Humanness not pictureness
My design for the new edition of Wolfgang Streeck’s How Will Capitalism End?, published by the wonderful folks at Verso. More of this sort of rectangly wordy...
Read Frame Type Film
Read Frame Type Film — Intrigued by MUBI’s new cine-centric publishing venture, MUBI Editions. In this first title, film curator Enrico Camporesi, graphic...
Ultramarine
Jolly nice to find my cover for Mariette Navarro’s Ultramarine on Casual Optimist’s Book Covers of Note. Other roundups are available: Literary Hub’s 13 Best...
Reprise
Behold, a new cover for Dalkey Archive Press – Reprise, collecting three volumes of short stories by Nicholas Delbanco. That’s Ida In An Interior With Piano...
Giovanelli Cleopatri
Hello hello. I’ve made my first ever Wikipedia edit! After a bit of lunchtime detective work and intense reverse image searching, I learnt that the image on...
Listing
Wrapping up the year with some illustration, book covers and movie poster madness.
Wild reading
Since the late 1950s, David Hurn has been photographing people engrossed in whatever they’re reading, from books and broadsheets to laptops and phones. His...
Posterphilia
Hello hello. Did you know it’s almost 2025? TWENTY TWENTY FIVE. Ridiculous. Anyway, if you need some specific bookends for this particular quarter-century,...
Marquee
Work in progress. Always in progress. The fascinating origins, and triumphant resurgence, of Risograph in Japan. INT’s Tokyo correspondent explores the...
Undisciplined
Hello hello. Another two-piece collage. All about the selection and finding the shape they want to be. And this one definitely wants to be a book cover. Type...
Other people's letters
Hello hello. Let us begin. We’ve just returned from Thought Bubble in Harrogate, always one of the most joyful weekends of the year. It’s not one of those...
Bury it underground
Hello hello. So I finally finished Ripley and now I’m a little obsessed with Caravaggio. Specifically, how his work appears in the show – in stark black and...
Bananapocalypse now
The whole goddamned point of the web.
Robot wilderness
Hello hello. Oh dear lord I’m trying Bluesky again. Basically just biding my time on this social network carousel until somebody revives mySpace. Seriously,...
Authentic twiddling in the dark forest
Hello hello. First up, this Fantastic talk by Erin Kissane at summer’s XOXO Festival (via Kottke), in which she talks about going offline, her time with the...
Fine holography
Nick Hornby on his approach to Substack:“I am trying to import the groove I have developed from my three-decade career. I have a lot of parts to me – sports...
Blogging to exhale
Whatever you're saying is true for about as long as you're saying it … and other bloggery insights.
Forklift in the weight room
One good thing about the current humans-vs-machines brouhaha is that a a lot of very smart people are throwing very smart words at it. Just one of many...
Lucrative muffin stand
Hellooo. Let’s with the hyperlinks already shall we now? Director Steven Zaillian and cinematographer Robert Elswit reveal the methods, ideas, and secrets of...
Trapper keeper paradiddle
Hello. I’ve mostly been listening to Station to Station on loop this week (a great standing desk album, should you need one), so productivity went out the...
Manhattan Fuji
It’ll make a new kind of sense when seen together.
Rebel Sounds
An honour to have designed Joe Mulhall’s new book Rebel Sounds, coming from Footnote in September. Photograph of The Specials fans at Leeds Carnival in 1981,...
Disintegration
Links. HYPERLINKS. This week I am mostly obsessed with Le Bon Samaritain by Charles Angrand, 1895. I know nothing about it or him, but there’s something...
The Black Star Wars logo
Continuous gentle ripples of hyperlinkage
Forton services
They had me at cream tea on arrival.
When the words run out, it stops
No solos; no decoration; when the words run out, it stops.
Woman with hands in hair
Maybe they shouldn't have been there in the first place.
Archipelagic void
No trees, no valleys, no hills, just the Archipelagic Void
Nirvanification
OK, here's an email. Let's run it up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes it.
Parthenon
Monsters and mono and other hyperlinksome things
TA-DA!
Hanging stones and drifting boxes.
The crows that ate Paris
The function and colour of ducklings in Paris.
Overinvolved
Fake history, believable space and female robots.
The ancient temple of selfish artists
Oscars and sausages and disorder.
Nobody else has ever bothered with it
Penrose Annuals, Folio Society’s Dunes, John Steinbeck’s pencils and Brian Eno’s painful originality.
The big comfy chair
Vasilis Marmatakis, Black poster art, Sunshine and Jodie Foster being cooler than you can ever hope to be.
Coastal gothique
Behold, your semi-regular supply of distracting hyperlinks.
Yellow
A hamper of pretty things, from my browser to yours.
Hubbub
This week’s beautiful rectangles – featuring chlorinated water, salty dirt roads and miserable wonderful coffee.
This is hardcore
After banging on about the majesty of black and white last week, my brain immediately decided to go another way. Typical.
Books and books and books
Because … books.
He loves me not
This week’s discoveries and delights and hand signals.
The veiled city
Your weekly assortment of mostly monochrome delights, from New Zealand to New York
Eighth grade graduation dance
This week’s discoveries and inspirations, from Chicago to Paris.
Nuts
A visual tour of my week's discoveries, from Cuba to Xanadu … via Blackpool.
The dimensions of a cave
Your weekly assortment of inspiration, fascination and procrastination.
False friends
Oily darkness! Creeps! And other things.
Silence
Another week, another journey into the absence of colour.
Sweet sweet isometry
Brace yourself for some hyperlinks.
Pair of shoes on deck, Caribbean
Your weekly hamper of visual snacks.
Making life simpler
In which our author almost comes to a horrifying realisation about his vocation but gets distracted by some teeth.
The poetry of violence
This week’s visual digest extravaganza.
Judging rectangles by their Andersons
Jumping straight into my shopping basket: 2000AD’s new collection Essential Judge Anderson: Shamballa, featuring stories written by Alan Grant and...
The Uncola
In which I somehow resist saying “geology rocks"
Grainy, grainy, grain
Squares and oblongs and suchlike that have entered my eyes this week.
Doppelgängerism
This week’s discoveries, oddities and doppelgängerisms.
Kylie’s arm life size
Pictures, pictures of pictures, pictures of things with pictures on.
Kitbashed invader
A clutch of design-related hyperlinks, distractions and invasive bashed kits.
Problem solution result
Your visual roundup of nice things that have crossed my path this week.
What was I made for?
This week’s digest of oblongular visual treats.
Limitarianism
Your weekly dose of links and waves and ripples.
Lone
This week’s visual digest to make your eyes and mind happy.
Basquiat the doormat
This week’s art and design and that kind of stuff links.
Broken noses
This week’s particularly monochromatic visual digest.
Triumphs and misfires
Yes I’m still banging on about Barbie and Threads.
Torn movie poster
This week’s visual digest, a little treat to keep your retinas busy until the weekend.
Chickens, eggs, cannonballs
Did we ever figure out what type of bird it was?
Exit Strategy West
Geoff Manaugh on Marx Ernst’s 1926 painting Forest and Sun: “I mistook the tiny white squiggles in the lower right for a procession of human congregants or...
Everything digital is now suspect
This week’s links and thinks and bangs and booms.
Not the stick
Some nice oblongs that have brought joy to my eyes this week.
The great when
Plus a shot of historical amnesia.
Where I slept
This week’s visual digest. One of them’s actually a square – try to guess which!
Waterfall rapture
Behold this week’s very finest creative distractions.
Rectangulism
This is a new thing. About rectangles. Five of them. Do keep up.
The road to hell
And other happy readings.
Crooked mast
It looks to me as if your propellers are going to have to be fixed.
Book of the future
Unabridged, unedited and un-updated.
Nothing I Know Belongs To Me
Except for Coppola’s new book, which is all pink. And my picture, which is a bit red.
Charity kill
Hyperlinks aplenty, now with added professional jealousy.
While, mean
Your weekly supply of art and design links.
Hoogspanning
And other links about other things.
Tricky Disco
Behold your weeklyish hyperlink arrangement, plus some squares and a dash of red.
Into the AI woodchopper
In which I look back to the future and despair … WITH VELOCIRAPTORS
Mitkey Astromouse
Spies! Astromice! Sauce!
Stock up on seeming nothingness
Behold your regular pile of links, now with bonus cheesemongering content.
Proudly a cheapskate
This time with considerably more dead lizard
The Island of Bad Art
Hyperlinks, unexplained sounds and weird noises
For promotional use only
Ooh I’ve just discovered you can add footnotes. Can’t imagine how that would become in any way insufferable.
Råskog
Another pile of hyperlinks, primarily of interest to stationery, architecture and Sandra Dickinson enthusiasts.
Dictionary stories
The first Meanwhile of the year! No, I didn’t forget I had a newsletter, you forgot I had a newsletter.
Airdnd
I’ve completely forgotten how to newsletter and apparently newsletter is a verb now.
K67
Another hyperlink extravaganza, typed with frozen fingers over a hot cup of cocoa. No pictures or numbers this week, just stuff, purest stuff.
Furman and Squirrel Girl
In which I report back from a little jaunt to That London.
Ahoy there from the lawyer foyer
Another round of inbox hyperlink shenanigans to distract you from that thing you need to do.
Reverses
George Eksts’ new book Reverses is a wonderfully alternative look at the V&A’s collection of works on paper, showing the marks, damage, fragments of...
Same, but different
Hello. Here are things of interest, do with them what you will. In February 1980, acclaimed street photographer Patrick D. Pagnano went on assignment to...
Post-its
Hello. Some links. Massively recommended if you want to brighten ups your twitter feed with some stunning New York street photography: follow book cover...
Galloping
I fell a little bit in love with K Young’s chaotic collages at this year’s Aesthetica Art Prize exhibition. All limbs and soft furnishings, it comes across...
Pop goes the easel
And other astonishing adventures in precognition
Lady Susan and the sniper elite
‘allo. Last week I finally watched Whit Stillman’s 2016 film Love & Friendship (based, a tad confusingly, on Jane Austen's Lady Susan rather than Love &...
Planes, ghostsigns and alien invaders
Hello, hello. Here’s this week’s link salad, featuring all the martians, lighthouses and typewriters necessary for a healthy diet. I’ve spent every spare...
OutHorsed
Yes that’s right, OutHorsed.
Roosters, Dogs
Updating you on recent designs, brutalist landscapes, the last iPod, the importance of naming objects, and 60s typography.
Hang it on the refrigerator
Hello all! This week, I’m reverting back to a good old fashioned numbered link dump format for Meanwhile, because why the heck not? There be gold in them...
Sungi Mlengeya
I found Tanzanian artist Sungi Mlengeya’s paintings … okay so I forget where. She’s been living in my browser for six months, a monochromatic oasis of calm...
Rozenn Le Gall
I first discovered Rozenn Le Gall’s work on the cover of Rebeka Elizegi’s excellent collection Collage by Women; a simple but striking juxtaposition of face...
Matt Needle Q&A
Posters by Matt Needle.
ABCD
It was a massive joy to attend the ninth ABCD (Academy of British Cover Design) awards last week, celebrating the best covers of the past year. Book design...
Beppe Giacobbe
This week, I am mostly transfixed by the work of Italian illustrator/artist Beppe Giacobbe. He’s got an incredible portfolio of editorial work to his name,...
Craig Ward × LEGO
This week I caught up with British-born/New York-based designer Craig Ward, whose work I’ve admired for years – particularly his typographic experiments with...
B. D. Graft
I keep returning to this WePresent post from a few years ago – Is it mine if I add some yellow? – that features the work of Dutch artist B. D. Graft, who has...
Gerald Brockhurst
Gerald Brockhurst
Some posters
Posters!
John Gall
Collage by commercial artist to designer John Gall.
Onlooker postcards
I got drawn into deltiologist James Brouwer’s enormous postcard collection after watching Vox’s short film on his discovery that many of them feature the...
Katrien De Blauwer
Belgian collage artist – or as she describes herself, photographer without a camera – Katrien De Blauwer has taken up permanent residence in my tabs for the...
High School High
High School High.
We Buy White Albums
We buy White Albums.
Contact
Contact sheets, lots of contact sheets.
Holograms and hypocrisy
Disappointingly few pictures of ambient cats.
One giant flat town
It is one giant flat town.
There’s a ghost in this house
Diagonal space mastery and ghosts in empty rooms.
Máximo Tuja
We kerned, we spaced, and we made this.
Sometimes I Might Be Introvert
This week’s edition comes to you from the bizarre serenity of York St Johns’ library. I came here for some peace and quiet and, quite by chance, discovered...
Olivetti pamphletti
I will never not love this poster for The Loved Ones by HelloVon, produced for Film4. I haven't seen the film, but that's entirely by the by,My favourite...
Small things
Hello all, I hope you’re coping well with the Great Indoors. I’m still plugging away here in my little studio, so do get in touch if you have any book design...
Sandbox
Hello. Inspired by the likes of Messy Nessy, Austin Kleon and Happy Readings, I’ve swung back around to the behold a list of things I like and/or have been...
Tokyo minus
Sort of like an exhale.
One thing
Communication, frustration and elation.
The discomfort of evening
How little are they? Are they like scary little?
Thinking with chalk
Who consumed so much of your power in one go? How much of the world is out of date? Have you ever seen the ending?
Fake love letters
Some kind of artly perspective magic.
Woman sleeping on gravel
Hello. Links. “We’d rather stay married” – Emily Oberman and Paul Sahre on designing with wit, coming up in the ’90s and why they’ll never work together.The...
Cannibals and Christians
The story behind the 20,000-brick Lego city that Norman Mailer built in his apartment for the cover of Cannibals and Christians. Warning: contains the words...
Cockatoo
Hello. Links? Links. Hyperlinks. Archive of Styles – A delve into Tallone Press’ collection of typefaces, absolutely stunning. Real care has gone into the...
Burglars
Peanuts in space – Commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the moon landing, Mondo have reprinted a pair of NASA safety posters to be sold at San Diego...
Happy reading
Happy Reading – I absolutely adore the new posters for Penguin Classics, by brand director Sam Voulters and designer Tom Etherington. Not sure what the long...
Trapdoor
Andrzej Pagowski – Lots to be said about the second season of Killing Eve (especially the stunning locations and costumes), but what really caught my eye...
Ottobiography
Hello, good evening, welcome. Here are the links. Ottobiography – Otto Preminger talking to Roger Ebert about his memoirs in 1977: “You know you are really...
Listing
Hello. I suppose you want some links. Ian McQue – I haven’t seen the film of Mortal Engines yet, but this collection of McQue’s concept art for it is...
Paris is burning
Paris is Burning – Janus Films are rereleasing Jennie Livingston’s documentary on the 80s drag ball scene, and have released this simple yet spectacular new...
Poor man’s Futura
Birmingham Design Festival – This week sees the return of the excellent BDF, liberally scattering wonderfulness across the second city for three days....
Wilder and Eames
Wilder and Eames – Did you know that Charles and Ray Eames gave their first ever iconic lounge chair and ottoman to their friend Billy Wilder? They later...
You don’t have to set foot on a plane
Hello. Here are some hyperlinks: Still at it – Wonderful portraits by Christopher Payne of New Yorkers who’ve been doing the same jobs for fifty, sixty,...
Add some yellow
Is it mine if I add some yellow? – collagist B.D. Graft questions the inherently infinite nature of the creative act. Extra merit for using that very...
Substantial emptiness
Diving into Kubrick's world, exploring typography psychology, attending the Thin Ice Press launch and more.
Obey the fatty text
Here are some hyperlinks. OBEY – Rough Trade have been storming this whole publishing lark of late. Craig Oldham’s new celebration of John Carpernter’s They...
He ate it
He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.
Übergang
Abandoned military checkpoints and beautiful margins.
Brutal deluxe
Joyful self-destructions, an Australian bar-brawl and a missile called Blue Steel.
No Surface All Feeling
Feuding brothers, thwarted lovers, and a lot of spoiled views.
Dinkus
But the real culprit was a teacher with an old map.
Crazy wall
Prussian blue can release cyanide, which is fun.
A lot of failure
A lot at one time at varying, sporadic points.
Gold
Of particular interest to fans of tunnels, NASA, wind and cavernousness.
Embracing chance
A study in confusion and misery.
Antilibrary
Berthold Wolpe and the wonderful world of Tupperware.
The hypothetical paperclip
The fantastically difficult and time-consuming task of turning everything in the universe into paperclips.
Janelle Monae’s new trousers
Evidence that something really happened.
Infinite present
The trees were just as green as before.
Municipal dreams
Five feet of idea space.
Axonomes
The complexity is mind-boggling.
Language Darwinism
Shorn of the distractions of its particular context.
Unmonetisable enthusiasms
Unmonetisable enthusiasms.
Chance wranglers
Who cares about being original?
Better business through scifi
Dystopia is now a commodity.
Rectangling
All about making words and pictures fit into a rectangle.
Straw camera
The joy of getting lost.
Dictionary stories
Temporal anchors, telling us where we’ve come from.
AIEE to Z-ZWAP
AIEE to Z-ZWAP.
Albers in command
Ergodic, and other splendid words.
Defy the staircase!
Defy the staircase!
Arrival at the design happening
Do you need me to draw you a picture?
Philosopher’s jumper
The beginning is the end is the beginning.
Slogan yourself cube
Mechanistic process and the captured eighties.
Girls girls girls
Like punk never happened.
Imprint tendrils
I never thought it would happen with me and the girl from Clapham.
Design and pies
Design and news and pies.
Skeleton apocalypse
Flying saucers and skeleton apocalypse.
Client behind the curtain
Marble notebooks and words we don’t say.
Scents and sense ability
Irrefutability abounds.
Gobblefunk, bunkledoodle, swishfiggler
Maman est morte.
Grief digest
It’s niche that.
Fundamentally dystopian
A flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles.
Ultimatum ponytails
Look back and laugh at your intense drive.
The form of the book
Too commercial? Not commercial enough? Too few cats?
Chicken footprints
Marginalia and failure.
Printly nosegay
Meanwhales.
Cop not cup
H is for Hawke.
Sterile non-places
The princess was in another castle.
Zigfrid von Underbelly
A long snakelike progression of pages.
Theological sci-fi
A procedure for moving through labyrinths.
The physics of hell
The hotels were ignored.
Eagle versus drone
The most merciful thing in the world is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
Antibookclub
Hello hello. Here are some things. Who lives in the Barbican Estate? — Photographer Anton Rodriguez shoots and interviews residents of London's brutal...
Spite house
The northern boy inked his toothbrush.
Jakku chic
Let yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit bottom.
Bowie
David Bowie RIP.
A roll of tape in a box
A roll of tape in a box, essentially an office supply.
Jagged teeth of the city
Exploring London's invisible forces, MIDI magic, typography's truth, Lego colors, book cover art, Star Wars sounds, London estate stories, Broadway typography, China's ghost cities, and travel tales.
Here, judge this
Here’s what you want for Christmas.
Phillumeny
Jackets, stamps and old hats.
Not just roughs
Increasingly irrelevant in the continual and independent interaction between objects.
Beneath the surface
It had to happen this way.
Quake column
A stroke and a dot creates a universe.
Fearfulness, tyranny, kindness
… and Faber
Throw the dice
Gentlewomen and smiling business men holding basketballs.
Secondary abandonment
In summary: tomorrow is a cannibal.
Index cards
In which hell freezes over.
Chromophobia
In summary: horse skull disco.
TeddyBär
The claw chooses who will go and who will stay.
Hairy-faced men
Songs about fonts, semicolons and the dreaded shrinks.
To cocktail
Ten more things to push gently into your brain-jelly.
Hole foods
Here are some things for your brain to nibble on.
Chalk
This time it's a list!
The timbre of timber
Robert Macfarlane reflects on the wistful archetype of childhood adventure: the humble tree house.“The trees become his house; he learns to sleep cupped by...
808 forever
This week: a horrible sense of panic.
Shoe, house, hat, butcher, wizard, cloud
This week: growing elaborate and careless with the passage of time.
Barbed
This week: a servant to pragmatism.
Brazilian Indian Telephone
This week: terrestrial sonar.
Ruins of the future
This week: all the flesh has been removed.
Periscope up
This week: memories of the space age.
Lexicalized into compounds
This week: sooner or later everything turns into television.
Roomba anklet
Vacuum cleaners, chicken bones, vague promises, centripetal privilege and academia nuts.
Rocky II
Spotlight on filmmaking, the power of short reads, speculative zoology, punctuation changes, and the allure of faces versus backs.
A catalog of readymades
Diving into the dazzling world of book cover design, the subliminal power of city fonts, the knotty science of naming products, the cunning uses of invisible ink, and the subjective nature of heroism in movies in this week's reading roundup.
One
Uncovering the buffalo sentence mystery, critiquing Earth's creation, exploring Amy Poehler's wisdom and new museum tech!
