{design} – Page 264 – { feuilleton }

Pasticheur’s Addiction

The Boojum Press edition of the Guide (1997).
(Frame supplied by Mark Roberts.)

A few days ago we had the CD cover meme which encourages people to create cover designs for invented groups generated by random means. In a similar vein but minus the random element there’s the growing selection of books by reclusive author Constance Eakins. A Flickr pool has been established for newly-discovered Eakins volumes and you can read more about the mysterious writer here.

This flourishing of pasticheury encourages me to post some of the cover designs I created for the various editions of The Thackery T Lambshead Pocket Guide to Invented and Discredited Diseases, a fake disease guide published in 2003 and edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Mark Roberts. The anthology featured a host of notable contributors and was great fun to work on. Although these were done in colour, they were all printed in black & white inside the book, with a shrunken glimpse of the colour versions on the rear of the dust jacket. My jacket design wasn’t used on subsequent printings so this is the first many people will have seen of these.

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The CD cover meme

Okay, here’s a web meme I can really get behind…. I’ve never been tempted to try one of those long list affairs filled with questions such as “what was your favourite breakfast cereal when you were a child?” The CD cover meme is more my kind of thing and it goes like this:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first article title on the page is the name of your band.

2. www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four words of the very last quote is the title of your album.

3. www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/
The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4: Combine all three elements in your photo editing software.

5: Share

Et voila! Without further ado I give Someone or Something Else by Tolnaftate, that well-known Berlin Techno outfit.

Someone or Something Else by Tolnaftate, Feuilleton Records, 2008.

For the record (as it were), Tolnaftate is “a synthetic over-the-counter anti-fungal agent. It may come as a cream, powder, spray, or liquid aerosol, and is used to treat jock itch, athlete’s foot and ringworm”, and the quote, I’m pleased to say, was from HL Mencken, “All successful newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend anyone or anything if they can help it; if the job is forced on them, they tackle it by denouncing someone or something else.” The pylons were unwittingly supplied by this Flickr user. Flickr has a pool devoted to this meme and they encourage you to add your own creations.

Via Sleevage which features some choice examples.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The album covers archive

Endangered insects postage stamps

Adonis Blue Butterfly.

Beautiful stamps for the second in a Royal Mail series intended to bring attention to endangered species. These will be issued on Tuesday and are designed by Andrew Ross using photography from the Natural History Museum. The Independent notes the irony of the Royal Mail printing these even as they’re building a new distribution depot at West Thurrock which will destroy natural habitats. Invertebrate Conservation Trust Buglife had tried and failed to prevent the development.

top: Silver-spotted Skipper, Red Barbed Ant, Stag Beetle.
centre: Noble Chafer Beetle, Barberry Carpet Moth, Purbeck Mason Wasp.
bottom: Southern Damselfly, Field Cricket, Hazel Pot Beetle.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Robert Lang’s origami insects
• James Bond postage stamps
• Lalique’s dragonflies
• Lucien Gaillard
• Wesley Fleming’s glass insects
• Please Mr. Postman
• Insect Lab

Atelier Elvira

Atelier Elvira (1897-98).

Seeing as there’s been a run of Art Nouveau-related posts here it’s worth mentioning a location that’s familiar to students of the Jugendstil but less well-known to the world at large. August Endell’s Atelier Elvira was a Munich studio building whose exterior decoration of a very stylised dragon creature manages to be even more exaggerated than similar work by Antoni Gaudí. Munich was the centre of German arts and crafts and produced much home-grown Art Nouveau but this eruption of bizarre plasterwork in an otherwise mundane street was still surprising. The façade was painted green, as in the tinted photo above, and the dragon painted different colours each year, yellow, red and so on.

The ironwork street entrance.

Needless to say, not everyone looked upon this kind of challenging décor favourably. In 1937 the Nazi Oberbürgermeister complained about the “hideous façade disrupting the character of the rest of the street” and had the dragon design chipped off the wall. Allied bombs did for the rest a few years later so these pictures are all that we have left.

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New coins

The coins of the realm receive a very welcome makeover following a design competition by the Royal Mint. The winning design by Matthew Dent is a surprisingly contemporary choice for such a staid institution. Although the Royal Arms shield is very traditional, the act of breaking it into pieces across the smaller coins is a clever move which makes the individual coins seem strikingly contemporary when only a small part of the design is visible. I’m looking forward to seeing these once they go into circulation.

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