Tumbling through inspiration

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I quite like having a tumblr account (I call it my scrapbook)—it is easy to simply add images into the visual log without much effort. Kind of addictive, actually! The images in my tumblr are mainly ones that have influenced the visual direction of UPPERCASE magazine. Colour, pattern, composition, typography, ephemera, photography, illustration, visual motifs, vintage aesthetics...

Dots, balloons, bubbles are a recurring graphic element in issue one and so you will see lots of them in my tumblr. I love the stark, graphic simplicity of these particular images from the Life archive (above) and so I referenced them for a spread in the magazine. I'm certainly not "America's Next Top Model" but it was fun to create these simple photographs.

Type Tuesday: Diti Kotecha

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This weekend I discovered the photography blog "Yesterday was dramatic, today is ok" via a google alert set for typewriters. Diti is a photographer and graphic designer in Mumbai, India and her images are stunning. She cites Sandra Juto's blog, Smosch, in her list of links. Just goes to show you how connected we all are, that this designer in Mumbai and I both visit the same blog of a Swedish illustrator!

Roni Horn Retrospective

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If you happen to be in Stykkishólmur (a small town on the west coast of Iceland) or in London, don't miss out on a chance to see New York-based artist, Roni Horn's moody and meditative photographs of Icelandic people, landscapes, and weather patterns.

To discover more about the artist's work as celebrated in the Tate Modern's retrospective, see this review by Kathleen Jamie of the Guardian.

The photographs below are part of Horn's 'You Are The Weather' series. To see more images from her  'Library of Water' installation currently on display in Stykkishólmur, click here.

Type Tuesday: Elizabeth Soule

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Elizabeth Soule uploaded these to her Flickr stream last night and they immediately caught my eye! I asked her what inspired these images:

"I found these letters at a shop, there was a whole set of them that I originally bought to spell out generic words that you would see on card, like "thank you", "happy birthday". While photographing I was really uninspired by "happy birthday" and began to play around and think of adjectives that or phrases that I like to use or hear often. I chose a solid colored background to let the letters pop and to also enhance the mood that each word made me feel. The cameras are the beginning of an idea "if these objects could talk" that I'm exploring."

Please visit Elizabeth's new shop; there are many beautiful prints and cards.

The Work-in-Progress Society

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The Work-in-Progress Society is a group I started on Flickr recently and we're already at 40+ members!

The photographs selected for the pool celebrate beauty in the unfinished. The subjects can be craft, art, design, illustration and the various tools, supplies and mess required to create the works. Whether the project ever gets finished is beside the point — we're just happy to be creating and exploring!

{Irina Troitskaya, Poketo, Think Girl, famapa, vair}

The obsolete has a new life!

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"Don't undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible."

–Edwin Land, inventor of Instant Photography

At last, someone with the vision (and money) has given life to Polaroid instant film! "The project is more than a business plan; it's a fight against the idea that everything has to die when it doesn't create turnover," says Florian Kaps, the new Austrian owner of a Dutch Polaroid film factory. The resurrection of instant film is called "The Impossible Project" and you can count down the seconds as the project develops. (Just 29,905,204 seconds to go.)

"The Impossible mission is NOT to re-build Polaroid Integral film but (with the help of strategic partners) to develop a new product with new characteristics, consisting of new optimised components, produced with a streamlined modern setup. An innovative and fresh analog material, sold under a new brand name that perfectly will match the global re-positioning of Integral Films." Excellent!

Pictures from LIFE

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When I was image searching for yesterday's Type Tuesday posts (Danny Kaye as the letter E), I stumbled into a new Google feature: the Life magazine photo archive.

"Only a very small percentage of these images have ever been published. The rest have been sitting in dusty archives in the form of negatives, slides, glass plates, etchings, and prints. We're digitizing them so that everyone can easily experience these fascinating moments in time. Today about 20 percent of the collection is online; during the next few months, we will be adding the entire LIFE archive — about 10 million photos."

I couldn't find anything about using the images online or purchasing the images for print publication, other than a link to purchase merchandise in the form of framed prints. (Images are copyright to Time Inc.)