Hasta La Ideas

Graphic designer Mat Cook has created a striking ASCII art-style record sleeve for electronic DJ Howie B’s new album Down With the Dawn.

The album is Howie B’s first in five years and the inaugural release from his new record label, HB Recordings. Cook has designed the album’s cover using ASCII code manipulated in Photoshop and Quark, and a website mimicking monochrome monitor displays from the 1970s and 80s.

Cook says the album art is both a “graphic gag celebrating…a master of the electronic returning” and a visual reflection of Howie B’s music, which he creates using old electronic instruments and new production equipment.

While the artwork features ASCII (a coding system used in the early days of computing when data was input manually using punch cards) it was generated by a modern programme and corrupted in Photoshop to create a portrait of the DJ that features hidden codes and symbols, says Cook.

The first single release from the album, Frankie’s City, also features ASCII style graphics:

And the cover of follow up single Night Nice features what looks at first glance like randomly generated code, but in fact relays the story of the song: different times of night and a series of heart symbols tell the story of the track’s subject, a man who goes out, gets drunk and has a one night stand.

Subsequent releases will feature more modern coding styles, reflecting the development of computer code and technology, and all will feature hidden details and phrases, says Cook.

“I’ve always been a big fan of making [record sleeves] quite dense – on the top level you see a face but when you look closer, you reveal different narratives, phrases and lyrics,” he adds. “Hopefully, it captures the ethos of the record, which has a retro feel, but could only have been created using today’s equipment.”

Down with the Dawn is released in April – see howieb.com for details.

Pour un projet d’études, l’illustrateur Vivian Loh a conçu un alphabet original et amusant en hommage à l’icône pop qu’incarne Beyoncé. Les lettres de l’alphabet se forment d’elles-mêmes à partir des poses contorsionnistes de Beyoncé dans ses clips. L’alphabet complet est disponible dans la suite.

Since September last year, an anonymous duo at Ohio’s Columbus College of Art and Design has been transforming chalk boards into typographic artworks under the cover of darkness. We spoke to the pair, known as Dangerdust, about their creative acts of campus vandalism…

Both members of Dangerdust study advertising and graphic design at CCAD. Each week, the students work through the night to decorate a black board with an inspirational quote about life, design or creativity. Those quoted so far include Nelson Mandela, Stefan Sagmeister and Ellen Lupton, and Dangerdust often draw detailed portraits of the speakers alongside their words of wisdom.

The project started as a way to relax in between course work, but Dangerdust’s art has since been viewed more than 9,000 times on Behance and the pair plan to release a new design each week for the rest of the school year.

“Working on class assignments all year can become tiring, and this was an opportunity to create work just for the fun of it,” they say. “We wanted to get away from the computer and do something that made us feel physically tired at the end of the day. We had never used chalk as a medium before we started…it was just something that was accessible, cheap and if we messed up we could always wipe away,” they add.

Each board takes between four and eleven hours to complete and requires careful planning and sketching, say Dangerdust.”Our process usually starts the night before. We spend a long time agreeing what quote we want to use. After that, we design the board by hand and eventually on the computer. [Then] we sneak into school…wipe last week’s board off and print any references we need. We grid it out, sketch it out and slowly build up the chalk, and after we think we’ve got it, we’ll wheel it out and spend a good thirty minutes squinting at it from all angles until we’re sure we’re done,” they explain.

While some might feel sad about having to wipe away hours of hard work, Dangerdust say starting anew each week is refreshing. “We love to see what we can do next. What’s really fun is that while we are erasing the board, sometimes we can see shadows of chalk from a totally different one, [which] gives the board more meaning to us.”

It’s a long and tiring process, but Dangerdust say creating each board is cathartic – and both students say the response to their designs around campus has been “wonderful”.

“We’ve always loved to work with our hands…it gives us great satisfaction to manipulate something as ordinary as a stick of chalk into something extraordinary.”

See the full set of designs here.

Le designer et illustrateur anglais Chris LaBrooy, dont nous avons déjà parlé sur Fubiz avec le projet Auto Aerobics, a été sollicité par Transport for London pour créer des affiches de publicité. Le projet a été conçu avec l’agence M&C Saatchi basée à Londres, sous la direction artistique de Will Bates.

Inspired by toys and board games from their childhood, directing duo Dent De Cuir have produced a musical Gif site playing animations timed to a custom track by French DJ SebastiAn.

An odd but highly entertaining site, PLAY displays a sequence of 17 Gifs designed to match SebastiAn’s 48-second composition.

Each features a cover image or advert for a classic game or toy brought to life with hand drawn animations: Hungry Hippos become man-eating Angry Hippos and GI Joe, a soldier blasting hearts and rainbows. Guessing game Guess Who has also been given a sinister makeover, and Battleships is now a picture of friendship.

Dent de Cuir – Jean-Philippe Chartrand and Benjamin Mege – came up with the idea after being commissioned by fashion trade show Who’s Next to create a video about the theme of this year’s show, toys.

“We decided to approach it as a mini music video. We collaborated with SebastiAn and asked him to create a custom track based on sound samples from toys. On completion, however, we felt like [it] wasn’t properly suited to that media, and came up with the idea of an interactive web platform with musical Gif sequences,” they say.

SebastiAn was given “full creative freedom” to produce the track and after receiving the final edit, Chartrand and Mege selected visuals and created animations based on the sounds and toys sampled.

The pair have directed several music videos for electronic acts, including Evil Twin for Modeselektor which made the official selection at last year’s SXSW festival and one for electronic duo Neosignal featuring Barbie dolls and Star Wars figurines.

They met while working as graphic designers and describe their process as a mix of “hands-on creativity and experimentation.”

“We are very inspired by popular culture…being both kids from the eighties, it was a treat for us to go back to our childhood toys chests and have a second thought about these objects we were raised with,” they add.