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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Mapping Big Ideas: BIGVIZ

200 pages of world-changing thinking, or what a sheep and a dog have to do with universal compassion.

When two of our favorite ideas — TED and data visualization — converge, it’s a beautiful thing. Naturally, we’re all over BIGVIZ — an ambitious effort by the fine folks at Autodesk, who took it upon themselves to visualize the entire 2008 TED conference.

BIGVIZ is the work of visual cartographers David Sibbet and Kevin Richards, who created over 700 spontaneous sketches in real time at TED. The 200-page PDF book — a free download — visually captures the gist of each speaker’s talk, mapping out the broader themes and the connections between them.

You’ll also find a number of fascinating charts and graphs on information patterns, some rather humorous illustrations of memorable TED moments, and even a few blank pages for you to sketch whatever ideas, connections or insights the talks may have sparked in you.

Go behind the scenes with the Autodesk team as they create the visualizations on-site, using multi-touch technology to interact with the sketches and view them as a history timeline or an interactive digital corkboard. Then, download BIGVIZ and enjoy.

And in case you’re wondering just why this visualization model works, watch information designer Tom Wujec’s excellent short TED talk about the 3 ways the brain creates meaning out of words, images, feelings, connections.

Illustration Spotlight: Plan 9.001

The 1′s and 0′s of home, or what the Olsen twins have to do with John Locke and God.

Every once in a while we stumble across something we don’t quite get, but can tell is brilliant. Case in point: The Plan 9.001 Flickr set from an artist by the cryptic name of 9000.

Full of wondrous, beautifully art directed charts, graphs, diagrams and other fascinations that capture the human condition, the illustrations are part poetry, part art direction, part homage to geek culture — and all genius.

Most of the images are left to exist in their self-contained reality, with no caption or explanation, inviting you to make sense of them ever which way you wish.

And some are brimming with keen cultural commentary, oozing both from the images themselves and from the quotes accompanying — mismatched at first glance, like this odd psalm that we had to Google-translate, but deeply profound in context.

Indeed, there’s a certain preoccupation with the God — a quest for divinity in the godless, lonesome, conflicted world the artist seems to inhabit. Or, you know, it’s just a mockery thereof.

And while we’re not quite sure what to make of it it all, we urge you to explore the Plan 9.001 set and the rest of 9000′s rather diverse but uniformly bizarre body of work — if for no other reason than that it has intrigued us more than anything we’ve come across in a long, long time.

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