Not sure when A Practice For Everyday Life updated but some great work in their latest release including this work for the Turner Prize last year.

www.apracticeforeverydaylife.com

Sticking with my promise of optimistic images to welcome in the new year, here is the exceptional work of young Portuguese photographer Joao Paulo.

Be sure not to close his window until you’ve had a gander at his ‘silence’ series.

www.joaopaulocarvalho.com

The ill-studio is a French group of collaborators devoted to fine arts. Our goal is to bring ten individuals together, working in various artistic areas such as graphic design, photography, typography, illustration, video, motion design, etc.

This picture has been taken for the last issue of the french magazine called Magazine that we have been guest curating. Magazine is a magazine about magazines. For each issue, they ask different art directors, graphic designers or photographers to come up with a concept to introduce the magazine they are reviewing. This is what we did.

www.ill-studio.com

London based studio Fallon have worked their magic on Cadbury’s Chocolate bar Wispa, all done for the love of Wispa and paid for with Wispa bars (including director/agency). Watch the making of the advert here.

www.vimeo.com/2587832
www.fallon.co.uk

Yes yes, happy new year everybody! Those Nous Vous fellas updated their site a little before the holidays and there’s too much good stuff to choose from. Here’s some famous summits by Nic Burrows.

www.nousvous.eu

Great update from London based studio, Village Green. Pictured are two of their infamous posters for London Club, Fabric. They don’t always work but when they do they’re well worth picking up.

www.villagegreenstudio.com
Via Form Fifty Five

Happy New Year! What better way to celebrate than a week’s worth of optimistic posts to get you in the mood for ’09?

To kick off is the video for Tom Vek’s 2005’s track ‘Nothing But Green Lights’ directed by Adam Bartley. An interestingly stark take on an uplifting track.

www.dailymotion.com
www.tomvek.tv

Five days late but never mind, back to work and back to it. This was being played in a local supermarket over the weekend and it seems an appropriate place to start 2009. Blame the bankers, blame the government, blame the media, blame whoever you want but don’t forget we’ve been here before, just ask Mick.

So here’s our opener for the year, Simply Reds first single from (way) back in ’85, Money’s Too Tight To Mention. If it’s anything to go by it does get better towards the second half but never the less remains a bit dodgy.

So Happy New Year to everyone, hope you have a great 2009!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqbrNwF8LJg

So it’s the last post today in the UK and we’re doing the same. From all of us here have a very Merry Christmas and we’ll see you some time in the new year.

Pictured is this year’s Carnaby St, don’t know who’s responsible but nice all the same. Answers on a postcard and I’ll get a link up.

Guest Poster — James Houston

Nothing says “Merry Christmas” like a wall full of microwaves.

I thought I’d end the week’s postings on a festive note, and this video is obviously right up my street. They could have thrown a printer or scanner into the mix to beef it up a bit, but lets not get picky on this season of good will.

Thanks to Will from itsnicethat for giving me a platform for me to show some interesting videos. I’ve really enjoyed writing for the blog over the last week, and I hope that you’ve all enjoyed my pickings.

Happy holidays everybody.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgBUqJzgvBo

Something from Bingo.

www.mr-bingo.org.uk

Guest Poster — James Houston

Nexus Productions’ Jim Le Fevre was one of the excellent people that welcomed me to London with open arms. We were both speakers at Interesting2008, and had have been mutually backslapping each other ever since.

Jim discovered that he can recreate a Zoetrope using the shutter speed on a camera as the strobe effect to separate the frames, and a Technics turntable as the rotating base. Simply beautiful and beautifully simple.

For the Interesting2008 talk
For a close-up of the device, set to Elliot Smith

Nice set of promotional posters for Groove Effect from Leicester based studio, Made By Six.

www.madebysix.com

Nice update from paper cutting addict
Marcus Walters.

www.marcuswalters.com

Guest Poster — James Houston

Having your mobile phone go off during a concert would usually be embarrassing, but at Dialtones it’s a necessity.
I really wish I could have been in the audience for this one – Dialtones was a concert where musicians onstage would create music by mass-dialling the audience’s mobile phones. The phones had been pre-registered and contained custom ringtones which had been specially created for the show.
This has been a huge influence for my own work, and already feels dated thanks to the rapid growth of the mobile phone industry;
I’m glad that the performance captured this moment in time, as I don’t think that .mp3 ringtone samples would have the same charm as these old-school polyphonic counterparts.
A true masterpiece – seeing the overlooked potential in an everyday object, and harnessing that potential as a means of expression.

See the performance
Find out more about how it was put together
Telesymphony website

Company are the second design studio to get a post from me this week. Their new site houses a fantastic range of consistenly great work, and also the all important self initiated projects like the one to the left, the beautifully titled ‘Hairface’.

www.company-london.com

Guest Poster — James Houston

This nostalgic promo was created by fellow Glasgow-based filmmaker Tom Scholefield for Warp records.

Jamie Lidell sings to his cat in a sincere A-Ha inspired rotoscoped promo. Lovely. Check out the newly designed website.

www.konx-om-pax.co.uk

London based YES Studio update with some great work including this for A Foundation.

www.yesstudio.co.uk

I haven’t looked around the ever expanding ‘Hey Ho’ folio for a little while now, but I’m glad I did yesterday. Beautifully considered and presented work from across the channel.

www.heyho.fr

So we edge ever closer to Christmas and the season of excess eating and drinking. Fortunately though the wise men at unreal have created six unique wrapping paper designs to make even the last minute of presents appear more thought out then the recipient could ever imagine.

The six designs include Classic x-box, Festive Flowchart, Searching for Santa, That’s Just what I (Didn’t) Want, Find the Six Pence and Queen’s Speech Bingo (pictured), Lizzy from London presents this all inclusive family game. KO 3pm 25/12 BBC One.

www.unrealshop.co.uk

The most recent project I was involved in was to create a promo video for “So Tomorrow” by Official Secrets Act. They knew my work from seeing my graduation video for Radiohead ‘Big Ideas (Don’t get any)‘ video online, and asked me to create something for them. This was my result, made with the shortest turnaround I’ve ever had on a project – DV footage was shot of the band performing in London, then the tapes were couriered to me to work my magic in Glasgow. The frames around the video are based on old arcade cabinet bezels, and were used to bump the resolution up to lovely 720p high definition.

www.1030.co.uk

There seems to be a lot of good work coming out of Australia at the moment, Lilian Liem has just finished her third and final year of graphic design at Monash University in Melbourne. Pictured is ‘Lost in Tokyo’, a conceptual mapping project, hand drawn with felt markers on paper.

‘Losing yourself in an unknown culture can be one of the most unique stories your life has to tell. I wanted to map my experience of travelling to Tokyo for the first time as accurately as I could, to convey the initial bombardment of confusion of a different culture, which after some time began to make sense as my journey unfolded. A map like this should represent Tokyo more accurately than a conventional map, as I found, could not chart how dynamic a city it really is.’

www.lilianliem.com

All round nice guy Andy has updated his site with some lovely new work – including the pictured fabric design for Bon Bon Kakku.

Also, as it’s the season of goodwill Andy’s also designed and printed a t-shirt to raise funds for the charity ‘Hope For Justice‘ – a great shirt and 100% of the proceeds go to the charity, doubly good reason to stick you hand in your pocket.

www.komadesign.co.uk
www.komadesign.bigcartel.com

Guest Poster — Hvass&Hannibal

Check NASA’s astronomy picture of the day and see a new picture of the universe every day. Or if you want to see how outer space looked in the 90s, browse through the archive that dates all the way back to 1995. There are good treats for space enthusiasts among the many images.

www.apod.nasa.gov

Dustin Aksland is a San Francisco based Fine Art photographer. This year he has exhibited in Copenhagen, Brussels, NYC, Washington D.C and San Francisco as well as having work published in Esquire, Wired, Fast Company, Tokion, and Swindle. Great work, check him out.

www.dustinaksland.com