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Archived posts: August 2010

M is for Men

We’re a bit late with this one, but you’ve still got just over a week to catch illustrator James Graham’s little show M is for Men at House of Propellers. James does a lot of work for Esquire magazine, and this show features a selection of limited edition silkscreened and foil-blocked prints based on the illustrations he’s done for the magazine. The foil-blocked prints (below) are especially tasty, and at £25 a pop, great value. You can also pick up a single colour print called M is for Men for a donation of just £1! Brilliant.

25 August 2010 | No Comments

The Art of War

We were doing a bit of research this morning, and stumbled across a really fantastic archive of wartime poster art and illustration, courtesy of the National Archives’ Art of War online exhibition. There’s a wealth of beautiful stuff on display, featuring a lot of original artwork, including Patrick Keely’s 1940s Road Safety poster (above), a Carless Talk Costs Lives poster by Reeves (below left), and Reginald Mount’s Hawker Hurricane poster (below right).

That then reminded us to post about (and order our own copy of) Paul Rennie’s rather lovely book Modern British Posters, published recently by Black Dog Press, which features a vast range of 20th Century British posters, including the three below.

Mmmm. Posters.

25 August 2010 | No Comments

Free Veer Ts

The good folks over at Veer (the stock image & font library) have recently revamped their site, and in an attempt to coerce us into blogging about it are letting us have five of their Creatives Understand t-shirts to give away to you lot, totally free.

We’re generally a bit wary of this blog becoming a mindless promotional tool for PR machines, but we’ve always liked the way Veer works, so we’re happy giving them a quick nod. If you’d like one of their t-shirts*, just drop us a comment in the box below (make sure you fill in the email box) telling us what size you’d like (XS to XXL), and we’ll give you a shout.

They’ve also asked us to mention that they’ve got a 25% discount thing going with their various of their fonts over what’s left of the summer

*First come, first served; one per person; UK only

UPDATE – Thanks for entering folks – competition’s now closed, and we’ll be sending out the t-shirts to the five winners mighty soon.

23 August 2010 | 10 Comments

200 posters, screenprinted for free…

Print maestro Robert Gaddie dropped a poster through our door yesterday (that’s a detail from it above) to promote a rather tidy offer that he’s currently running on his CrayFish blog: put together a design for a screenprint poster (A2, up to 4 line colours, to print onto any Colorplan paper you like), send it in to him, he’ll pick his favourite, and print 300 of them, totally free. You get 200, he gets 100. They’ll be printed up in time for Christmas too.

Good eh?

17 August 2010 | No Comments

Limbo

We don’t cover games much here on We Made This, but every now and again a really distinctive game comes along that really deserves a wider audience, and Limbo is just such a game.

The game has recently been released on Xbox Live Arcade by Copenhagen games studio Playdead,  and it’s a truly beautiful experience. The game is a 2D platform game, where the main protagonist is a small boy who awakes in a sinister and gloomy forest. You  guide the boy through the forest, and through a series of increasingly complex puzzles. The whole game is set in a stunning black and white landscape (Jim Jarmusch’s film Dead Man leaps to mind), and the boy is animated like a sort of shadow-puppet Pinocchio, hopping and skipping his way through a world inhabited by giant spiders, gangs of other lost boys, and peril at every turn.

A truly great game – here’s hoping it crosses to other platforms mighty soon.

15 August 2010 | No Comments

A field guide to love & typography

The good folks over at FontShop have just launched their Education page, which features a series of really rather helpful documents about all things typographic.

The first of these, Meet Your Type: A field guide to love & typography, looks at the elements of typography, typeface selection, typographic details and buying fonts (of course). It’s a really good primer, looking at kerning, leading, letterspacing and so on, all written in Erik Spiekermann’s enjoyably quirky style.

There’s a Type Tips document too, which looks at capitalisation, en and em dashes, tabular figures, speech marks (or smart quotes), ligatures, justification and bullet marks.

All in all they work as a great introduction to typography. Take a look.

5 August 2010 | No Comments