This Is Not Here exhibition flyer. © Yoko Ono

I was trolling through my Delicious looking for some design to blog about when I instead found this—Yoko Ono’s Flickr.* I don’t know why I’m still surprised when I see something like Flickr used by a celebrity/famous person/etc and actually used well. Maybe its just because its wierd to me that Yoko Ono and I can be Flickr contacts. Even though she would have to do nothing for this to happen and I would just have to click a button so there’ s no actual connection.

Yoko Ono: “Yes” at Indica Gallery, 1996. You probably know the story but the piece is still great by itself.

Regardless of whether Ono and myself will be commenting on each other’s family vacations, this is a pretty amazing resource. If there were contact info on the profile page I would say she wouldn’t even need a website. There’s so much to get lost in—her written work (which is such a weird and great use of Flickr), interviews (especially cool are the late-60’s interviews with her and John Lennon with amazing Lennon quotes like “The establishment doesn’t exist. All that exists are old people, and when young people get through and change it, they will be it. They will be the Establishment.”), art and event documentation and cool stuff like John and Yoko visiting Niagara Falls.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono visit Niagara Falls, Canada, June 4 1969. ©Yoko Ono.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/yokoonoofficial/

*Said bookmark that led to this finding—Northcoast Zeitgeist.

Omar Salazor, Melbourne, 2006. Photo ©Huntfilmwork LLC

Skate film legend (Mindfield, The DC Video, Sight Unseen to name a few) and OG Stereo rider (only one part in Tincan Folklore but oh what a part it is) has a new website collecting his film and photo work over the last 15 years. It clearly is meant to function more as a professional portfolio than an archive so its neither deep nor exhaustive but what is there makes it worth a trip—Heath’s “Mindfield” part, Danny Way’s Mega-ramp part from The DC Video and legend of legends John Cardiel from “Sight Unseen” are all there in Quicktime rather than stutter-y streaming video plus some other photo/graphic goodies.

Huntfilmwork.com

Hunt’s currently working on a video for Analog Clothing. Here’s a pretty cool little teaser they did earlier this year.

Image ©2009 Cody Hudson

Cody Hudson is a Chicago-based painter/drawer/assembler who also works as Struggle Inc.—a designer/illustrator/assembler. His signature “soft modernist” style might have been the thing to kick off those giant geometric hand-drawn letterforms we all love so much. After years of a website with a “new site coming soon” sign hanging in the window, he’s finally opened the doors on it. Cody’s been at it awhile so clear out some time in your calendar to soak it in.

All images from struggleinc.com

View more images after the jump

Print for Obama campaign 2008. ©2008 Cody Hudson

T-shirt for Sixpack. ©2007 Cody Hudson

Installation view of “There Ain't No Bottomless Pit Here, This is Fucking Magic, Man, and We're All A Part of it Together” at MCA, Chicago. 2007

Barry McGee for Bodega

Its about time somebody did the wall vinyl thing with more “proprietary” works than the standard ornaments and Victorian silhouettes. Bodega is a new project selling artist designed wall vinyl to beautify your crib. With pieces from long-time faves Barry McGee, Cody Hudson, Mike Leon (including his “Dicks of the World” graphic for Skate Mental!), Hisham Bharoocha, Harsh Patel, Steven Harrington, Darcel and more it looks pretty tempting even when you’re broke with a 9-week old baby.

More images from Cody Hudson, Michael Leon and Harsh Patel after the jump.

Cody Hudson wall vinyl for Bodega

Harsh Patel for Bodega

Michael Leon for Bodega

Note: I am currently hustling to wrap up work on a book about the new minimalist, brutalist and modernist typographies. I have a few entries on designers left to write and since I find blogging less initimdating than Microsoft Word I will be writing these last entries on jnamdevhardisty.com. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. Thanks, Namdev

All images from Hudson-Powell.com

Hello Kitty’s Wizard Mirror for “Kitty’s Secret House” exhibition, Hong Kong.

Hudson-Powell occupy a truly unique place in contemporary design practice (aside from being a partnership of two brother, Luke and Jody Hudson-Powell) being known equally for the elegant print design they craft for restaurants, cultural institutions and fashion and generative digital artworks and applications. Considering the typical chasm between those two practices, it comes as no surprise that the studio do a little of everything in between as well.

Canteen opening invitation

Much has been made of such digital projects as an art-generating program for the Barbican London, children building Rube Goldberg-esque constructions in Nickelodeon TV spots or Hello Kitty’s Wizard Mirror installation (a fun-house mirror kind of project where viewers could see themselves with an ever-changing abstract head) but little has been said about their print work which seems to come from a completely different mind. Their work for Canteen, a restaurant opened with the aim of celebrating British cuisine and design is just that, a celebration of British design with references to the classical typography of 1950’s Penguin book covers and the iconography of shields. The exterior signage set in Johnston Light (a pre-cursor to Gill Sans) is a thing of beauty that feels like its been sitting on the building for the last 60 years while the individual print pieces consitute a kind of elegant Modernism—serif type organized in a grid of rule lines and white space. A shocking contrast to the neon colors and explosive imagery that is in much of their digital work.

Canteen exterior signage

In projects like the fashion newsletter Letters From London and a record sleeve for the band Men-An-Tol (designed in collaboration with Jethro Haynes) a similiar tension between modernism and tradition is at play. Both designs luxuriate in their deep blacks while making use of a fairly agressive modern composition but the use of humanist sans serif typefaces softens the effect. Instead of appearing technical there’s an ambience of some other time in history. One that we don’t know first-hand but are sure it exists. The closet comparison I can make between the brothers’ print work and another designer would be the early work of Peter Saville. Hudson-Powell, like Saville, are masters of creating works that evoke contradictory themes, times and places and it is for this reason that the work is so striking.

Letter From London newsletter

But what to make of the aesthetic schizophrenia of their print and digital work? I believe it is simply a matter of context. There is a clear context for the Canteen work that places it in within a certain historical trajectory, there is not such a trajectory or even a need to acknowledge a trajectory when creating your own software to produce self-generated images or making an installation for a celebration of Hello Kitty. Its context, of course, that grounds their work in graphic design practice while leading to so many interesting end-points. As the brothers say, “if we had just wanted to do any our own projects and work on our own style, we probably would have ended up as artists instead of designers.”*

* Interview in +81 Magazine, Japan. Vol. 40, 2008.

Former Alien Workshop graphics legend Don Pendleton has a new online exhibition of paintings up. Its his signature steez, there’s not a lot to add, is there?

I love this one, though:

Life, Death and Giants

Bob Kronbauer did a documentary about Don a couple of years ago as the first installment of his Little Giants series. I still haven’t seen, I should pick it up.