I don’t think I have been this excited about design in a long time; to me this is as close to perfection as is humanly possible. I was checking out Grain Edit before bed last night and came across a post about the Latvian magazine, Jauna Gaita (The New Course). I’ve never seen so much great design collected in one place for one purpose. The magazine is still in print and you can view over 50 years of covers here. Thanks so much to Dave at Grain Edit and his sources for turning me on to this great source of inspiration. This is the sort of stuff I am compelled to re-design in large format just to print up some posters for my house.

Incidentally I am flying home from Lisbon in a couple hours; sort of sad to leave as I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked teo really take in the city. But there’s a lot of work to be done back home so it’s time to go. On Thursday I fly to Los Angeles to proof the Barack Obama poster so I should have some shots from that posted up soon.

Took these shots of some amazing tiled designs in the Baixa area of Lisbon yesterday.

Yes sir, Mr. Crouwel. Via FFFOUND via insect54.

Apparently Super Bock is like the Budweiser of Portugal; it’s literally everywhere. Caught these kegs stacked up in the warehouse behind the OFFF festival at LX Factory. From the right angle the name reminds me of a nice album by a certain Scottish music duo.

Boards of Canada – Everything You Do Is A Balloon

[audio:balloon.mp3]

The festival has kept me pretty busy since we arrived so I haven’t had much time to walk around and get some pics. The first day / night I was able to get a few though, they are all from the Campo Pequeno area. We’ll have a couple extra days after OFFF is over to really explore, planning to get some bikes and ride all over this place. Really excited for that, from what I’ve seen there is a lot of visual stimuli out there just waiting to be shot. Still sort of limping along here with my Nikon D80. I’ve found ways around most of my big gripes with it but being at the OFFF I’ve seen a lot of people toting around their 5D’s and D400’s, been getting jealous.

Via FFFFOUND

Shepard Fairey has re-designed the covers for two of George Orwell’s classic novels: his dystopian masterpiece, 1984 and his totalitarian allegory, Animal Farm. I can’t think of a better artist to tap for such a task, these two concepts fit nicely with the decidedly cynical slant of Shepard’s work. I really like his take on the covers, but must admit that the minimalist / modernist in me is still partial to Art Brenner’s original for Animal Farm (above).

More greatness from Mr. Aicher Via rallovallo

Here’s an incredible video of Elliott Smith apparently recording Angeles live in a living room. Amazing that they’re getting such great sound from one mic picking up both the guitar and the vocals. I use 3 mics just to capture one acoustic guitar, which might be overkill. I have been experimenting with mic’ing drums using just one condenser room mic placed at a good distance and a dynamic on the bottom of the snare only with decent results. (thanks to Dusty Brown for that technique)

I’m not sure "liveblogging" is even a word but I’m posting this from the booth at OFFF Lisbon so I suppose it’s fitting (the WiFi actually works this year!). All the above images are from today’s festivities, it’s about 3pm right now so we’ve a bit to go still. The beer is flowing and the sun is shining so come out; even if you don’t have a ticket you can hang out in the main area where there’s lots of people, food, and drink. So far Lisbon has been great, judging by the things I saw out the window on the cab ride from the hotel to the event I have a lot of walking around to do once I have a spare minute.