Poketo, one of my favorite everyday-wearable-useable art websites, has come out with a new line of eight soft and comfy, prewashed cotton tees. These artsy, fun and colorful shirts (and other aesthetically amusing stuff,) were designed by some of my own personal favorite indie artists including Pepa Prieto, Lisa Congdon and Pietari Posti. Their inspirations vary from ice cream to hairy masked wrestlers dancing to the beat, making them the most fabulous works of wearable art around.

Betsy Walton’s “Swim”
This shirt was inspired by Walton’s love of swimming, magical lakes and cute swimming suits. Walton creates most of her art based on daydreams and her knowledge of print-making and knitting. More of this Wisconsin native’s work can be found at poketo.com, morningcraft.com or monsieurt.net.

Pepa Prieto’s “Ice Cream”
I’m from a region of the United States called “New England.” Although we endure some of the longest and coldest winters here, we are still the number one consumer of ice cream (in the USA) all year round. It’s no wonder then why I LOVE this tee shirt! I’m against buying for myself for fear I may eat it.

Prieto is, as I mentioned, one of my favs. Born in Granada, she studied fine arts and was inspired to create this shirt because of her own love of ice cream, laughter and all things reminiscent of childhood.

“Creature Friends” by Melissa Contreras
This colorfully busy shirt was inspired of course, by nature and of her experiences of “Guatemalan Summers and California Nights.” Contreras is a Californian with big ideas and the creativity to pull them off. I just adore the bold colors combined with soft, rounded edges. You can find more of Contreras’ designs on axelhoney.com.

Maki’s “Bear Camp”
In keeping with our nature theme, Maki has created this hilarious tee-shirt inspired by the Murphy’s Law of camping; complete with rain, bears, and angry trees. Based out of the Netherlands, Maki is used to having his art described as edgy, humorous and intelligent with lots of urban-appeal. He also created another hot-ticket item on Poketo, “Goldrush Rainbow.”

Peskimo’s “I Want to Dance”
“…with my hands in the air so everyone can see my armpit hair!” You have to love a scene this funky and funny. Inspired by Mexican culture and its love of dancing and moustaches, this shirt is funky enough to get anyone in the mood to groove.

Peskimo are a UK based dynamic-duo, with a ingeniously quirky team. Together they create little monster illustrations around the world. They’ve produced art for vinyl toys, TV shows, magazines and more. You can check out more of their little monster funk-o-saurs at peskimo.com.

“Stay True” by Ashkahn
No one describes Ashkahn’s work better than he does: ““Those who stay true to themselves and are able to express themselves fully without worrying about what others might say. Those who can wear mismatching socks and laugh in its delight. Those who can embrace the free flowing foreverness of their being!!! Wake up to uncover the pink moon!”

Working out of California, Ashkahn has a few projects in the works. Be on the look out for the “Don’t Stop Studio” and his own new tee shirt line “Cryin Tiger.” You can find more on Ashkahn at DontStopStudio.com

“Deer in the City” by Pietari Posti
Straight out of Finland, Posti has been drawing and designing since he was a kid. Now working as a freelance illustrator in Barcelona, you can find most of his work on display at PPosti.com. “Deer in the City” is part of a larger project entitled “Giants.” It is essentially a “what-if” collection of gigantic animals walking around in cities. It sounds quirky because it is. What else is it? A must-see collection.

“Radiolarians” by Lisa Congdon
Lisa thinks scientific imagery is really cool because it often reflects the perfect balance and symmetry that nature has to offer. “Radiolarians” is inspired by the real life single cell organisms by the same name which dwells in the ocean.

Ms. Congdon, a natural artist, lives in San Francisco and prefers to follow her own sense of what art is rather than a so-called “refined technique.” She gets her inspiration from flea markets, natural science and life.

Want to get your hands on these? All shirts are available in women’s and unisex styles, and are just $28 online. Other fab pieces of work are available too. But you have to be on your toes, because once stuff sells out it will typically be discontinued.

All of the artist’s work can be found on Poketo’s website in various forms including wallets, prints, accessories, stuff for your house and stationary.

It’s the end of August, and as such I’m back with the second installment of my pet obsession, the monthly roundup of various pixel-art products, designs, and various curiosities I’ve found online. While being a relatively minor part of the design world, I’ve made no secret before of my love for the artform, and every single day designers continue to do incredible things with it. We’ve got some high-profile pieces this month, plus a couple of websites and interactive games that are nothing short of brilliant.

First off, those legendary Germans eboy have published a new, extremely-limited-edition book, entitled Schmock. Published as part of a 500-copies-only series by Rojos, this little 160-pager is full of the studio’s recent work, most of which is pixel-centered, with some toy and t-shirt design thrown in too. Eboy are widely acknowledged as masters of the form: check out the prices on their first amazing book, long out of print, and glance at any of their insanely overloaded city posters to confirm as much. At the time of writing, there was one copy left, so it’s likely flown away to the land of overpriced amazon/ebay sellers by now. Console yourself with a t-shirt instead.

The high profile release I mentioned earlier is nothing other than Brian Eno and David Byrne’s new Everything That Happens Will Happen Today album. Released only through their website, the cover is an incredibly detailed drawing of a suburban house. They’re shipping out deluxe editions of the disc by November–if my dreams come true, the pixel theme will be expanded to glorious lengths for that version. Oh yeah, and the music: these are two giants of the last 40 years, and their one previous collaboration together, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, is fantastic. Expecting wonderful things from this one.

This is just beautiful–a Berlin-based designer created mockups in photoshop in order to figure out how to best tile his bathroom. His lively chronicle of the debate between he and his wife over what masterpiece of art they’d turn into a pixelated, tile-based bathroom wall & bathtub is both charming and enlightening–and just wait until you see their final choice for the tub. It’s absolutely genius. This is probably the best implementation of the 1×1 decorating aesthetic I’ve ever seen.

Here’s a flash game with an artistic bent–abstract pixels float around the screen, and only by moving your mouse to form the design can you move to the next level. To describe it sounds strange, but give it a try and you’ll find there’s something good about it–it’s like trying to pull one hundred pieces of floating confetti out of the air and into a unified whole. Did that make it any clearer? Nah, probably not. You’ll see it when you see it.

Another elegant flash work that uses only 1×1 pixels of different colour–mixed with some fun physics–to create piles of sand at the bottom of your browser. This falls into the “2-minute-diversions” category, but there’s nothing wrong with that.

And our last entry comes from Cubescape, a site that let you build an isometric world using a series of cubes. The most satisfying element for me is the option to “replay the construction” afterwards, which does exactly that: gives you a fast-moving animation of every block you (or other, more talented people) have dropped into place. Strangely gratifying. And with that, my roundup of one small corner of the design world is complete for another month–see you in September!

The Olympic Games are a consistent magnet for design criticism–professional and amateur alike–as seen most clearly in last summer’s messy reaction to the London 2012 logo. Personally, when speaking of an event as universal as the Olympics, I tend towards the “better a weird logo” camp than the “obviously designed by committee” one, so I found the harshness directed towards the London logo (it does have its defenders, too) far preferable to the usual collective shrug/ignorance meted out to high-profile logos like this.

Last year in Brussels I saw a great shirt with the Moscow 1980 logo on it, and I realized there’s a dearth of products out there that take advantage of the wonderful design history of the Olympic Games. Whether it’s the concentric lines of the Mexico 68 logo (the closest thing I own that’s similar is this killer shirt from iso50) or the beautiful simplicity of the Tokyo 64 logo, this is a heritage of design ripe for a wide-scale reintroduction–something likely blocked because, for legal reasons, any old designer can’t slap a classic Olympic logo on a t-shirt and start selling it.

Whether or not Colloco’s new PVC-leather Olympic Logo Bags are legal is beside the point–they’re fantastic. The aforementioned 64 and 68 designs are beautifully represented, and the Munich 72 games are rendered with the iconic sport-specific pictograms created by Otl Aicher specifically for those games (good thing, as those symbols are more enduring than the actual Olympic logo of that year, although it’s good too). There’s also a re-imagining of the Los Angeles 84 logo, and the great Moscow 80 one as well.

It’s an Olympic Year, which means it’s time to either protest, embrace, observe, or simply ignore the Beijing Games; I’m not sure which one I’ll choose for August (probably the complicated ignorance through vacation route), but should I decide, on a whim, to express my Olympic Spirit through a woman’s handbag, I’ll stick with the classics.

I can’t hide my fascination with the little corner of the design world known as pixel art. Ever since I bought a hoodie emblazoned with a 10-pixel figure from an 80s arcade game, the irresistible pull of the squared art form in its newly-commercialized iteration has pulled me in again and again. It’s a purposefully constricted style that, for me, never seems to lose its appeal.

With that in mind, here’s the first of a monthly post looking at my favourite examples of found pixel art over the previous month. We’ll keep it simple on our first go around, with these three great highlights.

Agnieszka Bartosiewicz’s Customizable Sideboard

Core77 showed us this wonderful sideboard from the aforementioned Polish designer, in which a series of holes lets you insert coloured felt pieces to create your own designs. The mind reels. 3500 holes! Get yourself some video game maps and re-create the hell out of them.

This is the kind of thing I can never have in my place, for should I find myself with an urgent deadline, essay, or what have you, I could be found reconstructing a part of this mere hours before submission time.

Post-It Art: 8-Bit Edition

Post-It art isn’t the newest thing in the world, but using it to recreate classic 8-bit scenes is a more recent development, not to mention something even the artistically unlucky can try their hand at. Check out this fantastic Megaman illustration to see how.

Easily the most impressive was the UCSC students re-creating a Donkey Kong level using several floors of their school’s engineering building. 14,000 post-it notes later…

A Nintendo Console Inside a Nintendo Cartridge

Alright, this isn’t pixel art per se, but since the NES was the source of so much wonderful pixel art over its lifetime, and drives most of the examples here, let’s show this one off anyway. A ream of tech blogs picked up on the fact that a resourceful designer managed to modify an old NES cartridge using a custom screen and various other parts to make a functioning NES-within-a-NES. I love it.

That’s it for our first outing–the next roundup comes in August, with the best in pixel and game-inspired art from every corner of theinternet. If you’ve got a must-have inclusion, don’t hesitate to send it in!

Burning up the blogosphere recently is Cameron Adams’s Handwritten Typographers, a brilliant sampling of how today’s finest typographers write stuff down on paper. Some of the results are fantastic. Hardly surprising that people devoted to designing type also write in an interesting hand, but Adams asks some further questions:

Do typographers exert some extraordinary control of the pen that laypersons don’t? Does a typographer’s handwriting influence the typefaces they produce? Has the rise of digital communications made handwriting redundant? Do modern typographers, born of digital tools, lack the finesse of their more wizened counterparts? If so, does that change the way their type is designed?

One thing I’ve always been interested in is the conscious development of a handwriting style. Do people (typographers or not) spend time practicing and perfecting a handwriting style? One guess is that any naturally talented designer already has some drafting skill that’s automatically transposed into the more automatic features of handwriting, but I’d like to see a feature that looks at prominent designers who admit to practicing and perfecting their handwritten styles, like an illustrator would perfect his line.

I’d buy a little pocket-book made up of notebook scraps that chronicled the handwriting evolution of, say, 25 famous artists/designers. Yes I would.

Recent experiences in renewing my passport made me reflect that we all probably spend a fair amount of time developing our signature–I’ve got notebooks from my childhood filled with flailing attempts to make my name look cooler on the page, most of which failed.

Ever been forced to sign your name exactly inside a little box, any contact with the page borders immediately invalidating the entire form? There’s a handwriting-consistency test if there ever was one. My shaky hand means the one signature I did manage to get inside the box still doesn’t look all that close to what you’ll see on an average contract or credit card slip. Oh well, it’s only border control, right?

Adams’s experiment struck me as a wonderful spin on the “ask artists how they do what they do” genre, which has always been a wonderful/terrible thing for me. Reading great essays on how, for example, certain novelists do what they do can fill you with inspiration, and then along comes some anecdotal evidence that some of the best living authors of the day, say Philip Roth or Don Delillo, write almost monastically, genius writers hammering away in solitude for 10 hours a day, trying to get something, anything right, and we’re all reminded that you’ve got to put the work in, no matter what you’ve done before. But we’ll save that digression for another day.

There are times I’d rather just see how an artist writes stuff down, or organizes his/her day, than always read about the why. In a unique way, that’s what Adams has done here.

One wonderful new book gaining strong traction in the world of design and advertising is Rob Walker’s Buying In. The weekly columnist for the New York Times Sunday Magazine stands and delivers a book-length meditation on the 21st-century consumer, along with a perfect antidote to any under-researched column or study that tells you marketing “as we know it” is dead, or that the modern consumer is so over-informed and intelligent that all old strategies or ideas have jumped (or must be thrown) out the window.

Advertising is changing in fundamental ways–this, no one denies–but some rules of the game still remain, and Walker is here to chart the way all the various agents (producers and consumers alike) have adapted.

Besides the immediate appeal to anyone involved in advertising or design, the book has a transcendent draw that comes from its central examination of brand attachment. Walker coined the term “murketing”, to describe a 21st century mix of murky and marketing that he describes as being a two-part system, one which is made up of the “increasingly sophisticated tactics of marketers who blur the line between branding channels and everyday life” and the consciously “widespread consumer embrace of branded, commercial culture.”

Read the introduction to the book here and tell me you’re not hooked by his anecdotal reference to Chuck Taylor’s All-Stars: he says the book “was inspired by the disconnect between what the experts say [about consumer behaviour] and how we really behave,” and the first example comes from his very own experiences. Perfect for me, as I only started wearing All-Stars a year and a half ago, and since then I’ve already bought 3 pairs. Why? Lots of reasons, surely, almost all of them connecting to self/group identification, and (almost) all to be found in this book.

One of the most fascinating parts of Walker’s theory, the pieces of which you can put together through all the entries on his murketing blog or his “Consumed” columns (all available online), is the “Desire Code”, his examination of how we come to desire what we eventually buy, or how logo/brand/product desire is created.

His idea rides on a “fundamental tension of modern life,” one that extends far past marketing and consumerism but is essential to his understanding of it: the tension between the individual and the group. Hardly a new concept, but that’s the point–the game hasn’t changed so much to be unrecognizable, rather all its participants are (apparently) a little more self-aware. A fine sampling:

When I was in grade school, we watched a lot of films. Perhaps they were a relatively easy way to quiet the children down for a while. But remembering this period as an adult, I’m struck by the realization that those films all had one of two themes.

One was: Deep down, each of us is different, unique, and special.

The other was: Deep down, we are all just the same.

For years I shared this observation, for laughs, before it finally occurred to me that this was no joke. In fact, it articulated what is more or less the fundamental tension of modern life.

We all want to feel like individuals.

We all want to feel like a part of something bigger than ourselves.

And resolving that tension is what the Desire Code is all about.

Summer is here, and from anecdotal evidence in various popular magazines, I’ve heard it’s the “reading” season, although reading on the beach does nothing but hurt my eyes. If you, however, can keep yours relatively unsquinted, Walker’s book is an essential purchase.

I find myself wondering about contemporary art sometimes. Not so often, but every once in a while a little old-fashioned voice pops into my head–especially when I’m looking at a video installation or a conceptual piece–and suggests I could pull off something similar, bury it under enough pseudo-theory about the nature of space/blankness, and call it groundbreaking. It’s a bullshit idea, of course: just the same kind of conservative ‘verification process’ that wanted to be sure Picasso could paint detailed, measured, classical scenes before accepting the artistic merit of his more innovative work.

My silly ideas are sent even further down the river when contemporary artists are given the opportunity to demonstrate their abilities in a different medium, especially a traditional one with well-established boundaries. Ubiquitous American retailer The Gap has gone and done just that, commissioning 13 former winners of the Whitney Biennial to design a range of limited edition t-shirts.

H&M has been doing a similar thing for a while now, pulling in top fashion designers and having them create low-cost/high-fashion lines for the store, but Gap’s project is different–each designer isn’t from the fashion world, but actually a contemporary artist for whom clothes aren’t the norm.

Although most of the shirts seem to be sold out by now, they offer us a great look at the kind of art world genre-hopping we don’t normally see. While some artists seem born for at least some kind of t-shirt design (think the visual blasts and surface-is-everything aesthetic of Jeff Koons), others give me pause, or set me wondering how they can possibly translate any of their major themes to a t-shirt. Rirkrit Tiravanija’s exploration of the ‘social role of the artist’ works great in a gallery, but splashed across your chest?

Flipping through the New Yorker recently and seeing the individual ads for each shirt, I was really taken aback by how successfully Gap and the artists have pulled this off. Mixing high concept art with a whitebread American clothes shop shouldn’t have worked, but it did. For a few weeks in May, it was possible to hit any big mall in any suburb in America and get a $30 t-shirt that would normally be sold in a select few Paris/NYC/London shops for ten times the price.

Share your thoughts on the shirts–have you seen better stuff on Threadless, or has each artist’s talent been successfully transposed? Leave your comments!

There are an absolute ton of online archives and digitized university collections online, from the NY Public Library to just about every university you can name. One of my favorites has been the Duke collection, which houses a manageable amount of stuff while spreading its holdings across an interesting range of categories. Sure, historical insight is always interesting, but what I’m really after are some nice, big JPEGs that really let you explore old design up-close. Part of it could be some kind of image-hoarding complex, with the idea that one day I’ll start making one-off t-shirts for myself, with all the best images I’ve found online (unlikely), but probalby it’s just because this stuff is plain rich, and speaks volumes if you give it some time and thought.

Finding a smaller university collection like Duke’s can be a goldmine for inspiration or just good old interesting stuff to see, so let’s take a look at some favorite selections.

Songbook: I’m Going Back to California

Here’s one of my favorites: American Sheet Music from the 1850s right up to the 1920s. If you want to see a concise history of American illustration (or a little history of illustrated racism), look here. Not only do you get overwhelmed with lots of old-time song titles and obscure music hall singers long since forgotten, but the art continuously attempted to match the subject matter in a myraid of interesting ways. Endlessly worthwhile.

KLM Airlines Ad, 1953

There are over 800 transportation related ads in the Duke holdings, and there’s something about seeing how the American public viewed (or was sold) the experience of travelling to Europe in the 1940s that’s endlessly evocative to me. This idea of getting on a bouncy plane and heading across the ocean to find a Spain or Italy where English was surely non-existent and American money was still worth a lot more than the local currency is fascinating, especially when beheld through the lens of advertising.

Now You’ll Like Yeast!

Another fantastic thing about old collections is the text used in promoting the products, especially medical ones. Here’s one from Duke’s “Medicine and Madison Avenue” series. Remember that Simpsons episode where Grandpa tried to figure out what was wrong with Maggie and pulled out “Dr. Washburn’s” medical book, naming off such old-timey ailments as scofula, the ‘vapors’, jugnle rot, dandy fever, poor man’s gout, the staggers, and dum-dum feveer? If you enjoyed that in any way, old medical ads can hold your interest for about 6 straight hours.

Kellogg’s Corn Flakes Ad, 1915

This classic Kellogg’s advertising card is taken from Duke’s wonderful collection of advertising “ephemera“, made up of cards and inserts and hundreds of other little unmissable things that came along with standard advertising, from 1850-1920. An fount of styles and inspiration.

Photo from “The Urban Landscape”

Here’s an unidentified photo from an otherwise so/so “Urban Landscape” series I couldn’t help but include. I love it because of the overblown vignetting that obscures everything but the monument, the flag (see the full view), and whatever the protagonists of the photo are looking at off to the left. I’d surely buy this if it was artfully converted to a vector graphic and screen printed on a shirt.

Within these categories you can find some of the best old advertising, design, and illustration around. Whether you’re writing copy for an “old-fashioned” ad campaign, trying to get a retro look for a client, or simply interested in some vintage American advertising and photography, you’ll stumble upon something useful in the collection.