The Threadless Book

We have a lot of love for Threadless, the inspiring community based, crowd-sourced t-shirt company that has been printing the designs of their users, and building a forerunning company, for ten years now. In honor of their ten year anniversary they've published a book filled with some of their best designs, interviews with Threadless members and the history of the company written by founder Jake Nickell.  The Threadless book takes us through the colorful creations of an entire generation of design and t-shirt lovers, the most colorful of them all being the company itself.

The Exquisite Book

By Julia Rothman, Jenny Volvovski and Matt Lamothe

The Exquisite Book is a project based on the Surrealist game called the Exquisite Corpse. The book is a modified version of the game, played by one hundred contributing contemporary fine artists, illustrators, designers and comic artists.

Irma Boom: Biography in Books

This miniature book contains a complete overview of Irma Boom’s oeuvre, with commentary and more than 450 full colour illustrations in 704 pages with printed edges. Boom is one of the most widely renowned book designers in the world today. The book was designed by Irma Boom for her retrospective exhibition at the The Special Collections of the University of Amsterdam Library.

Boom is known for making tiny models of all her books, which proved inspiration for this tiny book. With text by Mathieu Lommen and notes by Irma Boom.

Vera: The Art and Life of an Icon

Legendary designer and artist Vera Neumann (1907–1993) believed in art’s ability to inspire and enrich lives. An innovator and one of the most successful female entrepreneurs of her time, Vera built her company on a radical philosophy: fine art should be accessible to everyone, not just a select few. Known for her iconic images of cheerful flowers, trendy geometrics, and vibrant ladybugs, she believed people should surround themselves with beauty.

For the first time, Vera: The Art and Life of an Icon, tells her inspiring story through the art and designs she created. In this volume, richly illustrated with Vera’s original sketches, paintings, and photographs of her worldwide travels, readers are introduced to the amazing woman behind the dynamic designs that continue to inspire and influence art, design, and fashion.

Images from Print & Pattern

We're fortunate to have guest authors Megan Fizell & Cassandra Edlefsen share their collaborative colour series here on COLOURlovers. Their monthly colour project considers select artworks featuring one predominant colour within the context of the pigment’s history and in relation to natural edible form. Read more about the project at the bottom of this post. You can find the original articles on Feasting on Art. The one below is located here.

Hung Liu’s artistic production is a process of recollection – a symbolic excavation.  Having weathered the re-education of artists vis-a-vis Mao’s Cultural Revolution and immigration to the U.S. in 1984, Hung Liu’s influences are richly transcultural.  She is known as one of the very first Chinese artists to study within the U.S. and has since received numerous accolades for her dynamic work.  Starting from anonymous photographs (often of unnamed Chinese prostitutes), Liu’s portrayals pair elements of tradition with contemporary critique.  Vividly, her use of colour challenges her audiences’ emotive links to colour.  In an interview she gave in 1995, Hung Liu refers to her vibrant use of colour, particularly red: “Red is an alarming color. We use red lights to warn people; to tell about danger and to use caution.  In China, red is the color of the national flag. It is also the color of revolution; it suggests blood. Red also is used for celebration; it is festive and is used for such things as weddings, the Chinese New Year, and red banners. I like to work with layers of meaning.” (1)

Hung Liu, Yang, 2008

Check out the Color Barcode Multiblend Generator (see examples here), which creates Davis-like veticle stripe multiblends from up to 99 different palettes from the COLOURlovers library. The generator was created by COLOURlover sero*.

Gene Davis was a member of the group of abstract painters in Washington DC during the 1960s known as the Washington Color School. The Washington group artist were among the most prominent of the mid-century color field painters.

Though he worked in a variety of media and styles, including ink, oil, acrylic, video, and collage, Davis is best known by far for his acrylic paintings (mostly on canvas) of colorful vertical stripes, which he began to paint in 1958. The paintings typically repeat particular colors to create a sense of rhythm and repetition with variations. One of the best-known of his paintings, "Black Grey Beat" (1964), owned by the Smithsonian American Art Museum reinforces these musical comparisons in its title. The pairs of alternating black and grey stripes are repeated across the canvas, and recognizable even as other colors are substituted for black and grey, and returned to even as the repetition of dark and light pairs is here and there broken by sharply contrasting colors.

As we move into mid-November, it's officially time to declare my favorite time of year: cooler temperatures and long coats, multicolored scarves, gloves, and hats to go with it! It's a great time to redecorate the home, change the colors of your bedroom, or go shopping for a new sweaters for yourself, the kids, or possible Christmas gifts...who knows what you may find?

This week on What's Crafty on Etsy, we'll look at all kinds of fun items for winter to help you get yourself into the spirit.

If you like modern design but feel white walls are just too plain, perhaps I have just the thing for you. Etsy user designedDESIGNER has a variety of wall decals for sale to suit rooms of all sizes and colors.  This set, called "Birds in the Urban Forest", comes with six trees, birds and loose leaves for you to arrange as you wish. The price beats wallpaper (which is so last century anyway). If you have a baby's room to decorate, there are some precious options as far as that goes as well.

Mmmm, now that's some tasty color Karl Addison has been drawing up for the Seattle Bagel Bakery.

Hand-drawn ads were much more the norm a few decades ago. It was probably the advancements in photography, creating a much quicker turnaround and offering more control for the ad wizards that pushed out the regularity of the style. Now while this category has made room for computer-drawn as well, latley there has been a resurgence with straight-up hand-drawn logos & advertisements rounding out many companies identities. This style can give an old fashion, home-made, classic, tactile feel and it adds in a sense of craft that is often not translated to the consumer through photography.

"It was really an accident," Cecelia Webber admits in an interview with Modern Luxury, "I shot a nude figure against a black background and thought it looked so much like a petal I just went with it."  And thus started her journey as a professional artist in hopes of dispelling much of the world's view of nudity as either "something erotic or disgusting," as she puts it.

Her work consists of only the naked human body, often her own, photographed in the most peculiar of positions then painstakingly overlaid using Photoshop to form the familiar shapes of petals, stamen and stem. So familiar the shapes are and so acutely formed that at first glance it is hard to tell that you're looking at naked people. Lastly, but always first in our book, she saturates the forms with stunning color. Her work pays great homage to nature: the beauty of the human figure and the shapes and colors that connect all living things.

Coloring Books

Johnny's Startup Adventure

Jonny's Startup Adventure is the perfect coloring book for the aspiring startup founder. Help Jonny on his journey as he launches his company, pitches angel investors, delivers a keynote & ultimately gets liquid...

Through 14 pages of coloring you'll help him name his idea and color in the world he hopes to take over as he meets such characters as: Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble, Dave McClure, Chris Sacca, Mark Zuckerberg + Sean Fanning & the Missing Dinner Guest, The Last Super Angels Supper, Steve Jobs, Paul Graham & The Ultimate Sign of Success... A Custom Zonda!

*BONUS* Each book comes with a pack of 8 crayons from COLOURlovers.com.

PRINT SCHEDULE: Order your copy now and get in before the holiday rush. The first printing of books will be shipped mid-november.

Brought to you by the folks at COLOURlovers.com ...Helping you rediscover the joy & fun of playing with color.

Fashion

Leaf Shirts by Dave Rittinger

Dave Rittinger's Zero Footprint Shirt series is comprised of  solid colored leaves hand woven and glued together.

Street Art

Urban Interventions by S.P.O.T.

S.P.O.T. was born out of an urgent will to work OPORTO’S city cultural and urban context.

S.P.O.T. presents and defines itself as a company that promotes, manages and produce ideas, events and cultural initiatives in the context of contemporary urban cultural reality.

Mobile Phone Cases

Uncommon: Color Study Collection by Laura Guido-Clark

Color consultant Laura Guido-Clark designed this collection of iPhone 4 cases for the custom phone case makers Uncommon.

Color Study Collection | We created a collection of color studies that express, through the powerful use of color and pattern, the language a color speaks and the emotions that it represents – beginning with primaries plus black.

Prints

Oil and Water Don't Mix by Happiness Brussels

Oil and Water Don't Mix | A project by Happiness Brussels | Designed by Anthony Burrill

Limited edition of 200 posters, screen printed with oil from the Gulf of Mexico disaster.

All benefits go to CRCL, (Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana) A non-profit organisation dedicated to restoring the Gulf of Mexico’s coastal wetlands.

Given some of my previous post subjects, it seems I'm definitely attracted to immensely colorful and heavily patterned artwork. Perhaps it's because it differs so much from my own comparatively minimal & restrained design work? Regardless, I think it's the irrepressible energy of this type of work that keeps me coming back for more. Young Brooklyn artist Morgan Blair is no different with patterns-a-plenty, rainbow colors, and style that easily traverses from illustration to painting to grafitti. She cites Legos, Maya Hayuk, nostalgia and forts (agreed, who doesn't love a good fort?!) as a few of her influences. If you're nerding out over this like I am, frankly, you should drop what you're doing read this interview with Morgan over at Doodler's Annonymous. She actually drew the answers to their interview questions. What a clever monkey.

Fellow lover of life and color passed along the link to the work of French artist OX who lends their exceptional color sense to adbusting and billboard takeovers.

We can all agree (maybe) that advertisements are a visual intrusion; an abrupt, unwanted diversion from our otherwise cohesive cityscapes. I think it is clear that OX goes beyond just ridding us of corporate logos and buzzwords, instead melding the billboards with their surroundings and leaving a mark of color love. Jump over to OX's site to see an extensive collection of work and videos showing some of the billboard transformations.

This year, legendary milliner Stephen Jones will celebrate the 30th anniversary of his design house, Stephen Jones Millinery.  To commemorate the event, Antwerp's Mode Museum is hosting "Stephen Jones & The Accent of Fashion," a comprehensive exhibition of Jones' hats and a look at his career, which has included partnerships with Jean Paul Gaultier, Comme des Garçons, John Galliano, Christian Dior and Marc Jacobs.

[Clockwise from top left: KY, 2010; Blase, 2004; Northern Lights, 2002; The Cabin, 2008]