Friday Favourites

These pixel portraits have been created by artist/designer Hjortefar, for Danish fabric brand Kvadrat as part of their Hallingdal 65 project. They asked 32 talented designers to come up with new ways of using the Hallingdal 65 textile, which was originally created by Nanna Ditzel. Hjortefar’s portraits are entitled ‘BUM and NANNA’ – after two people behind the brand (more about the story behind the portraits here), using 29 different colours and around 7200 pixels per portrait. Check out more images, and a video of the making of the pictures on If It’s Hip, It’s Here. English people can stop sniggering about the name BUM now.

These cars bring a whole new meaning to the term ‘cut and shut’. These were found on set of a new Michel Gondry film currently being shot in Paris, and posted up on the Blenheim Gang blog. I love the way there’s just something a bit wrong about them, but they manage to still look kind of right. The film The Foam of Days (or will it be called Mood Indigo?) is due to be released in 2013, and has been adapted from the book by Boris Vian.

Comic artist Chris Ware has drawn this week’s cover of The New Yorker, which is entitled Mother’s Day. I love his style – his work has appeared in the magazine several times since 1999, and in this article he discusses the New Yorker covers that inspired him. Thanks to James for finding this one.

Thanks to Iona for sharing this: “I watched this over the weekend and thought it was fantastic: John Cleese on creativity (way back in 1991). The section I particularly liked was on making the time to play, and achieving a balance between playing (creativity as creative thinking) and doing (creativity as creation). Funnily enough (boom boom) he also talks a lot about the importance of humour even on extremely serious topics. After all – humour is about making connections and making connections is the first point of creativity.” Found via Brainpickings.

This week I was reminded of a personal creative favourite of mine, when I  heard the sad news of the death of David Weiss, who was one half of artist duo Fischli & Weiss. They were most famous for their film Der Lauf Der Dinge (The Way Things Go) – a film of an installation where a long chain of assembled objects interconnect, like a Rube Goldberg machine (echoed in Honda’s Cog ad). Their retrospective at the Tate Modern a few years ago showed a fantastic scope of work, including photography, sculpture, performance and installation, all centred around common themes of normality and the everyday. Their work made you look at the banal with fresh eyes, which is always inspiring, and the humour in the work always made me smile – particularly the sausage photographs. The photos above are from their installation of small clay sculptures: ‘Suddenly this overview’ – more on Design Boom.

Fischli & Weiss - 'At the carpet shop' from Sausage Photographs 1979

Here’s a shorter version of Der Lauf Der Dinge but you can find the full 30 minute version in three parts on YouTube.

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