We really love a spectacularly ridiculous hip hop album cover. You know, one that deploys all the common cliches with copious jewelry, fancy cars, naked women, suits, cigars, a lurking posse, toned and oiled muscles, maybe a skyline, the works. It’s hip-hop, it’s all about showing off and having fun doing it. All of those [...]

One time while were riding in the elevator in a really, really tall building one of our favorite jams came on the muzak, and we felt transported to a dark, light-dappled dance floor. We’re not sure the other people in the elevator were transported to quite the same place, and it became clear when the [...]

Though we often feel like we don’t use them enough, we really enjoy animated gifs and appreciate their artistry a great deal. We may start to do it a lot more now that Urlesque has curated a top-notch listicle of 8 Animated Gif Blogs, which is a fairly invaluable resource given how many crappy animated [...]

You may have noticed that we’re huge architecture nerds, and, to a lesser degree, comic book fans. In a weird way, though, we’re maybe even more fond of the places where science fiction and architecture intersect and help to create spectacular, imaginary new constructions. We really enjoyed Architects Journal’s vidsticle of the Top 5 Comic [...]

Today, November 3rd, is National Sandwich Day, because it’s the birthday of the man who created the food item, John Montagu (1718-1792), the Fourth Earl of Sandwich (seriously). Supposedly, Montagu invented the food during a marathon 24-hour gambling session during which he wanted to be able to eat with only one hand. The solution he [...]

You know, it’s not just people that wear costumes on Halloween–you filthy humanist!–cars, vans, buses and motorcycles gotta get their “trick or treat” on too. And we’re not just talking about the dog-mobile from Dumb & Dumber, there are innumerable real-world examples of vehicles dressing up as other things (no, not Transformers). Cool Material has [...]

We like that new technology is bringing the rest of the world up to European advertising standards, which go with the “If it’s pretty it doesn’t need to make sense” principle. Increasingly, commercials for products big and small, from every corner of the planet, are doing simple concepts with slick visual style, like those in [...]

We have no problem admitting that we’re big typography nerds. We can’t help it, we’re hopeless addicts and suckers for original and creative fonts, especially ones that are made from real world objects. As it happens, Reuben Miller’s listicle of 22 Really Creative Alphabets is full of such typefaces, our favorite of which is Jonathan [...]

Yesterday we heard the sad news that American photographer Roy DeCarava had passed away at the age of 89. One of the pioneers of a new kind of American street photography, especially between the late-40s and late-60s, DeCarava focused his lens on the desolation of the neighborhood where was spent most of his life: Harlem. [...]

As the conventional wisdom would have it, everything is for sale, so it should be no surprise that one of the most common graphic treatments we encounter is the barcode, the pattern of vertical black lines that tells us how much we owe the man. Of course, the barcode’s symbolic analogy to capitalism makes it [...]