Mr. Zero Punctuation

I was a little late in catching onto Mr. Zero Punctuation [Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw], an English video game reviewer for The Escapist magazine. A few scant months back, a co-worker of mine played Croshaw’s review of The Orange Box for me (knowing that I was a huge fan of the game) – and I found myself really not only bowled over by the quality of the review itself, but in the funny and unique presentation. Obviously, the guy gets his moniker from his verbal delivery… he snarkilytalksreallyfastandgetsinalotinaveryshortamountoftime – but the accompanying minimalist / information graphics-style animations are so simple, subversive, and friggin’ fast that you NEED to be paying very close attention to be getting all the jokes, cross-references, jabs, and barbs.

Hell, I’m even not the world’s biggest gamer (in fact, I remain blissfully unaware of most of the games he reviews), but whatever… I could watch this guy review breakfast cereal.

Check him out either via The Escapist or his blog.

Beautiful Losers

In the early 1990’s a loose-knit group of like minded outsiders found common ground at a little NYC storefront gallery. Rooted in the DIY subcultures of skateboarding, surf, punk, hip hop & graffiti, they made art reflected the lifestyles they led…

 Watch Trailer

The Superest Super-Something Ever

“The Superest is a continually running game of My Team, Your Team. The rules are simple: Player 1 draws a character with a power. Player 2 then draws a character whose power cancels the power of that previous character. Repeat.”

Silliness abounds from Kevin Cornell & Matthew Sutter.

The Superest

(via Drawn!)

SAW WAS

Stephen Doyle is a graphic designer who sculpts words that mess with meaning. Design Observer have a fantastic write up about him with some beautiful examples of his work. His hand-built words toy with your brain in only the most fun and profound ways. He’ll have you looking for your exacto knife.

Design Observer

My New Ffffound Ffffriend!

Ffff**k! What a simple and beautiful idea to capture and display images you come across in various internet wanderings. I tend to pull images off of sites and place them into my ‘wallpaper’ folder, which then becomes a designy screensaver. My biggest complaint about my own system is the lack of metadata in the image: I don’t know where it came from once I have copied it onto my drive. Ffffound fixes this problem, creating a social medium for bookmarking images. The EXTRA bonus is the recommendations and associated images that come with every picture. You can easily spend hours meandering through hundreds (soon to be thousands and then millions) of images. I will be first in line when this comes out of private beta.

Ffffound (with 4 F’s) describes itself thusly:

FFFFOUND! is a web service that not only allows the users to post and share their favorite images found on the web, but also dynamically recommends each user’s tastes and interests for an inspirational image-bookmarking experience!!

Look for a new wave of sites to be named with four consonants now, instead of missing vowels. I’m serious!

Link via Daniel Burka on Pownce.

IdeaFixa Treasure Trove

 

Ideafixa.com is a cool publication. It’s an e-mag that publishes bimonthly on specific themes. Issue 8 is Self-Portraits. While that has all the hallmarks of student disaster, the quality of the work is very impressive. The depth of the collection is fantastic, you just keep turning page after page after page. A lot of the work comes from South America and it’s  refreshing to get exposed to the talent of the South. There is also a bio section for some of the artists which makes for some interesting reading. They work on a submission policy and the next theme is Food. So get out your pencils, camera, wacom, emo, etc and try and overwhelm the curators with your genius.

IdeaFixa

The Politically Incorrect Alphabet

Inspired by Dick Bruna’s Miffy, The Politically Incorrect Alphabet was supposed to just be a cute little one-off creative joke created by one Mark Jones to taunt his wife (who just happens to be a kindergarten teacher). Of course, ‘project creep’ sunk in and the effort snowballed.

As an online alphabetic flash-card set, it’s equally offensive, cute, fun, inspiring, stupid, useless, awesome, and completely politically incorrect (hence the name, duh). Most of the illustrations were inspired by suggestions culled from the site’s various forums (one for each letter).

It doesn’t look like it’s been updated in about a year, but I guess that’s what happens to weird stuff like this on the web – sooner or later, anyone can discover and ‘explode’ it.

Be sure to check out the additional downloads and look for animated easter eggs.

A Quick Art Culture Catch Up

A friend asked to see some art that I reckon is fairly decent at the moment. Instead of hiding it in an e-mail, let me share with everyone. I’ve blogged about most of these people or sites before but there’s no substitute for an easy to click blog post to get motivated to look again. So, in no particular order, here’s some food for thought:

Serious Painting

Painting removed by artist’s request

John Copeland – Probably my favourite painter at the moment.

Slightly Different Painters

Jim Woodring – A great contemporary Surrealist

Jeff Soto – Giant robots and rainbows never looked this good. Jeff’s work has been translated into a short film by 3 Legged Legs. It’s amazing to see this fine-art-street-type style in motion.

Ashley Wood – Famous for concept art, comic books and being a “little” brash at times. He paints on real boards and sells the original pieces to collectors. He qualifies as a real artist.

Interactive Media

Hoogerbrugge – A Netherlands artist who uses drawings of himself to lay waste to the repititions of modern culture. Or something like that. This music video is the quick sampler of his work but check out the website for classic focussed Hoogerbrugge.

Kooky

Michel Gagne – This is his 6th book, Frenzied Fauna: From A to Z.

ICanHasCheezBurger -The meme called Lolcats is something that many would not consider to be art, but it has been accepted adopted by the masses and shares some of the traits of art: visual aesthetic, an underlying theory, self-imposed executional rules, a sense of history. Is it -ism or is it -crapism? Will people in 100 years time have retrospectives of Lolcats? And in case you think I’m writing total rubbish look up the definition of Art.

Where to find more

Artshole – A UK listing for art
Art Krush – The e-mail publication and this list will see you right.
Drawn! – All about Drawers!

The Ghastly Tribbles: Edward Gorey Does Star Trek

Here’s another sci-fi genre-bending mash-up mixer: imagine Star Trek’s most memorable episode, The Trouble With Tribbles, as written and illustrated by Edward Gorey. Special thanks to Shaenon K. Garrity, who brought this send up to life.

(via Metafilter)

Bite Me

 

I’m always on the looking for talented people who make ad guys appear to know what they’re doing (I need all the help I can get). Bite Animation are one of those crews. They’re a small motion graphics & design studio in Johannesburg who’ve done some impressive work for some very picky creatives. They’ve just relaunched their website so go visit them.  If you’re a fan of heavily layered illustration you’ll enjoy the experience.

Bite Animation