Drawn! the other day had a link to this treasure trove of retro illustrations, posters, books, covers, and pretty much everything else committed to print, and an on-link to the Mid-Century Illustrated Flickr pool. Looking through these is a bit like browsing ffffound, you keep finding things you want to keep links to… or just keep. I tend to want to redraw things, as I find it helps me understand how it was done a bit better and I often learn some new technique or style, or get inspiration for something else. I particularly liked the Black Pearl cover — it’s an engaging and compelling image, but made with just three colours. No halftones or tints either. I didn’t redraw this, I just used clean-up techniques to recreate it:

The Aircraft Propulsion Data Book is interesting as the curve appears smooth and aerodynamic, but under close examination it seems a bit… well, clumsy. Still, that’s the kind of thing that interests me — for example, when doing things like icons the details can seem crude and ugly up close but at their intended size provide useful (and subtle) clues on how to interpret the whole image.

Also in the sets of images are various examples of very nice typography, these two caught my eye in particular:

And linked from the Photo Lettering one, this beautiful, beautiful thing:

Then, finally, no collection of mid-century illustrations would be complete without at least one retro-futurist image, so here’s a fabulous subway illustration by Klaus Bürgle:

This advert for the Zurich Chamber Orchestra has been linked from several design related sites (I can’t remember where I first saw it), but all of them were linking either to Zapp Internet or to YouTube, both of which only had low quality and low resolution versions. For animations with such fine detail as this has, you really need to see the clean, high-res version to appreciate it fully. So, a good few Google searches later, and I’ve found this article on Llámame Lola, which not only carries a link to the MPEG but appears to be the originator of the Zapp upload. My paraphrased translation of their description, which is, to be fair, a bit random:

Here’s a great commercial for the Zurich Chamber Orchestra made by the agency Euro RSCG Zürich. Recently the orchestra carried out a concert in Spain with the Swiss flautist Emmanuel Pahud, at the Palau de la Música in Valencia. For the opening night last week, Emmanuel Pahud performed with the ZKO under the direction of Giovanni Antonini, the Flute Concerto nº7 by Devienne.

Also, I was intrigued by the ZKO logo, and not immediately finding any PDFs containing a high-res version of that either, I decided to redraw it, as is my wont. It’s a beautiful logo, and probably is the subject of much jealousy by other orchestras.

You may need to download VLC to play the video from Llámame Lola as Quicktime claims it’s not a valid video file. Go figure.

In 2005 The Royal Mint announced a competition to design six of the eight kinds of coin in circulation in Britain, the first full redesign of the coins since decimalisation in 1971. Open to everyone and with a top prize of £30,000, they received 4000 designs from 500 people, and I just saw on the news that the final designs have been completed and the first coins ready for issue. Not only that, but the £1 coin is now included in the redesign, and somewhat appropriately becomes the uniting element of the set.

You can tell they were done by a graphic designer; even with the complexity of the Royal Arms, the designs are clean and sparse, with pleasing variation in placement of the inscription, and on the 20p there is a sense of refraction through the thick border of the coin. Just take a look at them though, they’re fantastic, in fact, they’re astounding — I can hardly believe that these are actually official coins of the real United Kingdom, instead they look like they’re from some sleek, efficient, science-fiction alternate-universe version of the country.

The one thing that gives me pause in the whole process is the thought that we won’t be seeing any more of the beautiful 50 pence designs. I’m not exactly a numismatist but I do enjoy seeing the new designs every couple of years or so. I suspect that the one coin not included, the £2, will continue to have commemorative designs on it. I wonder when we’ll get a £5 coin actually in circulation?

While researching this article, I was looking through earlier coin designs on the Royal Mint site, and I notice the 1948 Half Crown used the Royal Arms as well, but with a more elaborate shield design. I think it’s rather attractive, and I’m intrigued by the crowned GG ligature either side of the shield.

UPDATE: Daring Fireball linked to this amusing comparison between the new coin designs and the new design of the US five dollar bill.

There are many collections of vintage posters on Flickr, most of them full of the mundane, rather than the classic. What makes an old poster a ‘classic’ anyway? Does it have to have inspired a whole style of advertising, or be an exemplar of a particular style, be well-executed or just be by someone famous? I guess it doesn’t really matter, it seems it just has to be old and have survived to be scanned in and shoved online. It’s nice though when you find some good examples in these collections. I particularly like some of the (depressingly low-resolution) scans on this collection, especially the lettering on the Volga one, which I nearly missed thanks to Flickr’s brutal it-must-be-square thumbnail cropping.

I’ve had this great gallery of technical illustrations open in a tab for a little while now, and if you’re at all into super-detailed diagrams it’s well worth a look. The one of the fan (below) is my favourite. Via Chris Glass.

Farm animal, curiosity or pet? Check out the big cat in this one.


Multiple forms of diversity in one happy package.

In the future, we will all have very low, flat cars, road signs will be hard to read, we will have genetically modified pets and will build large industrial entertainment complexes in areas of astounding natural beauty. That’s the future according to these amazing 1960s illustrations from United States Steel International, by Syd Mead*. Naturally, the implication is that we will be using lots and lots of steel, and will continue to use it to make sleek, shiny cars.

It’s strange how these pictures remind me of a book I had at primary school (I was about 7) which showed two possible futures. One was positively pastoral, with blue skies, happy people cycling along clean white paths through a garden city. The other showed what would happen if we didn’t reduce our energy dependency (apparently), and showed gigantic skyscrapers looming against brown, smoggy skies, with traffic jams and people wearing gas masks. They were both illustrated in an almost identical style to these retro futurist ones, and showed almost the same subjects — they could have been taken directly from this series.

I was going to make a point that all the people in the pictures are white, but there does appear to be one little nod to diversity in there (snippet at right). I think it’s a woman, but the face… ahem.

The lettering on the signs reminds me of the information screens from 2001.

Update: * Thanks to Angel Dominguez for the name

I was looking through my site earlier trying to find an article about Ian Kim’s work, and found that somehow I hadn’t done one. I’ve admired his work for a while, especially the piece below. I was doing some work today that needed illustrations of books flying around (right) and wanted to look at it again for inspiration.

As you can see, my style is rather different (I love working with vectors) but it’s always good to acknowledge your inspirational sources! The similarity in colours is entirely coincidental — the project I’m working on has a scheme of red and blue already!

Make sure to have a look at the ‘personal’ section on the site too, as there are some powerful images, some on some emotive and important subjects.