The designers behind Field Notes, the small-run high-quality notebook start-up, often look to the past for design ideas. For their first line of notebooks, they collected dozens of vintage farmers' pocket memo pads and mined them for ideas about typography, colors, and even imagery.
For its latest line, the company dropped the agricultural aesthetic and took design cues from the iconography and classic look of vintage road atlases and travel memo pads. Each notebook comes with 48 "looseleaf blue" lined pages, and is finished with a copper staple on the spine. They appropriately titled the throwback collection "America The Beautiful."
The "America The Beautiful" series is for sale in Field Notes' online shop, where you can also click through an awesome notebook archive.
Before committing full-time to photography, Ed Freeman's day job was managing the Beatles' final tour. After a few other musical odd-jobs, which include contributing guitar arrangements to Carly Simon and Don McLean records, Freeman left the music industry and completely switched to fine art and commercial photography. His latest collection, Desert Reality, captures the remaining buildings from the once-booming Southern California desert cities around the Salton Sea, not far from the Mexican border. [via Ignant]
The group show at the Gestalten space in Berlin this month is a celebration of the new infusion of energy we're seeing in print, yes, print publication. It seems, perhaps in light of the Internet content explosion, that designers and publishers have gotten more inventive and creative with print. Gestalten thinks we've entered a new era in print publishing. The "Fully Booked" show celebrates the tactile experience of print and distinctiveness of design, materials, and technique. The show is broken up into roles that print can play: The Storyteller, The Teacher, The Collector, and so on. Featured designers among the 200 include Stefan Sagmeister, David Pearson, L2M3, Made Thought, and many more. Luckily for those that can't make it to Berlin, Gestalten has published Fully Booked: Ink on Paper, 272 pages of print design thrills.
Fully Booked is available at Gestalten.com
Decades back, home stereos were often proudly housed in handsome wood cabinets that kept power plugs out of sight, and often boasted their own built-in speakers. The new series from Gesa Hansen plays off those populist mid-century pieces, also keeps the wires under wraps, and offers high fidelity, all on a contemporary scale. The collaboration between The Hansen Family and Tivoli Audio offers two modern sound solutions for the home audio enthusiast. The first is the Radio Rack, a smaller piece in dark wood that doubles as a magazine display rack, while the second, the Sound Sideboard, is a substantial cabinet in sustainable wood with a special hinged back to conceal wires and room for two speakers. We'd have 'em both, if we could.
Obscure Beatles imports, charming kitschy travel albums, and dozens of records about food are among the infinite categories of album covers found on the LP Cover Lover Tumblr. But the site isn't all jokes. For every cringeworthy novelty sleeve, there's another with gorgeous vintage typography, or a bold design we wouldn't mind seeing on a new release. True to Tumblr form, the site also posts iconic images from rock history involving album covers, including Bruce Springsteen admiring Born to Run in a record store window, and snapshots from the original manufacturing of Rubber Soul.
Follow LP Cover Lover on Tumblr and, like the last century of album sleeves, sometimes it's NSFW.
The black and white composition of the new "Music Project" campaign from Saint Laurent Paris shouldn't come as a surprise. The series was conceived and shot by Saint Laurent's new creative director Hedi Slimane, who shot black and white portraits of rock stars in his Rock Diaries. The clothes for the campaign were chosen in collaboration with the artists and include selections from the Saint Laurent archives, as well as this year's collections. In addition to dressing musicians, Saint Laurent has also commissioned new works from Daft Punk and San Francisco garage buddies Ty Segall and Thee Oh Sees for their runway shows.
The "Next Stop" design competition seeks to find the designer of Chicago's forthcoming Bus Rapid Transit system. The project has a simple mission statement: "This single-stage international design ideas competition is intended to be a catalyst for iconic, sustainable, and functional design for Chicago’s planned BRT system."
Chicago plans to expand its BRT from a pilot project to service running on its Central Corridor and possibly the Western-Ashland corridor.
In order to make sure a design can be adapted to any station in the city, organizers have specified that each proposal must have plans for three different locations: Downtown near State and Madison, Bucktown-Logan Square at the Western Avenue Blue Line L stop, and Pilsen near 18th and Ashland. All entries are due May 13 at noon.
Read the competition brief at the Chicago Architectural Club.
We're big fans of Unis here in the Nothing Major offices and are willing to consider that the new Davis Pants from Unis might be the spring pants for which we've been looking. Yes, they're pleated—and we shudder at the pleats we wore in our youth— but pleats are okay this year, especially in a slimmer pant. Cut and sewn in the USA from Italian cotton twill they're made to last and make you look good doing it. They're slim, as we said, with a button fly and flap pockets. In other words, ready for the office, outdoor drinks after work, and a jaunt over to a music festival.
Unis Davis Pants are available online from Unis and in Unis boutiques.
Look for more in-depth coverage on Unis soon in the Nothing Major journal.
To give you an idea of how close Opening Ceremony's new Spring Breakers collection is to the actual wardrobe in the film, the new line includes a ski mask, a hoodie with "DTF" printed on the back, and a basketball jersey bearing the name Alien. In addition to about a dozen other basketball jerseys, there are plenty of items for casual fans too, like neon bikinis, a few unicorn bandanas, and a "Harmony" friendship bracelet. The look book was shot by the official on-set photographer for the film, Annabel Mehran. [via ThinkContra]
Opening Ceremony's online store has all your tank top needs under control.
The documentary film format has been good to rock music's great unknowns in recent years. Witness Searching for Sugar Man's 2012 Oscar.
The story of Detroit proto-punk band Death finally gets its due in A Band Called Death, a documentary by Mark Covino and Jeff Howlett on the '70s-era trio formed by the Hackney brothers. The band was rediscovered in recent years via rare vinyl blogs and eventually through reissues on the Chicago Drag City label. The doc takes us through this process and delves into the history of the band, which recorded high-energy Motor City-style rock on a 1974 demo table that sounds as punk and unhinged as what was later unleashed by the Sex Pistols and Bad Brains. They turned down a contract from Clive Davis, apparently, which required them to change their name and, later, Death members settled into a gig as a popular reggae band in Burlington, Vermont. They have since reunited for tours.
Presently, the film is touring small festivals—it debuted at 2012's Los Angeles Film Festival.
