Design delightful notebooks with heat transfer vinyl ...

It is really hard to walk slowly in your own city. I happily snail around any other city, taking days going 6 blocks. But in my own town it is really hard to slow down. But you have to, if you're going to catch the textures.Streetart in Oslo. There are great variety, artistic skills, and ...

My company has an office in Gdańsk, where my favourite colleagues hang out. I've been down twice so far, and spent about two weeks there. It's a delightful town, and as i get to know more and widen my circumference i discover new treasures. Gdańsk is a lot more than just the main drag. You ...

On the northern edge of the Oslo forests sits Bislingen. It used to be a bustling place, with downhill and cross country skiers, weddings, parties. One day they closed the door and left. The plan for someone to come back another day and open the door … i guess this plan fell through. Then plan ...

It was a small thought. Ages ago. "Wouldn't it be fun to make glowing mushrooms!" The short answer, it turns out, is "no". The obnoxious answer is "the journey is the goal". So i guess the truth is somewhere on the scale between yes and no. I made this There's a pandemic these days, so ...

Last year, i actually got my arse in gear, and went to London. Good thing, that, considering the pandemic of 2020 ...

I went to Utrecht last year, to meet up with two of the other squirrels, and attend a workshop in datavisualisation with Stefanie Posavec. A few days in Utrecht. You should stay away, so it always stays delightful for me. I am going again in april. Wonderful place. 36 73 tile tile 6 44 43 ...

Judge it by the cover. Of course you will. Covers are some kind of board or another. Typically chip board: gray dense cardboard. I am using MDF and plywood, and will try plexiglass, mirror, wood, veneer and whatever comes my way. Typically, boards are covered with cloth, leather, or some cloth-plastic-y combo. The entire thing ...

The inside of a book is called a book block or register. Register makes only sense if the content must be in a certain order, such as in text, images, or any content. Blank pages are… blank. A4 on tape signatures map book Bookbinders love book designers who include a tiny square on the spine ...

Paper Paper is what it is all about. Almost. Industrial, hand made, rag paper, pulp. Printed, patterned. One thing about paper: there is a direction of fiber, and this should always go along the spine. If it doesn't, things will crack. I promise. Do you have any fancy coffee table books, that creaks; where the ...

I have an apprenticeship in bookbinding. That means I dedicated three years of work and school to it, and I got a scroll-y, hopelessly large and pompous diploma, proving it. I have not worked as a bookbinder for over 20 years. For some reason, now is the time to start again. But to find the ...

This was going to be a triumphant article about a stellar idea, a struggle of problem solving, learning curves, dangerous lasers, and the final, exuberant splendid result in all its plasticky-golden glory. Yeah, well… The idea! …so the idea: to laser engrave a bunch of slices of my brain in transparent acrylic, stack them… it ...

laser engraving 3D I have mentioned elsewhere, I love laser cutters. I got to try one at uni, and to do some pretty cool things. And wanted to make more. I could have made files and ordered the pieces from professional companies, but the laser is a tool and unlike any other, and to get ...

There are some amazingly talented artists around here. fremtiden wellies viking child child superhero trolleys old gods see the wall don't go in there scene chimney chimney explotion love shipping news shipping horses the walls splish splash baby turtle turtle blue :0 arrrr wire colour ...

Pretty deep in the Swedish woods, there is a narrow gravel road. At the end of this gravel road, is a deserted smallholding. All around this delapidated farm, there are cars. Hundreds and hundreds; in various states of decay. Cars from the 40ties, 50ties, 60ties, 70ties and probably 80ties. The car cemetery. It is here, ...

There are wolves here in Norway, and it is an insane controversy. It would have been really funny, if it was not so tragic. Here is the gist: the wolf is red-listed here. That is to say, on a national level. This means it is threatended, on the brink of extinction, there isn't enough individuals ...

I am scanning my father’s positive slides and negatives, a Himalayan task. He took a good deal of photographs, starting in the 50ties. I am guessing about 3-4000 35mm negatives, colour and black and white. 12 boxes of slides, and an unknown amount of 9x6 I have not even dug out yet. It is of ...

Theodor Kittelsen was a Norwegian painter and book illustrator (1857-1914). He illustrated the Scandinavian bestiary of legend and fairy tales, and his work has scared countless children (myself included). He drew and painted trolls, the black death, sea monsters, nøkken ("water spirit"), and anthropomorphised natural phenomena such as the echo. His work can be rather ...

A Bosch painting is a marvel to look at, regardless of how familiar someone is with their creator. But once you realize when and perhaps why they were made, they become truly uncanny. Luckily for those new with the language, the town of s'-Hertogenbosch in the Netherlands is normally referred to as "Den Bosch" (pronounced ...

Most warships these days are gray, and for good reasons. They are generally more difficult to make out with the naked eye. Of course, these days technology often makes visual camouflage redundant, but during World War I, a different tack was used: dazzle, or disruptive, camouflage. The idea was not camouflage as in "invisible", but ...

Auguste Racinet was a French illustrator, famous for his detailed depictions of historical costumes. His polychromatic ornaments are also a thing to marvel, just take a look at these five motives from Persia, Byzantine, Medieval, Renaissance and 18th Century style: His masterpiece, however, remains to be Le Costume Historique, an unprecendented attempt to illustrate the entire history ...

The Eurasian lynx is a medium-sized cat, native to Siberia, Central, East, and Southern Asia, North, Central and Eastern Europe. It lives in the wild close to where I live, but after decades of hanging out in the woods, I have never seen anything but a set of footprints in the snow. Once. They are ...

In the chaos that is self-employed life, it's hard to find the time to do personal projects. Personal work is a great way to explore styles and hone your skills. Especially as a graphic designer, I think personal work is muy importante. But when do I do it? After about a year of not doing ...

There is a fairy tale here in Norway, called the twelve wild ducks. The story is not really important, it a fairly classic good versus evil, patience, purity and deceit. I think it is a pretty convoluted story, and I always found it dissatisfying that there is no attempt at explaining why the princes are ...

Visitors' books, while bursting with creativity potential, often feel like a mere registry of names and locations - with the few occasional sentimentalities. They are condemned to live in the present and, as such, their true value is usually underestimated. Rare is the chance to come across a Visitors' book that has long lost its ...

I have fallen in love with a machine. The laser cutter at the uni. Well; actually, it is what it can do, that captivates me. I am craftsperson – I have two educations in crafts. I am a potter and bookbinder. So I have a sense for materials, how they act, what you can and ...

Lots of games have no result except the pleasure the player gets out of it. But there is an increase of games that help science in some way. Yisela has already written an article about some of them; in games for science. This article is about a brand new game by University College London, University of ...

The future library is a forest in Oslo: 1000 trees was planted in a forest in Oslo in 2014. It is the future library. Each year, an author submits a manuscript, unread, unseen; that will be stored in the national library. In 2114, the trees will be cut down, milled and made into 1000 books ...

J.G. Ballard's novel High-Rise had been on my radar to read for many years, and I finally did so over the last month when I learnt it had been made into a movie by a film director whose movies I tend to seek out and watch (more on that in a moment). High-Rise is set ...

Source: Youtube ...

We know very little about the Suplicantes, small sculptures made almost exclusively out of volcanic rock. Although they are considered the peak of NOA's sculpture art, we can only attempt to deduce who made them and why, as almost all of them have been found outside of their original historical and geographical context - usually by ...

Scientific illustrations by Carim Nahaboo Carim Nahaboo is a London based illustrator specialising in accurate depictions of natural history subjects as well as more imaginative, conceptual themes. So says his bio on his webpage, and who am I to argue? I am in awe of his work; this is old-school scientific illustration: art, design and ...

Ages ago, when I had time on my hands, I made a metal angler-fish. It was a loose idea, a few trips to some charity shops, one trip to Ikea, a hardware shop and a round of e-bay. Anglerfish sculpture: upcycled scrap metal It is all scrap metal, discarded kitchen implements. Whisks, strainers, some unidentified ...

Once in a while, chance or genetics throw into the world an individual so special, so divergent in their way of thinking, that the whole of humanity will be condemned to acknowledge their existence for as long as written records shall prevail. But when the man and the myth intersect with the freaky visual representations left behind... very little makes ...

Saul Bass is the genius behind movie legends such as The Shining, The Man with the Golden Arm, Vertigo and Anatomy of a Murder. During his 40-year career Bass worked for some of Hollywood's most prominent filmmakers, including Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese. It was his work for The Man with the Golden Arm that made ...

Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer; art is everything else. – Donald E. Knuth [two_third last="no"] The definition of categories of design, science and art are not clear-cut. Neither one have a universally-agreed on definition, and professor Martin Kemp at University of Oxford argues that though these categories are ...

Kjell Aukrust was a legendary artist, humourist and illustrator. He is most famous for his wacky stories from a particular part of rural Norway, full of bizarre and hilarious people, inventions and creatures. They make little sense to people from other countries, the Danes certainly do not get it at all. I grew up with ...

Industry has been more than a simple influence on our society, environment and landscape. It has shaped who we are and where we live, and it has brought about social change on an unprecedented scale in an unbelievably short period of time. But Chronos doesn't discriminate and buries it all, so a discipline emerged after World War II (when the retooling of ...

My Neighbor Totoro is a guaranteed top spot in any list of popular anime films. A kid's classic, this Miyakaki's piece might be hiding a much darker and fascinating story behind its cuddly characters. Was this exactly what Miyazaki had in mind when he created the movie? Hell, who doesn't love a good conspiracy theory, especially one riddled with ...

Sagmeister is a bit of a rock star in design. His project "Obsessions make my life worse and my work better" is of course mad and stunning. 250.000 EuroCents, eight days and more than 100 volunteers resulted in this crazy, beautiful sentence I can relate to. They left the work unguarded. And here is the ...