Charley Harper: An Illustrated Life

Birds, insects, monkeys, and 12.6 pounds of design genius.

If you think of nature illustration as the sterile visuals of a science book, you haven’t seen the work of Charlie Harper. The iconic American modernist, famous for his spunky stylized wildlife illustrations, spent more than six decades adorning books and posters with his highly distinctive artwork.

In 2001, New York based designer Todd Oldham — a legend in his own right — rediscovered Charley’s work and decided to comb through his ample archive, collaborating closely with Harper to curate, edit and design a book that captures the iconic style of the great master. When Charley passed away in 2007 at the age of 84, Oldham went on to publish Charley Harper: An Illustrated Life — a magnificent coffee table tome full of illustrations in Harper’s unique self-described “minimal realism.”

The book is massive tribute to Harper’s work — literally. At 12.6 pounds, the 424-page A3 monster is a dramatic, visually gripping antidote to today’s nano-culture. It’s also a lovely reminder that — as much as we love the interwebs — experiencing artwork on the screen is just never quite the same as the rich, lush, tactile glory of perfect print.

Charley Harper: An Illustrated Life comes as a must-have for the serious design aficionado — so snag it for your own library, or as a certain-to-floor gift for a visually passionate other.

via Melexodus

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Remastered, Reinvented, Reimagined: Record Club

What Iceland, Andy Warhol, and a dying goose have in common.

Creativity is often the art of reinvention — combining known ideas in novel ways, putting a new spin on something old, pushing the exiting to a new frontier. Add an element of creative collaboration, and it becomes pure genius. And that’s exactly what music wunderkind Beck does in his latest project, Record Club.

This summer, Beck took the legendary Velvet Underground & Nico album (yes, that one…) and decided to invite a few friends — from actor Giovanni Ribisi to recording engineer and producer Nigel Godrich — to record cover versions of the full album in a single day.

The tracks, accompanied by trippy, minimalist video remixes of the studio sessions, are then posted on the Record Club website in daily installments.

Our favorite is the cover of “Run, Run, Run,” where the wonderful Icelandic up-and-comer Throunn Magnusdottir gives Nico a run for the money in a brilliant duet with Beck himself.

Another gem is the dreamy cover of the iconic “Sunday Morning,” both whimsically mellow and reverberating with quiet exuberance. And for “Venus In Furs“, arguably the first “goth” song ever recorded, they mustered an appropriately kinky cover involving a sitar and a flute bought on the street in Japan, fondly referred to as “the dying goose.”

Explore Record Club and appreciate the potent cocktail of some of today’s most powerful culture-drivers — retro revival, creative collaboration and the evolution of music production and distribution beyond record labels.

via Very Short List

Data Visualization Spotlight: In The Air

Carbon monoxide, spraying façades, and the art of seeing the invisible.

What an odd beast the air is — it slides below our sensory awareness, yet it’s the source of all life. But what if you could “see” the air and how it interacts with the rest of our environment?

That’s what In The Air, a fascinating visualization project, aims to answer by making visible the microscopic and invisible agents of Madrid’s air — gases, particles, pollen, disease carriers — and exploring how they interact with each other and the rest of the city.

The project includes a spectacular digital tool, which lets you play with and data-cross the various elements of the air in a way that makes behavioral patterns emerge.

The resulting data get fed into a physical prototype called a diffuse façade — an installation of colored water vapor diffusers informing passersby of real-time air contaminant levels. It doubles as a microclimate management tool, lowering the temperature in the summer and humidifying the air in the winter.

In The Air comes from Madrid’s Medialab-Prado and was developed for last year’s Visualizar seminar.

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