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The work of Byron Winton was recently brought to my attention as he is having an opening at the Zombo Gallery, a cool space located literally down the street from my home/office. From the artist:

I am a master craftsman specializing in, but not limited to, images of dark fantasy and fiction mainly depicted through acrylic painting. Other mediums include photography, ink, and digital manipulation. Providing a keen eye for design and detail, I believe in the highest impact and satisfaction my work can offer.

Check out his portfolio site for more info and prints and also check out Zombo Gallery, a place I’m lucky to live in such close proximity to.

Leigh-Ann Ferraro - Freelance Seamstress

I recently completed a logo for a good friend of mine who needed an identity for her freelancing. I played on the concept of stitching as I created a monogram and custom font. This was featured over at logogala.com recently as well.

Found via Digg today, this collection of amazingly intricate and creative carved pumpkins. Happy Friday and Happy Halloween all.

The Google holiday logos are pretty well documented, but the above really caught my eye. In lieu of gussying up the wordmark today, the above supplants it to celebrate the anniversary of the patenting of the bar code. (Read more about that here.)

As I stated above, today’s bar code image in place of the typical Google lettering is really eye catching. It also showcases Google’s ability to leverage their brand power. Can you name any other company that is quite frankly ballsy enough to totally remove their logo from their homepage? Even the past holiday iterations of the logo have at least been drawn up around the existing logo type. I really applaud Google for going “full-tilt” with this particular occasion logo.

Having said that, I also think Google has a bit of an unfair advantage when it comes to boldly abandoning their logo because of their ubiquitous brand position. Regardless of which logo, if any even, would be displayed on it, the Google homepage is near universally recognizable. So long as the image fits the general proportions where the logo would typically be, I surmise you could put anything in that area and the whole page would still read as Google. In this instance I really like that they chose to fore go any of the recognizable characters from their mark, as they could have potentially intertwined the wordmark and bar code imagery in a countless number of ways, retaining the more typical Google holiday sensibilities, but they didn’t. Despite the unfair advantage, I think this is really well conceived and well executed.

See more holiday iterations @ http://www.google.com/intl/en/holidaylogos.html

* As a disclaimer, I am well aware that I have been very light on the amount of posts on this blog and wanted to let readers know that this lack of regular posting is a byproduct of my work to redesign the Schweitz Design blog as well as my own portfolio site. That being said, the recent post of pinups from Rolf Armstrong were pretty popular and I have another collection from American pinup great Peter Driben. Enjoy.

From the Wiki:

Peter Driben, an American pin-up artist, was perhaps one of the most productive pin-up artists of the 1940s and 1950′s ^[1]. Although both Alberto Vargas and Gil Elvgren have extensive catalogues of work, neither came close to the output of Driben. Driben’s pinups delighted the American public from the beginning of World War II until the great baby boom of the 1950s.

Born in Boston, Driben studied at Vesper George Art School before moving to Paris (circa 1925). While taking classes at the Sorbonne in 1925, he began a series of highly popular pen-and-ink drawings of the city’s showgirls. His first known pin-up was the cover to Tattle Tales in October 1934, and by 1935 he was producing covers for Snappy, Pep, New York Nights, French Night Life and Caprice. Driben’s popularity continued to rise in the late thirties with covers for Silk Stocking Stories, Gay Book, Movie Merry-Go-Round and Real Screen Fun.

Driben’s career expanded into advertisting with his move to New York in late 1936. He created original three-dimensional die-cut window displays for Philco Radios, Cannon Bath Towels, and the Weber Baking Company. Perhaps his most famous work being the original posters and publicity artwork for The Maltese Falcon. Peter Driben was also a close friend of publisher Robert Harrison, and in 1941 was contracted to produce covers for Harrison’s new magazine Beauty Parade. Driben went on to paint hundreds of covers for that publication and for the other seven titles Harrison was to launch – Flirt, Whisper, Titter, Wink, Eyeful, Giggles, and Joker ^[2]. Driben would often have as many as six or seven of his covers being published every month. Driben’s work for Harrison established him as one of America’s most recognized and successful pin-up and glamour artists. Just before he began to work for Harrison, Driben married the artist, actress and poet, Louise Kirby.

In 1944 he was offered the the unusual opportunity, for a pin-up artist, of becoming the art director of the New York Sun, a post he retained until 1946. During the war, his popular painting of American soldiers raising the flag at Iwo Jima sparked a considerable amount of media attention.

In 1956, Driben and Louise moved to Miami Beach, where he spent his retirement years painting portraits (including one of Dwight D. Eisenhower) and other fine-art works, which were organized into successful exhibitions by his wife. Driben died in 1975, Louise in 1984.

Luke Jerram, a UK-based installation artist and sculptor, was recently brought to my attention for for his glass sculptures replicating “famous” bacteria and viruses. THe set of these most recent works can be viewed here. Also worth taking some time to peruse is his website:  LukeJerram.com

source: http://www.behance.net/Gallery/Philip-Morris-Wants-you-to-SMOKE/173858

Abduzeedo has a great collection of Russian Constructivist art/design work. I really love this style, expecially the angular and blocky typography associated with it. Check it out  here. Happy Friday everybody and have a great holiday weekend.

From Wikipedia:

Rolf Armstrong was born in Bay City, Michigan on April 21, 1889 to Richard and Harriet (Scott) Armstrong. His father owned the Boy-Line Fire Boat Company, which included a line of passenger ships. Some were deployed in Chicago for use at the Chicago World’s Fair there in 1893. However, the father’s business and family were struggling, and the family homestead was lost to foreclosure. A few months later, the family moved to Detroit, Michigan.

Rolf’s father died in 1903, and a year he and his mother moved to Seattle, Washington, following the footstep of his oldest brother, William, who haved there a year earlier. By now Rolf’s artistic interests were emerging to more than a part-time pleasure.

He moved to Chicago in 1908, where he later studied at the Art Institute. He then went on to New York, where he studied with Robert Henri.

After a trip to Paris in 1919 to study at the Académie Julian, he returned to New York and established a studio. In 1921 he went to Minneapolis to study calendar production at Brown & Bigelow.

During the 1920s and 1930s, his work appeared on many pieces of sheet music, as well as on the covers of many magazines. Many stars posed for his portraits, including Mary Pickford, Greta Garbo, and even Boris Karloff.

Armstrong’s work for the Pictorial Review was largely responsible for that magazine achieving a circulation of more than two million by 1926. A year later, he was the best selling calendar artist at Brown and Bigelow. In 1930, RCA hired him to paint pin-ups to advertise their products, and in 1933 the Thomas D. Murphy Company signed him to produce a series of paintings for their line.

Rolf Armstrong died in 1960, on the island of Oahu, Hawaii as one of the best “pin-up” artist of the first half of the 20th Century.