Charley Harper is a name that should be familiar to anyone with a good knowledge of Modernist art (we've certainly mentioned him before).
For those who don’t know this work consists of stylized wildlife prints, posters and book illustrations, and now there is a range of greeting cards featuring his designs. Pictured here is the Octoberama card, an autumnal and decidedly midcentury style illustration on a 7 by 5 inches blank card.
The cards cost £2.25 each from Hus and Hem.
Here's a project and a half. Back in 1980, Johnny Stiletto bought a 35mm camera and spent the next 10 years using half a roll of black and white film each day to chronicle life in London. The result? Vintage 80s: London Street Photography.
Published by Frances Lincoln in September (but available to order now), this 176-page book follows the fashions, the hairstyles, the celebrities and the key incidents. So expect Mick Jagger, New Romantics, ra-ra skirts, Boy George, Sloane Rangers, yuppies, the IRA bombings, the Iranian Embassy siege, royal romance and…well anything else that might have happened during the decade. That's 160 unique and unscripted street photographs of London in total. Oh yes, that is Sir Francis Bacon on the tube adorning the front cover.
If you want it for your coffee table, it's discounted at Amazon right now to £12.74.
Birds often turn up in Scandinavian-inspired designs, be it folk-art style doves or owls, but the subject of this print is less common.
The Mengsel Toucan Print by Luzelle van der Westhuizen is inspired by geometric and hand-drawn patterns, particularly those found in African and Scandinavian design. The design is dominated by a bright orange colour, which adds to its retro look. The silkscreen print is available as a limited edition (although the number isn’t specified) and framed in white wood.
It costs £105 from Heal’s.
You may remember the Scandi Poster from Summerville we featured a while ago – now the same company Summerville have produced a new design on the same idea.
Where the Scandi design featured flowers, the Town Colour It Yourself poster should appeal to anyone with a love of architecture as it features rows of houses in different styles, along with passing traffic of vintage-looking cars. It has been screenprinted, but with only a black outline; the rest being left for you to colour in with pencils, felt tips or crayons as you wish.
It costs about £10 from the Summerville Etsy store.
It's predominantly purple and it features the sun, so calling it Purple Sun is probably a wise move by Shag.
His latest screenprint that is, which offers up a summer vibe and a mid-sixties feel, not to mention a surfboard, a seagull and a glamorous lady. It's an 11-colour serigraph, sized at 37 x 49cm and limited to 200, each signed and numbered by the artist.
$175 is the price, with stocks likely to sell through quickly.
If you share my endless fascination with fonts, then you’ll probably love the “So You Need a Typeface?” Print as much as I do.
The title question is printed in the centre of the page; from there you pick why you want a font and follow the Yes/No questions until you reach a font suggestion. Should you actually have a design project in need of a typeface, it could be quite useful, but for those of us with just an amateur interest in such things, it makes an interesting bit of decoration.
It costs $22 from the Felt and Wire Shop.
