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A drawing by Lucille Clerc. • The usual imbalance of heat versus light this week but Kenan Malik and Teju Cole had some worthwhile things to say. Related: Atlantic illustrators respond to the events of Wednesday. And some history: covers of Charlie Hebdo‘s parent magazine, Hara-Kiri, whose legacy of bad taste and confrontation was overlooked […]

Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet of the 1920s is one of the more famous products of the Bauhaus movement, a radical reinvention of the medium which encased the dancers in cumbersome costumes. The outfits and stage designs are familiar from Bauhaus histories but you’re less likely to see an actual performance, something that’s possible with this […]

I wrote something about French designer and architect René Binet (1866–1911) a few years ago while exploring the creation of the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900. Binet designed the remarkable monumental gate that formed the entrance to the exhibition, a structure that demonstrated his proposal that natural forms might replace historical pastiche as a basis […]

The Crystal Gazer (or The Magic Crystal, 1904) by Gertrude Käsebier. Once again the annual review of artists/designers/photographers featured in the weekend posts arrives at the beginning of the new year rather than the end of the old. Scroll down to see what caught my attention over the past twelve months. We Are The Water […]

The Crystal Gazer (or The Magic Crystal, 1904) by Gertrude Käsebier. • “I had to resort to extreme violence”: how Hipgnosis revolutionised the album sleeve. Aubrey Powell, last surviving member of the design team, talks to Joe Muggs. • Mixes of the week: Radio Belbury: Programme 14; The Conjurer’s Hexmas by SeraphicManta; Secret Mix 139 […]

Photo of the author by Linda Moorcock. I mentioned a few days ago that I had another new piece of work to reveal, and this is it, a poster/promotional piece for Russell Wall’s forthcoming documentary about Michael Moorcock. The main challenge with one was to create something that would give a sense of Moorcock’s extensive […]

The Road To Ruin (1970) by John & Beverley Martyn. Art: Un Semaine de Bonté (1934). Having already looked at cover art featuring the work of Salvador Dalí and René Magritte, a similar post for Max Ernst seemed inevitable. I did search for Ernst cover art after the Dalí post but at the time there […]

The Atomic Mr Basie (1957) by the Count Basie Orchestra. A few more examples and this would have been part of the ongoing Design as virus thread. A recent post at MetaFilter led to this piece about the use and misuse of photos of nuclear tests. The Count Basie album above appears there, a cover […]

This weekend I was at the Louder Than Words music conference in Manchester to meet Peter Bebergal, author of Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll, and Mark Pilkington of Strange Attractor. By coincidence the event was hosting a discussion about goth music and culture based around The Art of Gothic, […]

Plague doctor mask by Tom Banwell. Last month I wrote a little about the Steampunk: Art of Victorian Futurism exhibition that’s been running since the beginning of October in Beijing, this being the same event that was staged in Seoul earlier in the year. Five of my book cover designs have been featured in these […]

Data 70, a typeface by Bob Newman. The presence of electronic artists Data 70 in the Spatial mix at the weekend had me thinking about the preponderance of cultural items that were given “70″ as a suffix in the 1960s or in the year 1970. The air of futuristic optimism in the 60s drew attention […]

Alchemical Stone (2014) by Daniel Lasso Casas. Via full fathom five. • “I am unsure if this reality is an everyday one. We don’t know if the universe belongs to a realist genre or a fantastic one, because if, as idealists believe, everything is a dream, then what we call reality is essentially oneiric.” Jorge […]

“Iconic” is a much abused word these days but this book from UK publisher Counter-Print can claim the term with some justification: Icon contains over 200 examples of social media icons from many well-known, as well as up-and-coming, graphic designers and illustrators. This limited and concise canvas for self-expression is represented within this book through […]

Forget Me Not (no date) by Caitlin Hackett. • Halloween brings out the articles about weird fiction: “No one would now write of [HP Lovecraft] as the critic Edmund Wilson did, in the New Yorker in 1945: ‘The only real horror in most of these fictions is the horror of bad taste and bad art.’ […]

Painting from the poster art for The Highbury Working (2000) by Alan Moore & Tim Perkins. Unlike last year, this year’s CafePress calendar arrives on time, its creation being eased by the fact that it’s a reworking on an earlier version. The idea with the previous Heaven & Hell calendar had been to alternate various […]

Cover art by Arik Roper. Peter Bebergal’s Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll was published this week. Articles about rock music’s occult preoccupations have been a recurrent feature of music magazines, especially around Halloween, but Bebergal’s book is the first attempt at a wide-ranging, full-length study. Despite the subtitle, the […]

Polish poster (1965) by Jerzy Skarzynski who was also the film’s production designer. I love The Saragossa Manuscript, both the novel by Potocki and the movie by Has. I saw the film three times which, in my case, is absolutely exceptional. Luis Buñuel in My Last Sigh (1983) No surprise that a lifelong Surrealist was […]

Untitled (2007) by Remko van Drongelen. • Another week, another Kickstarter project: Frank Woodward’s 2008 documentary, Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown, was an excellent study of HP Lovecraft’s life and work featuring interviews with John Carpenter, Neil Gaiman, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Peter Straub, Guillermo Del Toro and leading Lovecraft scholar ST Joshi; the film also […]

Those covers everyone likes. My designs for KW Jeter’s steampunk novels from Angry Robot and Tor Books. When I wrote a brief history of steampunk for Eye magazine last year I ended by somewhat provocatively declaring that until something better appeared this was the defining aesthetic of the moment. A year later, the movement (if […]

White, Red and Black (1949) by Marlow Moss. • British television’s greatest director, Alan Clarke, rates on the cult scale here for his work on Penda’s Fen but his career was long, uncompromising and still hasn’t received the full appraisal it deserves. His more violent dramas—Scum, Made in Britain, The Firm, etc—have all appeared on […]