John Cleese on creativity

Definitely well worth watching!

Beautiful Copperplate Logos

Late 19th century copperplate prints have always been a fascination for me, the extreme attention to detail is just incomprehensible to me and creates a very distinctive and powerful aesthetic.

This link will take you to a BibliOdyssey page filled to the brim with high resolution scans of finely crafted logotype prints from this era. Revel!


(Detail from just below the capital A in the above picture:)

Victorian Infographics

Ah, the beauty! This warms my heart and makes me happy. :) Victorian Infographics on BibliOdyssey.





(Via BoingBoing)

Harry Clarke

Irish illustrator and stained glass artist Harry Clarke (1889-1931) has fascinated me ever since I first happened upon his work in a beautiful edition of Edgar Allan Poe's "Tales of Mystery and Imagination". He's like an Aubrey Beardsley with ten times the craft, displaying almost inhuman skills for detail and composition.

You'll find lots of high-quality scans of his work HERE. Personally, I like his monochrome works the best. It's one thing to look at the image as a whole, but when you zoom in and start going over the details, you can get lost for hours and hours. Simply amazing.

Craft: Brandt Brauer Frick

I totally stumbled upon this amazing video of the German trio Brandt Brauer Frick. Paul Frick (the gentleman with the moustache and spectacles) is not only a house/electronica artist, but also a composer of contemporary classical music. He has, for instance, written an amazing piece for harp, percussion and slide projector, which can be heard (and seen) here. It is because of his composition work that I stumbled upon this Brandt Brauer Frick clip.

What really baffles me about this video is that this -- if I understand it correctly -- is totally indie, totally underground. And should be totally low budget. But the craft and technique displayed in this video -- apparently (co-)directed by one of the members of the music trio itself -- is so unbelievably well done that I don't know whether to laugh or cry. It's unbelievable. Is this the result of an enormously huge budget and a big top notch crew, or the result of the democratization of cheap HD-technology in the hands of a couple of extremely talented and savvy individuals? I just don't know!

Check it out in HD, if your computer specs allow you to.