PROBLEM: WALLETS CAN BE CHEAP AND ANONYMOUS.

For me, wallets have always been about function over form. I have to take my wallet out of its resting place so many separate times in a day, that it’s got to hold everything perfectly and just plain work. Most wallets do this, to a degree—but do they do it for long?

Not really. If you’re the type that can’t buy an expensive wallet because you know you’ll be sitting on it, and moving your rear end in and out of various chairs all day, visiting god knows what sorts of stresses and strains on this little leather thing that contains much of your life—you know what a disintegrating wallet looks like. Leather that no longer seems leather, mysterious pockets that weren’t there a few weeks ago suddenly appearing as the material becomes shredded, torn; you’re likely destined to go through a ton of wallets in your lifetime.

PROBLEM: THEY CAN ALSO BE OVERPRICED AND EXCLUSIVE.

Or are you the cardinal opposite, the wallet connoisseur? Have you always splashed out for a top quality purchase, genuine, beautiful leather, something you can be proud of every time you pull it out of your pocket? If so, you’ve probably paid a damn lot for these things, and either way, used them into oblivion.

PROBLEM: WALLETS AREN’T SO INTERESTING.

While there are a ton of wallets out there, both cheap as all hell and expensive as some other, richer part of hell, most wallets follow the same form. A simple fold, wide enough that each side can hold various debit and credit cards, and the entire span will take your money and papers and put a nice crease right in the middle.

If you’re lucky—or not—your wallet might contain a little pocket for change, which, you will know if you routinely use it, changes shape depending on how many little coins you’re carrying around. Not always fun to have poking into one of your two cheeks.

PROBLEM: THE EUROPEAN-STYLE MEN’S BAG ISN’T REALLY A WALLET, EITHER.

So, is there a solution, a way out of this imaginary problem that I’ve sorta created here? Sure, there are plenty: abandon the wallet and use a sort of bag. If you’re in Europe and need to feel safe-in-numbers when it comes to fashion, you’re in luck, as plenty of people carry these around here, and there are tons of good models to choose from. If you can choose a kind of shoulder/purse/bag/pouch well and choose it with style, you’re set. This opens up a whole new world of accessorizing to you.

But what if you can’t really make that leap? What if you just want to get a damn good looking wallet, one that stands out and is strongly designed, but still functions, looks, and seems like the familiar wallet form you’ve been using your whole life? What’s out there?

PROBLEM: WALLETS DON’T LEND THEMSELVES EASILY TO FRESH, CONTEMPORARY DESIGN.

Not much. There are chain wallets, super-thick wallets, super-thin, minimalist wallets, wallets branded with various comic book characters that just don’t put in the effort, but there aren’t that many interesting wallets around. Sure, you might stumble upon a few fantastic specimens here or there, but most likely they’ll be one-offs, some kind of limited edition from a big designer that is so overpriced it’d be a shame to use it as a regular wallet.

And these are few and far between—you’re far more likely to find a $200 t-shirt done by an expensive designer’s hand, or even a designer canvas tote bag than you are to find a kick-ass wallet.

AND SO, A SOLUTION.

As a fun and exciting answer to all of these problems, I present Poketo. Their slogan: Art for your everyday. That’s exactly it, too: they make wallets that you can use as your everyday wallet, but they’re interesting enough that you can pull them out and simply admire them for their design, too.

SEE, WALLETS CAN BE AS NUMEROUS AND EXCHANGEABLE AS PURSES!

Besides just some great design work, in which Poketo have brought together a whole stable of illustrators and artists to do fantastic limited edition wallets, Poketo have also suggested a kind of revolutionary idea in their ‘surprise packs’. That’s the notion that you can have more than one wallet on the go, that the wallet should be enough of a minimalistic venture that you can switch the entire thing over to another one, just like many females cycle through various purses/handbags and their respective contents.

They do this by not giving you the option of fattening up the wallet too much—its design constricts you into eliminating every kind of card and addition you aren’t going to be using on a daily basis. And the great thing is that 10 of these wallets will only set you back $100. Ten wallets!

AND THERE ARE DOZENS OF NEW MODELS COMING OUT ALL THE TIME.

They’re also constantly producing new wallets from new designers, who are doing these designs freelance. This means the art is both recognizable if you follow illustration in any way, and wildly varied and exciting. Their site is overflowing with great designs.

The construction of the wallet itself is what allows Poketo to do this. It’s not a custom-crafted piece of leather, rather just a nice print, inserted into a piece of plastic, and molded into the form of a foldable wallet. Nothing fancy, no heavy custom printing or stitching jobs here. But it gives the company great creative license in the amount of models they can feature. It’s unlikely you’ll ever see wallets as varied as this, even if they all have the same external shell.

LIMITED EDITIONS DON’T NEED TO SIGNIFY RIDICULOUS PRICES.

Thankfully Poketo isn’t really overcharging for their product, but continues to produce limited editions, which is a concept that I absolutely cannot get enough of: the idea that limited editions don’t need to be expensive. They can be limited, sure, and once they’re off the market you can sell them for whatever the hell you want, but as these wallets keep coming out, they’re gonna keep costing $20 and nothing more.

THUS, POKETO IS GOOD.

And there you have it. Wallets that aren’t your father’s fine-crafted leather, but are instead something closer to a great stream of well-designed t-shirts: you change them up infinitely, they keep coming out, they look great, and they don’t cost that much.

Sure, they aren’t the most well-put-together things in the world, but they signify a big change. Now, pulling out your wallet isn’t just fun because you’re gonna spend some money—you get to stare at it, too.

I was recently turned on to the absolutely killer commercial photography of Mitchell Feinberg. An American working in both Paris and New York, he does some of the best product photography around. Check out these examples.

I struggled to find my favourite examples from his site for this article, as there were tons of them. The most striking ones are these recent pieces of work for Muse Magazine, which are technically advertisements or product photography, for products that have been scultuped out of a kind of mold. It’s as though their imprint was left perfectly inside drying cement, only dozens of times more detailed.

The polo shirt is an especially striking example, and each one from this series gives a strangely satisfying emboss to these handbags, watches, and wallets. I love the fact that each product is entirely drained of colour and essential shape, and the photo is as much about the cracked texture and broken surface of the environment around the indent as it is about the prouduct being represented.

Here’s something I never thought I’d be stunned by: makeup and cosmetics photography. Feinberg makes this stuff look luxurious and entirely alien. Flipping through a fashion magazine, stuff like this might get missed, but when seen as part of his impressive portfolio, it’s some beautiful work.

This red/blue combination is especially beautiful–he’s turned lipstick and… that blue thing (what kind of makeup is that, anyway? I’m clueless) into what looks like an unconventional homage to abstract painting.

And then there’s his food photography, which I’m still unsure about. He approaches it with the same eye he lends to the cosmetics, which means much of it looks alien and interesting, and hits you with a fresh burst of the unexpected. That’s good, but does it make me want to eat what he’s shooting? Not exactly, but I don’t think that one set of criteria is all that matters. A lot of this work is for the New York Times Magazine, which publishes some of the best food writers in the country, and they’re not always writing about how delicious and fun it is to eat things.

For some reason the aesthetics of Feinberg’s embossed series made me think of this model by Hans Op De Beeck that I stumbled upon recently, which is just a rapid-prototyped (unless it’s entirely computer-generated–I can’t tell) model of a modernist, Le Corbusier-styled apartment flat, only with additional touches like satellite dishes on every balcony and the first signs of decay. It occupies the space between real life and Corbusier’s blueprints: a pristine white model of what his famous designs eventually became. De Beeck calls it a “silent witness to the crumbling of modern thought.” Sure, why not?

I’ve written about magazine stores before, about how the overflowing amount of titles on display, the remarkably specific nature of all of them, and the feeling of library anxiety that greets me when I think about all these people publishing all these magazines every month. How do any of them sell? How do any of these things make money?

In fact it’s becoming rather clear that a lot of print isn’t making so much money at all. The book industry is in some sort of crisis, newspapers are dying, and magazines aren’t having a great go of it at all, either.

So it’s encouraging to hear about new magazine shops opening up, ones devoted entirely to the idea of reading and buying those magazines that make the format worth it in the first place. It’s even better when the focus of these stores is largely on design and art magazines, which are some of the best and most tangible reasons to still be picking up print-based… well, anything. A well-curated magazine will still provide you with more solid information in one sitting than most of our hyperactive, ADD-inspired internet surfing can in a few hours.

A new Berlin shop has just launched with exactly this idea in mind. Called Do You Read Me,and definitely not just another overflowing magazine store, this is a highly curated shop designed with you in mind. Go there, browse, sit, read, explore, and then buy.

It was recently featured on one of the New York Times’s many blogs, and has me on the lookout for something even close to this nice here in Rome. Some of the shop’s better features include Eames chairs for lounging while you read, and no shrink-wrap to speak of. You’re free to browse and read all you want before buying.

There’s a lot to be said for specialization, in my opinion. Going into a massive bookstore and finding its massive magazine section doesn’t lead me in any direction, and doesn’t help me find what I want to find. The shelves are bursting, and somehow the inherent value of each title is diminished through the very overstocking of that particular section. That’s why the layout of this store is so appealing: minimalist shelves with great spacing, and wooden tables featuring mouth-watering stacks of what are surely interesting titles. It’s reason number 4,058 to book a flight for Berlin.

From the shop itself: “We provide a subjective selection of beautiful, sapiently written, well crafted magazines in the scope of art, culture, fashion, photography, design, architecture, literature, music, theatre, society, politics and business. We look forward to compiling, together with our clients, the most beautiful, most interesting and most innovative magazines available from around the globe.”

Here’s something different. There’s a flickr pool out there called The End, which collects all the end title screens from about 500 different films. Many of these are by necessity classic ones, since most modern films don’t often feature such a firm close–it went out of style, likely seen as a formal holdover from literature, from a time when films still weren’t accepted as a valid art form unto themselves.

Some filmmakers still use the device, of course, but it’s largely ironic. Last year’s great Ratatouille, for example, used it, but it was the famous French ‘fin’, which suited the movie perfectly, while standing out more as a nod to Paris and the idea of french-ness than any kind of homage to a filmmaking tradition.

There’s something about seeing all these titles in one place–it’s like repeating a favourite word over and over again until it loses its original meaning, and then suddenly ‘The End’ seems an entirely strange thing to say at the end of a film, too unnatural, overly obvious–a world of typographic artifacts we didn’t know existed until the strange ways of the internet brought them to us.

The end screen of The Man With the Golden Arm, done by Saul Bass, is a true classic (although it does make me think of Anatomy of a Murder, also done by him), and anyone interested in one of the most unique and talented film titlers and illustrators of the 20th century would do well to find some of his work. For anyone interested in typography, he was simply the best title designer around, and could do wondrous things with minimalistic animation and good type: just look at these examples plus some classic title videos below.

One thing I kinda like doing is discovering an illustrator or designer after I’ve already purchased or enjoyed some bit of his/her work without knowing it, and then being taken in by the rest of their stuff. The latest candidate for this process of mine is Olly Moss, whose stuff I first saw on Threadless a long time ago. Specifically, that was this Spoilt t-shirt, which fit well with Threadless’s generally clever theme and plays on words.

Turns out this young designer (he’s 21) has also done some great re-imagingins of film posters, which for some reason is a tiny corner of the design world that I can’t help but be enthralled by every time. I have to say, if I was working in the packaging/publicity department of any major studio, I’d be out canvassing these guys and letting them do the hard work for me. Just looking back at Now Showing, any of the major studios have ready-made covers for any future blu-ray special editions, no problem.

Check out his awesome re-imagingings of the great film The Deer Hunter, plus Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. He’s also doing some good work with colour-layering, throwing a bit of typography-based information in there to boot. The “retro band/old song vs. new DJ/new beat = remix” illustration is fantastic, a nice simple encapsulation of where a remix lies, told through a design that stands out.

Then for the people who are somehow visually excited when they see mixing consoles (check), we’ve got his wonderful Mixer Shirt (called AV). Speaking of his shirts, he was also responsible for the Nintendo Family Tree shirt that I pointed out in the last month’s post on pixels. As seen below, his infographic stuff is playful without being overly coy–all fine examples of, say… the Threadless Aesthetic, if there is such a thing, only done right nearly every time.

I’ve seen his designs dozens of times and they’re still funny, which isn’t always the case with Threadless. Partially it’s the illustration, which holds up in a kind of aircraft-emergency-pamphlet way, but the typography and sense of visual timing (check out the rules of shotgun one) are spot-on. This kind of stuff is hard to do well, which is painfully evidenced by the mountain of threadless-imitation sites out there trying to turn bad puns into even crappier t-shirts. Here’s the winning formula: very, very solid joke + design that would make a good shirt even if the joke weren’t funny at all = memorable and funny shirt… maybe. Olly Moss knows how it’s done.

Once again MAKE Magazine turns us on to something fantastic: the sculpture of Susy Oliveira. I have to say I haven’t seen anything like this before, and there is something, like the original MAKE poster said, that reminds me of the dead bodies in various video games. While that’s just a fleeting reference–Oliveira is an new Canadian artist doing work across several fields, and this is just one of them–it’s the one that caught my attention.

What is it about taking computer-inspired shapes and forms, like the constrictions of polygons, and pulling them out into the open world? Why is this fascinating? Art historians (and I am definitely not one of them) could insert these works somewhere along the “history of sculpture” timeline, tracing influences of certain movements without ever touching the computerized aspect of it. But that very connection to computerization is what makes all the difference: these are photos, printed out and sculpted on top of foam in such a way that they resemble the simplistic polygons of the first three-dimensional games (think Virtua Fighter).

What I’d really love to do is have the chance to see this work in person, where I could walk around it and see it from varying angles, which is obviously a large part of the work’s significance: each piece of the surface has a series of separate angles created by the polygons, which make even something as simple as a pair of jeans seem strange and unreal.

The appeal of all these projects still gets me thinking: does their appeal come solely from their nods to computer-based design? Game designers had to use primitive, obvious polygons during the initial stages of 3d-game design, and 8-bit games were constrained into using the pixel as building block. Now, are the children who grew up with those generations clamouring for artistic representations of those childhood touchstones in a more mature context?

Well, that’s one way of putting it, and at the moment that’s how I approach these things at first–they hit a series of nostalgic buttons, and if the art can remain interesting beyond that, then I can cast any nods to a pre-existing, even video-game related concept aside and look for more. And there seems to be plenty here.

I’ve taken a big interest in public/street art recently, but most of the instances that I’ve happened upon and enjoyed to any degree are various modifications of the landscape that serve to provoke and confuse. As I still see it, street art generally tries to do the following three things: present art where it’s least expected, comment on the use of public space, and tries to be extremely clever.

But one thing that I haven’t seen this discipline do so often is actually make positive use of that public space in a way that, say, a city planner could appreciate. No problem–that’s not the artist’s job by any means, but surely there are a few street art projects out there that don’t just try and screw with the perception of the urban landscape but instead actually improve it, even in ways that conservative, committee-constrained planners could approve of and maybe even embrace?

I don’t mean big, cool paintings on the side of old buildings–go to any city with a modicum of artistic spirit about it (Montreal, for example) and you’ll find tons of that, all generally city-approved or at least tacitly endorsed by the fact that the best of them stay up for years. No, this is smaller scale, along the lines of the street art we’ve seen over the last few years, those exhibitions of “urban play” that trip up expectations and tweak common elements to new effect.

Enter Joshua Callaghan, who has done just this, and remarkably, he’s done it within the confines of a city-approved project. We all know about those power & utility boxes present on our streets, usually painted in an unremarkable, military-green. They’re ubiquitous and hardly appealing, but thankfully ignorable enough. After seeing Callaghan’s work, though, I’m starting to notice their stark uselessness in the landscape more and more, these big green boxes of electricity that occasionally contain some posters and flyers but more often than not do absolutely nothing besides what’s required of them to keep our telephones and traffic lights running.

The LA neighbourhood of Culver City decided to do something about them, and comissioned Callaghan to cover several of their boxes with large vinyl prints containing photographs of the landscape, or carefully chosen shots designed to somehow “blend” with the surrounding colours in a pleasing way. And they work as more than that, since the illusion is broken when you come up close and realize that hey, it’s just a normal old utility box with a big sticker all around it.

There’s a ton of possibility here: find an historical photograph from 50 years ago of the exact same spot, and put it on the utility box, creating a fleeting look back in time where one might least expect it. It’s also one excellent way of getting some commissions for your work: if you’re a young street artist, out filling the city with your highly original designs, you might just get a call from a city authority that isn’t about fining you or trying to foot you the bill for however much it cost to clean up your art project. Here’s hoping more planning departments see the light.

If you’ve stumbled across any other examples of urban/public art being used in an official context, condoned and approved by the authorities, fill us in!

To me, most street art wants to accomplish three little things that add up to the idea of ‘shocking’ the viewer. The word shock isn’t entirely appropriate as it implies something drastic–’changing perspective’ is probably more appropriate but kind of boring, so whatever. ‘Shock’ it is. Anyway, according to me, the three things that all projects of this kind attempt to do are:

• presenting art where it’s least expected
• commenting on the use of public space
• being (or trying to be) extremely clever

Those generally add up to the possibility of ‘shocking’ the passerby out of his/her normal sensibility or (if we want to start posturing) complacency, even.

Based on these criteria, I don’t exactly understand why Aakash Nihalani’s street art succeeds, but it does. His photography is great, his shapes are clean, clear, and fun. Maybe that’s it–the sense of fun that comes through in what he’s doing, which is really remarkably simple. It’s direct, well-photographed, and has a reasonably clear explanation by the artist as to what he thinks it is, and what he’s trying to do:

I’m not trying to push a certain highbrow logic or philosophy or purposefully communicate through the esoteric medium of art. I work instinctively, trying to follow my gut about the sensation of color and space, and have fun doing it.

On the ‘a-ha!’ scale, it’s about the same as when you were a kid and you first figured out that you could draw a two-dimensional square on a piece of paper, and then by adding some diagonal lines, make it into a three-dimensional object. The simplest thing in the world, which is probably why I like this stuff, because it’s a reference to that discovery in what’s already a multi-dimensional environment.

My street work consists mostly of isometric rectangles and squares. I selectively place these graphics around New York to highlight the unexpected contours and elegant geometry of the city itself. All execution of a piece is done on site with little to no planning.

Head over to his site for more quality work on display. His photography really does add a ton to the enjoyment of his work, it’s great stuff.

Dutch designer Marcia Nolte has created a somewhat horrifying series of photographs, called Corpus 2.0, in which the human body is artifically modified to accommodate various products, including headphones and high heels, as shown above. The underlying suggestion behind the exhibition has something to do with evolution, but the striking thing to my eyes was the clean, minimal photography, which reinforced the idea that all these “evolutions” would only be possible through surgery.

There are several crazy processes by which the human body is physically modified or stretched to fit a certain purpose. There’s the horrifying procedure known as Foot Binding, the collarbone-distorting ‘neck elongation‘, and the famous lip plate. All these various unpleasantries make me cringe like hell.

Above we see the “cellphone shoulder” and “texting hand” examples. The insane thing is that, out of all those extreme modifications linked to above, Nolte’s commercial-products exhibition actually hits closer to my own experience. How? Well, my little toes seem to be moving slightly inwards after two years of me pushing my wide feet into long, thin Converse All-Stars for the past few years. Maybe I just can’t remember what my toes looked like before, but now something seems, well, off. If only I had some before and after photos… 

So, I endure this apparent body transformation for the sake of a brand, a product, an image I’m trying to cultivate. It’s not severe and it’s not anywhere near as ugly as the extreme modifications in Nolte’s photos, but it’s a physical change nonetheless, and one done at the expense of a brand. Credit goes to this designer for making me think more about it; the above photo shows a modified “cigarette mouth” and a nose with a built-in ridge for glasses.

Hold up, though: this concept explores some of the same ground, and it’s by another young Dutch designer. Jewellry for your eyeball. Crazy, those guys, I tell you.

Artist Philip Toledano has launched America: The Gift Shop, an online installation that “reflects the current foreign policy in the fun-house mirror of American commerce. We buy souvenirs at the end of a trip, to remind ourselves of the experience. What do we have to remind us of the events of the last eight years?”

I was a little nervous when first clicking on this one: it’s really easy to screw this stuff up, to let art surrender its power to simple ideology or sloganeering. It’s especially easy when your subject isn’t something with a lot of room for nuance. If this was a piece on how “personal circumstance affects the political”, I wouldn’t be hesitant, because that’s a topic with some weight behind it, one that demands a subtle approach.

Subtlety is necessary because pointing out just how things have gone wrong outside America’s borders since 2001 has been done by many many people, and it’s a double-edged sword: the problems are big, and thus easy to refer to in a slogan, but the sheer quantity of them means the clarity of the message can get lost in the explanation. And that’s just the political aspect of it. Trying to turn that kind of criticism into art? It’s a tall order.

That’s why I really like Toledano’s approach, which highlights his strange souvenir-based approach without sliding into lazy criticism of commercial culture. No blustery text about the ‘blind consumerism’ of America and its tenuous connection to foreign policy: he simply says “my palette is the vernacular of retail. The more familiar it is, the better host it becomes for the idea.”

In other words, this isn’t a critique of the foreign policy itself, but a comment on how the most famous aspects of that policy (Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Shock & Awe) were digested and normalized by the public until they resembled familiar figures on a store shelf somewhere. Works for me–I know my repeated exposure to the hooded & wired Abu Ghraib figure has certainly dulled whatever my initial reaction was to it, and now that deadening process has been mapped out through visual art, getting me to think about the original image all over again.

And here’s another election-period piece of art/comedy for you, just ’cause: A New Electoral Map by Chris Harris and Stephanie Chen.