Oh Nicoletta Ceccoli! My friends know me too well. For my birthday last year, my BFF gave me Kate Bernheimer’s book The Girl Inside the Castle Inside the Museum which Nicoletta illustrated. Ceccoli has illustrated many books in her home country of Italy, but also the US and the UK but The Girl Inside the Castle Inside the Museum is my favorite by far.
Raise your hand if you too have ever wanted to live in a museum!
With the proliferation of images on the internet, what with FFFFOUND and Flickr, you may think that it’s enough to be surrounded by images on a daily basis. While I think that it’s great to be able to see new things at the click of a button, nothing quite beats the satisfaction (or surprise) when you dig into an new copy of a magazine or book. I’ve heard instances of people identifying with a particular magazine because of how it smells, and others of how it feels. For me, it has a lot to do with memory. I have a photographic memory that places things easier when it’s in tangible form. I can tell you exactly where and what an image looks like, down to the sizing and placement on a page, and what page it’s on too — I kid you not (it’s both a curse and blessing!) And that is why print will always hold a special place in my heart.
I recently received a lovely zine from Jonathan Lo of Happy Mundane called At Your Leisure. To put it simply, it’s an exploration of ideas, images, concepts and colors — all bound neatly in a little book. If you’ve ever been to Jon’s blog, then it’s almost like an extension of it — there’s a generous spread of art, interiors, design, fashion and crafts, all mixed in beautifully.
One big thing to note is that most of the photography and styling was done by Jon’s team, which is nothing short of amazing when you think of the time they’ve spent putting the entire thing together.
Easy on the eyes and a quick read (there’s short interviews with home owners that go along with the photos), the zine is a true labor of love and it shows. When I got my copy, I actually thought that it was a full fledged magazine! Instead, it’s a gem with only 500 copies available per print run, which makes it all the more covetable. Mine came with a special little gift too — a miniature dream catcher (which I thought was a lovely hark-back to the theme of the zine, Visions.)
While it’s so sad to see some magazines close down (Venus zine just ended their print version, and Malaysian readers will be sad to hear that KLUE has also done the same), I’m happy to see that there are opportunities for smaller publishers to push the envelope, and Jon and his team is one of them.
You can purchase a copy of At Your Leisure over here, and read Jon’s lovely blog over here.
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Happy weekend everyone, and I’ll catch you again next week!
p/s— Also, a big thanks to Creative Boom for including Pikaland among 49 others in their pick of the 50 best websites for daily inspiration!
Nothing brings out the geek in me more than looking at pixel art. Remember the days of Sierra games on the PC? The entire Police Quest series and Indiana Jones were my favourite games from the heydays of point and click adventure games (do I hear a whoop?)
Luckily, I can still get my pixel lust satiated just by reading and looking up the daily drawings of Steven Kraan. He lives in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, where a lifelong passion for drawing has finally led him to be a freelance illustrator. Other than create these wisecracks on pixels, he also draws with more traditional tools — like pen and paper.
You can also follow him on his Facebook page.
And now, excuse me while I geek myself out some more by revisiting old games and see if I can load them up on my Mac!
