers the world over, creating works for magazines from ReadyMade to Wired and enlisted by almost every in-demand band to personify their album with one of his minimalist illustrations.

The book of mini music posters, printed on wood-free paper using a full six-color process, sells from San Francisco’s Chronicle Books or online from The Small Stakes for $25.

Beautiful/Decay‘s new book “The Underdogs” shows off the talents of the hundreds of artists the collective collaborated with, and is the third in their limited edition series.

The creative powerhouse has made its mark as a revolutionary fashion and arts supporter with the thrice-yearly books, merchandise and website. “The Underdogs” shows off the best of Beautiful/Decay’s aesthetic in the artworks, including a skull filled with balloon creatures and extraterrestrial portraits.

To mark the debut of this beautifully designed volume, Cool Hunting and Beautiful/Decay are giving away a copy of the book to one lucky reader. To enter, tweet @coolhunting why you need this book. We’ll pick a winner Wednesday, 14 April 2010 before midnight. “The Underdogs” will also be available from the Beautiful/Decay online store
at $40 for a year’s subscription, or check their website for stockists in the U.S. and Germany.

Thanks to our randomly stumbling across this story in Peoria, Illinois’ local paper, the JournalStar, this weekend, now on our must-read list is Lance Factor‘s new book Chapel in the Sky: Knox College’s Old Main and Its Masonic Architect. As best we can describe it, the books sounds like The DaVinci Code for the architecture set, telling the story of Factor’s discovery that the Illinois’ college’s centerpiece building, home to one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, was designed by a Freemason-connected Swedish architect who secretly built it using Masonic principals despite the fact that the college was rabidly anti-Masonic (this was all in the mid-1800s, so that explains why people would have strong Masonic leanings one way or the other). Factor, a professor at the college, had noticed how odd the building’s architecture was, like “why there were precise triangular grids in the transoms above doors” and finally headed out to crack the code. Everything about the book/story sounds fantastic, and as soon as we’re done typing these words, we’re going to order our copy. And you should too. If it’s an indication of how good it is, although the book is being published through the small Northern Illinois University Press, it’s been so wildly popular locally that it almost immediately went into a second printing as soon as it was released.

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