The first time we saw the type of classic design work displayed on Grain Edit was in a past life. We were getting up there in years and could only talk about walking five miles to school in the snow and how these new patterns frightened us. This time around we’ve got a different point of view. Now we’re grateful that someone has created a site to showcase the classic design work from the 1950’s thru the 1970’s. The Oakland based Grain Edit graphic design tribute doesn’t just trumpet the creations of yesteryear, it also focuses on the work of contemporary designers who have taken inspiration from that era. Aside from displaying fine examples of vintage creations the site contains original articles and houses interviews, designer libraries, as well as images from rare design annuals and vintage kids books from their own bookshelves, amongst other things. Yes, Grain Edit is a truly wondrous playground for those interested in immersing themselves in a vintage aesthetic, but don’t take our word for it, check it out for yourself.

You might be saying to yourself, “Hey, I live in a ‘gravity defying home.’ It’s called an apartment.” And you’d be right. But, PointClickHome has a whole gallery full of slightly wackier concepts than your Upper East Side, white-pained-brick, 12′ x 9′ coffin. Architectural feats include tree houses in Java, lantern-like condo bubbles in British Columbia, and the occasional angular cube found in Scandinavian countries. Our favorite: Archangelsk, Russia’s Gangster house. This wooden tower of tower was apparently owned by a repudiated mobster that loves Frank Gehry and hates structural stability.

Dave Eggers is a modern day renaissance man. Not only is he responsible for founding McSweeney’s, but he’s got a few impressive books under his belt and also runs a writing program for underprivileged kids amongst other things. Eggers continues to make our worldly contributions feel a little less significant with his latest venture, a collaboration with Apex Art entitled Lots of Things Like This. The upcoming exhibit explores an unnamed crude, often funny, and certainly irreverent form of contemporary art that ranges from one paneled cartoon illustrations to text-based art best exhibited in the works of people like David Shrigley, Raymond, Pettibon, Nedko Solawkov and Tucker Nichols. If you’ve got a twisted sense of humor, and you find yourself in New York between April 2nd and May 10th we recommend making your way to Apex Art on Church Street in NYC to check it out.

With Polaroid film set to go the way of the dodo sometime in 2009, it's only a matter of time before the many shutterbugs who champion the photo format run out of their remaining film stock. Luckily, for fans of the non-digital instant image some of the best scene snappers have pooled some of their favorite images together so that the art form of Polaroid photography might live on forever. For The Love of Light: A Tribute To The Art of Polaroid gathers the work of twenty-five photographers from ten countries, on five continents in one breathtaking volume of photos produced with the their precious Polaroids. The book will be available in July, and hopefully will be such a roaring success that it will lead a world wide Polaroid revival and force the parent company to reconsider its stance on phasing out their film. C’mon photo fans…band together to save an endangered species before it's too late.

Founded in 1901, the Society of Illustrators is the grand mac daddy of this artistic genre. And, like every established society, once a year (for the past 50, at least) they pat themselves on the back, drink champagne, and laugh snootily in the air on what a good job they’ve all done. We imagine. In fact, we’re not really sure what goes on at one of these events, but we do know that the illustrators feted are all exceptionally good. From the political to the absurd, and minimal to ornate, the editorial show focuses exclusively on illustrations commissioned for books, magazines, journals, and online pubs. The exhibition is running until March 23rd, so if you’re in the New York area it’s worth you while to stop at the Museum of Illustration for a look at the class of 2007 (including Brain Stauffer, whom we recently profiled).

Via The I Spot

If you feel that Helvetica isn’t living up to its potential (cough, heathen, cough) and there’s nothing new about Times New, typographical design site Reserves could be the graphic tool you’re looking for. The site is the brainchild of Mike Jarboe, who uses his aesthetic brand to influence the companies like DC Skate, Globe, Nixon, 686, Transworld Snow and Skateboarding…well, a lot of board sport culture. In keeping with their urban influenced typeface and stock art, Reserve has launched a few new elements: concrete surface texture stock images, an Atari-style pixel type called Scheme, and vector art-based silhouettes of Street Style.

A super-duper music geek friend just linked me to Anthology Recordings, the first digital reissue label which, within 5 minutes, already had me tuned in to rarities I never knew even existed. Fabulous ’60s Thai go-go girl band? Check. Compelling, heart-lifting soul from Bobby Patterson? Uh-huh. Early recordings from stoner rock progenitors Sir Lord Baltimore? Yeah, baby. According to a chat with Wired, the label’s Keith Abrahamsson takes advantage of songs and albums that have outlasted their copyright dates and whose ownership have gone back to the artists themselves. It’s a good deal for everyone; you pay as little as .98 cents for a song, $9.98 for an album, and the artists get their well-deserved cash. Listening to the music samples are fun, but reading the biographies, oftentimes written by a producer or band member of the group you’re checking out, adds a personal touch you won’t find on other MP3 sites. And as if they haven’t already made us giddy with this service, all the tracks are DRM free. Which means you can listen to your purchases via the multiple methods you want but be sure to make your friends buy their own copies. It’s the right thing to do and can prove again to the big record companies that we can be responsible for the music that we adore.

Attention all fans of art in greater Los Angeles area: Overgrowth at GR2 runs from February 16th to March 12th, and it’s sure to be a doozy. The exhibit features both the solo and collaborative works of Katherine Guillen, Zachary Rossman, and Brian Rush. The three artists worked in concert on twenty mixed media compositions, each 4'' by 6'' in size, allowing each other's work to be engulfed by that of their collaborators in efforts to create stunning works that are truly a coming together of artistic minds. Their solo stuff ain't so bad either as Guillen's uses gouache paintings and prints to “explore the explore the tenuous relationship between urban and natural environments” while Rossman's collection of gouache and graphite drawings delves into the themes of “decay, isolation, and supernatural occurrences.” The pieces Rush has up his sleeve are a collection of “paintings, medium-sized mixed-media pieces, and sculptures” depicting “whimsy as a divider between ‘facts' and creativity.” So get there while the gettin's hot...or for the opening reception on February 16th.

Admit it. Ever since you were a kid, you've harbored fantasies of blasting off into the great beyond of outer space. Heck, you still read science fiction novels and imagine yourself in the role of the heroic space adventurer fighting off would be planetary conquerors and seducing aliens of the opposite sex. Unfortunately, you're no real life James T. Kirk, but you're not alone in your desire to be one. John, Veronica and Peter Kleeman know just how you feel. They have a thing for all things astronomical too. That's why they founded the Space Age Museum. Over the past 20 years, the Kleemans have assembled quite the collection of familiar objects exhibiting a certain space aged spirit; whether it's a Rocket-finned Chevy or space aged cereal toy, you'd be sure to find it included in one of their exhibits of out of this world items. However, unlike most you won't find a gift shop, but you can change that. The Kleemans are searching for artists and designers to help create products for their future shop, so feel free to lend them a hand.

There’s some innate humor in the pairing of the name “Richard Goodall” and the word “Underground.” I don’t mean this snarkily; I mean this from the same perspective that seemingly drove the online shop’s font choice (Don’t you think we should make it feel a little more gangsta?). However, there is nothing innately humorous about the shop (slash gallery; Richard Goodall Underground and Richard Goodall Contemporary are two of the UK’s leading art spaces), which, to my shock and bliss, stocks about a 18,000 posters, art toys, skate decks, books, magazines, tee shirts, and everything else. That number is slightly salted with exaggeration — but in my defense — what use is reality when reality is 1,742 posters? Aside from representing many of today’s best underground talent, the shop is the only place I’ve ever found five Kings of Leon concert posters at once — including one from their December of 2003 show with Ben Kweller (signed by the artist, Dennis Loren/selling for five pounds/beautiful). It’s sort of like Wal-Mart, except filled with tons of glorious magic instead of ex-Disney Channel-ers Christmas albums. I feel lame for not knowing about this sooner (that’s my disclaimer, sassy readers), so save yourself the same fate and scope the grounds before your friends do.

Graphic designers in the T-shirt biz collectively turn out innumerable designs every month, but it’s rare to find our favorite ones selling their creations for more than just — and sorry to be so blatant — profit’s sake. That’s not a terrible thing, of course, because everyone needs to make a living, but as a person who also provides services I’ll bet they wouldn’t mind some of that money going to a good cause. Christopher Sleboda and Kathleen Burns of Part of It thought of the same way. Why not give these artists a place to sell shirts that go to a bigger pot? So they started Part of It this year to motivate artists like Jeremyville (whose shirt is pictured) and Dustin Amery Hostetler to make shirts with graphics that specifically relate to a cause or charity of their own choosing, with all sales of that shirt going to that organization. The list runs the gamut, from the International Dyslexia Association to the Arts Commission of Greater Toledo, which are places that wouldn’t necessarily receive the attention from the population of T-shirt buyers otherwise. If you’re not in the market to add the 500th T-shirt to your closet, they’ve got an awesome selection of tote bags too.

It doesn’t take genius to figure out that presentation counts, which is why some of the more salacious or provocative record album covers have gone into the annals of music history even if the music from the album itself has been left far behind. For every well-executed cover, you can pretty much guess there’s a darn good story behind it. Quick journalists will always ask artists to share the back story, but if they brush it off in a response, just hit up Sleevage for the deal. Besides the brilliant name, the site’s got the tidbits and gossip on the most seminal of album covers. Who knew that the saucy artwork on the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers was imagined by Andy Warhol and actually bears the, um, sizable pecker belonging to someone’s assistant (and not Mick Jagger’s manbusiness)? Also, Justice’s illuminating 3-D cross on their debut was not an original idea; check T. Rex’s Electric Warrior for a comparison. Use Sleevage’s drop-down menus to navigate to your favorite album or cover artist for some big surprises.

Electronic this and downloadable that have served to smother what used to be music coupled with art. Once upon a time, the design of a cassette tape fold-out or a compact disc insert was as much a reason to purchase a particular album as the music itself…but today marks the separation of sight and sound, making music-accompanied visuals vintage, especially where vinyl is concerned.

Kavel Rafferty, commercial artist, collects herself company sleeves from the record era. An eye for deliberate design, Rafferty understandably deems record envelopes wall-worthy, and she’s sharing her little library of factory sleeves with the Web, by way of the Crossed Combs site. From the basic black on brown incarnations of both London Records and Columbia Records, to the colorful caricature-esque horn player belonging to Swedish EMI, these little record slips are big on design; Kavel’s collection is something to behold by record collectors and artists alike.

-Thea Beemer

My friends sometimes describe me as an obsessive type when it comes to things I really like, but I don't always see it as a bad thing — more often than not, it works out to someone else’s advantage. For example, I'm pretty obsessed with the Internet, and as a result, my friends are always recepients of the great things I pass on to them. That's the same spirit behind Sabadabada: a brilliant diamond hidden in the Internet rough; a heavy stockpile of Brazilian record covers from the 1960s and 1970s of tropicália, bossa nova and samba music by a devoted collector who's been adding to his collection for over a decade. Sabadabada's owner has meticulously organized the albums by labels and catalog numbers because s/he believes this method leads to more great musical discoveries. In return, we get this incredible library of vibrant images that pique interest to what the vinyl behind them inspired. Some say you can't judge something by its cover, but I’m thinking in this case that yes, you hella can.

We have been following Spear Collective Member Tom Judd’s Everyday illustration efforts since he completed a full year of daily drawings in 2005. On July 1st, he embarked on a refreshed and committed journey to complete another year’s worth of magic. Tom is going to be attending a two-year Master’s Program at the Royal College of Art in London, so I’m excited (to say the least) to see how his graduate work filters into and enlightens his Everyday portfolio. Tom also has an RSS feed for Everyday so you can have each day’s illustration uploaded, without hassle, to your RSS reader. Following Tom as he works closer and closer to his 365-day goal gives you a deep appreciation for the quality of his illustrations, but more than anything, it’s just damn impressive to see him churn out these intricate and deep works of art day, after day, after day…