The Wonderlust Journal

Touchable Sound

Just in time to feed my recent obsession with album covers, this book featuring the best 7-inch covers just hit shelves. With over 300 covers, I think this could entertain me for a while!

In related news, Rolling Stone published a list of the top 25 record stores in the US– check it out here.
[Past posts on album covers here and here]

October 11, 2010

Curated by:
Eliza Coleman

Section:
LustList

Labels:
for the library, Graphic Design, old stuff, records

Yes to All >> Ingredients for Good Style

E. Tautz, whose awesome branding I mentioned back here, is sponsoring an effort to bring back snail mail. As a part of this project, they are asking influential fashion icons and writers to write postcards with quotes or quips or lessons about style. I loved this one above– it’s so true! If you could have all of those things your style would be pretty unstoppable.

PS – Patrick Grant, the guy who bought E. Tautz and it’s parent company Norton & Sons, gives an interesting interview on his own thoughts on style here.

October 11, 2010

Curated by:
Eliza Coleman

Section:
Favorites, Style Files

Labels:
snail mail, style

Must See >> Waiting for Superman

I can’t wait for this film to come out here in Santa Barbara, everyone needs to see it.

Did you know that this generation in the US will be less literate than the previous generation? That’s a frightening statistic, and only one of many frightening realities about our education system presented in this film.

Tonight, Arianna Huffington will be hosting a virtual town hall with Davis Guggenheim, the director (also directed An Inconvenient Truth) and Joel Klein, the chancellor of NYC schools to discuss about the film and education reform in general, and anyone can participate!

It seems like the PR team behind this film is doing a great job garnering attention for their screenings with the director and things like this virtual town hall, and I’m so glad, it deserves as much publicity as it can possibly get!

The virtual town hall will be streamed live here

October 8, 2010

Curated by:
Eliza Coleman

Section:
Must See

Labels:

Classics >> Peter Beard

October 7, 2010

Curated by:
Eliza Coleman

Section:
Arts Visuels

Labels:
Arts Visuels, classics, Photography

Listening To >> Otis Redding

October 7, 2010

Curated by:
Eliza Coleman

Section:
Listening To

Labels:

Today I'm Loving >> Black, White, and Wood

Douglas Friedman

Badgley Mischka (rest of house here)

Meredith Kahn

via Aubrey Road

Roman + Williams

October 6, 2010

Curated by:
Eliza Coleman

Section:
Interiors

Labels:

Bruce Weber for RL

My favorite shot from a new campaign for Ralph Lauren’s new Big Pony fragrance shot by Bruce Weber. See more images from the campaign here.

October 6, 2010

Curated by:
Eliza Coleman

Section:
Style Files

Labels:
Photography, style files

Steve Powers is Back

So glad to see that Steve Powers (a graffiti artist AND Fulbright scholar) is back with a new project. Called “A Love Letter for Syracuse,” it’s a project in conjunction with Syracuse University and local organizations intended to use public art as a means to neighborhood revitalization.

Powers, together with these organizations, used painted phrases to turn three train bridges that are physical and metaphorical dividers between two very disparate neighborhoods into points of unity and conversation-starters.

Here, Steve discusses “why” of the font, the words, etc behind this project…

The bridges that cross Fayette and West Streets were hand made in the 1940s from Carnegie Steel and the toil of countless people. They were built for a Syracuse of great industry and remain faithful to the industrial ideals of utility, dependability and (yes) austerity. In the era the bridges were built, sign painting was a viable profession and like many other professions in Syracuse, went away because a machine replaced hands, heart and head.

Once sign painting as a trade became extinct, it became interesting to me as a medium for art. I learned to paint signs as they had been painted for generations, but instead of the commercial concerns of most signage I used the letters and colors to talk about love and life. The font I employ was prized by sign painters because it is clear and versatile, qualities that serve me well when I am talking about complex things like love. Beyond that, my use of the sign painters craft is about the importance of the hands, heart and head being present in the work I make. The work we are calling on to renew the West side must possess the same qualities.

The words we painted were drawn from the neighborhood. The font was already on one side of the w. Fayette Street bridge. (It was painted for Romano Ford in the 60′s and again in the 70′s) The colors we used are present in every industry, the federal safety colors, blue, red, yellow, green, and especially orange. The gloss black is what the bridge was painted when it was first built. The innovations of the color and the content emerge from the history of the black paint. In doing so, these painted bridges represent what I believe is the future of Syracuse; Taking what has value and remaking it for the future, in a way that respects tradition and innovation.

If you missed his last project, the now-famous “A Love Letter For You,” check it out back here. More about the current project here.

October 5, 2010

Curated by:
Eliza Coleman

Section:
Arts Visuels

Labels:
Arts Visuels, random acts of creativity, Street Art

Wonderment >> Sound Becomes Sculpture

A wonderful little piece of wonderment for your day…

Above, an ad for the new Canon Pixma printer, below, the making of the ad. To create what you see above, they put drops of paint on a membrane over a speaker, and then when they played a sound through the speaker, it made the paint bounce up, and they caught the action at 5,000 frames per second. That’s a lot of frames per second.

The result is ultra-clear slow motion video of tiny bits of gelatinous color exploding into the air.

Canon Pixma: Bringing colour to life from Dentsu London on Vimeo.

The ad itself is wonderfully captivating, and the making-of film, if it’s publicized, will be an interesting combination of the two trends I’ve been talking about on this blog related to advertising… the short film approach (Chanel, GANT) and the “real people” approach (Tod’s by Eliot Erwitt and Cole Haan by the Selby), where the photographer him/herself is known and hyped (not just a tiny credit somewhere), and the subjects are real people who use the product (not actors) and are identified. In this case, it’s not exactly the first or the second, but still carries the themes of a well-crafted story and a behind-the-scenes, “we’re not a nameless, faceless corporation” tone. Interesting here that they even reveal who the advertising agency behind the project was…

[By Dentsu London]