Artist Spotlight: Adrian Johnson

Because nothing non-awesome ever came from the U.K.

We’re suckers for awesome illustration. So we dig U.K. artist Adrian Johnson, whose work spans anything from editorial stuff for iconic publications like The Guardian, GQ and The Monocle, to advertising for big-timers like Vodafone and Canon, to animation for a number of top ad agencies, plus a ton of other killer artwork for clients like Scion, Computer Arts and 2K by Gingham.

Some of our favorites: The instant point made in Brand Whore for adidas / British Airways Business Life, the social commentary of Relocate for The Guardian, the category-defying Small Business Trip for MasterCard, the simple wit of Memories Are Our Fuel for Scion / Giant Robot, and the sheer awesomeness of Coolest. Fact. for 2K by Gingham.

via design:related

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New York, New York

We’re back — with gifts from the Jersey mob, 33 reasons why birthdays are overrated, and music legends who can bend power-coated steel.

That’s right, we’re back — with a spankin’ new site domain. (Cue in glance at browser’s URL field.) And because right now we’re in the most un-New-York-like place in the world — Sofia, Bulgaria — we’re focusing on the random, smart, bizarre stuff that makes New York New York. Welcome to the New York, New York issue.

JERSEY MOB SAYS “THANKS”

Let’s face it, this is the age of extreme consumerism. We define ourselves by what we buy, eat, watch, and otherwise consume. And now, we can define ourselves by the stuff leftover from our consumption.

New York-based artist Justin Gignac is selling fresh-picked NYC garbage. That’s right, junk. He scours the streets of the world’s most conspicuous-consumption-driven city for leftovers — metro cards, plastic cups, cigarette buds, newspaper, receipts, gum wrappers, you name it — then carefully arranges them in small (non-leaky, non-smelly) plastic cubes, each unlike any other.

For homesick New Yorkers and randomness-seeking hipsters alike, the cubes are anything from a sentimental piece of home to an artsy-fartsy piece of self-expression. (For us, they’re just garbage-filled plastic boxes, but we dig the idea nonetheless.)

The cubes even come in special limited-edition varieties: you can reminisce with junk from the last opening day at Yankee Stadium, New Years’ Eve ’08 at Times Square, and the final day at Shea.

Here’s to trashy taste.

BETTER THAN A CHAMPAGNE TOAST

And if you just realized you take garbage for granted, just wait until we consider tap water. Sure, NYC’s may not be the finest, but it’s drinkable — which is more than what a huge chunk of the world can claim. That’s why New Yorker Scott Harrison founded Charity Water, a — you guessed it — charity aiming to bring clean drinking water to people in the developing world.

The nonprofit was Scott’s version of a midlife crisis — after trading in his glitzy life as an NYC nightclub and fashion promoter for a humanitarian gig in West Africa, he came to appreciate the far-reaching (and often underestimated by the priviliged) power of driniking water, from basic convenience to serious disease prevention.

This week, Scott turns 33, so he’s out on a month-long birthday campaign: he launched Boring September, an effort to build 333 drinking wells in 33 villages across Ethiopia.

The idea: Scott is asking everyone born in September to do away with birthday presents and ask their friends and family for $33 donations instead. The goal is to raise $1.5 million for the 333 wells, which will greatly improve 150,000 people’s health and quality of life.

The best part: a few do-good companies are supporting the campaign and matching donations, making our regular contributions twice as powerful. Which is good news, since 1,100 regular Virgos and Libras have joined the movement so far — each contirbutor gets an individual birthday page, where friends can donate in their name.

So if you’re a water-spoiled September baby, suck it up and ask your mom not to give you that inevitable sweater you’ll never wear anyway — poor people score drinking water, you score one less dent in your street cred courtesy of mom.

BYRNE THE COMPETITION

Ok, ok, so we can’t get enough of David Byrne these days. So sue us. But the Renaissance man just keeps churning out the good stuff.

His latest: design work for New York’s CityRacks Design Competition. Besides submitting 9 designs of his own — among them “The Coffee Cup” in Brooklyn, “The Hipster” in Williamsburg, shaped like an electric guitar, and “The MoMA” right outside the eponymous museum — he was also recruited to be on the jury. (Come on now, fairness is overrated.)

Byrne, a die-hard cyclist himself, got down with the powder-coated steel like a pro, but didn’t make it as a finalist in the competition. Granted, some of those top designs are mad cool — we love Andrew Lang and Harry Dobbs’ “I heart NY” and the Kubrick-like geometric sculptures by Stephan Jaklitsch Architects.

Sure beats the way we do it in Philly.

via PSFK

Artist Spotlight: Alice Wang

What Isaac Asimov has to do with your body image and why your friends would rather you got 8 hours of sleep.

Every once in a while, we come across an artist so innovative and conceptually brilliant that we have the compulsion to stalk them. This, however, gets kinda hard if they’re halfway across the world, which in most cases they are. So we just spotlight them instead.

Today, we take a stalker’s stare at Alice Wang, a Taipei-born, London-educated, is-gonna-be-big-take-our-word-for-it product designer. We’re obsessed with Alice because her work isn’t just an aesthetic: it’s informed and inspired by genuine insight into human behavior, cultural taboos and sociological patterns. In other words, the Brain Pickings mission materialized.

Her Audio Sticks project explores how digitization will change our complex relationship with music. In Pet Plus, Alice projects the way we treat our pets as human surrogates onto products like the pet wineglass set that live in the extremities of the human-pet relationship.

She looks at the complex issue of body image through the prism of Asimov’s First Law — the idea that artificial intelligence can never harm a human — and the weight we place on that number on the bathroom scale.

Three different scales challenge the absolutism with which we think about body image.

White lies allows you to manipulate the weight reading depending on where you stand on the scale’s surface. Half-truth shows the weight reading to your friend or partner, who can choose the level of truthiness in relaying the number to you. Open secrets texts your weight reading to a friend’s mobile phone, binding said friend to share the results next time the two of you hang out. (“Hey, Anna, you brought suntan lotion, right? Oh and by the way, you’ve gained 5 pounds.”)

And then there’s the tyrant alarm clock. It hijacks your phone and starts randomly dialing one of your contacts every three minutes until you get out of bed and make it stop before your social circle has shrunk to the size of a sleeping pill.

Wang’s work is sometimes serious, sometimes tongue-in-cheeck, and always thoughtful. Just the way we like it.