My friend Tito and I were talking about paintings and stuff this weekend. He’s been saying how he’s over portraits, that he needs more than just a face. I told him an image with a person in it is way more interesting to me than one without. He agreed but said that there’s things that the portrait doesn’t capture, like gesture and connections. I’d say that Rune Guneriussen has accomplished specifically what me and Tito were looking for: Gesture and connection without humans. Or something like that, I dunno. Check him out. He plays with light really well.

Still tweaking that big post I mentioned Friday. I’ll try to get it ready for tomorrow.

Check out Jersey-based renaissance woman Kristen Lepore. I could take or leave the illustrations, but her demo reel is something to be remembered.

While combing the webs for a good book cover design for this weeks entry of BBCDW, I came to realize something: Most book cover designs fucking suck. Well, fiction at least. There’s more bad out there than good is all I’m saying. So, not really trying to spread any negative vibes around the earth, but it’s just easier to find bad book covers than it is to find good ones. If a real gem comes down the pike, I’ll shine a light on it.

So. Chabon. What the fuck. You used to be able to count on this guy for some cool looking shit. WTF happened? That subtitle font looks like those little plastic refrigerator magnet letters you had as a kid. Only a designer who’s truly given up could not see that. Anyone know the name of that font? Bob? I propose we address the Lords of Typography and have it stricken from the National Font Conservatory.

On an unrelated note, DON’T FORGET.

Looks like Nordic illustrator Esra Roise’s site got a bit of a makeover. It also looks like she’s moving beyond the hyper-realistic pencil drawings she’s famous for and is moving into more collage and water-color type stuff. Exciting!

The Dark Side of Planet Earth from mrcorbtt on Vimeo.

Design student Allan Corbett mashed Dark Side of the Moon with the first episode of Planet Earth. Just when you thought smoking weed to either of these things couldn’t get any better.

Irena is a hugely talented artist from the Ukraine. Go here to check out all her beautiful monsters.

If you don’t know anything about Raquel Aparicio then you should strongly consider checking yourself. We were lucky enough to have her contribute some work for the new issue (release date to be announced soon, btw) and it’s phenomenal. While searching for her web address I came across this:

I feel lucky to have met this person, if only through the internet.

Here’s a taste of the fruits of me and Bob’s labor. Well, Bob’s labor mainly. I mostly sit around being fed grapes by young Argentinian women and shoot all of Bob’s ideas down whenever he surfaces from the design dungeon.

So this is the new cover. The image is by Justin Gibbens. More on him, and other contributors, in the future. Enjoy this for now and brace yourself for the issue #4 hype train.

From the department of freaky Friday: Go spend some time in John Casey’s wild wonderful world.