What’s Up #39: Peter Crnokrak

Peter Crnokrak is deep into graphic design. It wasn’t always the case though. A brief snippet from his bio tells the story, “…studied medicine, completed a doctorate in evolutionary genetics, moved to Toronto to start a postdoctoral fellowship but become crushingly bored with life, decided to leave the sciences for design…”. Yep, Graphic Design has a proper scientist in it’s midst. Under his current moniker, ‘The Luxury of Protest’ [theluxuryofprotest.com] Peter has been producing precisely-detailed limited edition posters for you to purchase via Design Supremo [designsupremo.com], a sample of which you can see above.

A Tale of Two Cities

Okay,so this is only really going to be of interest if you live or have lived in either Sydney or Melbourne. But if you thought the Melbourne/Sydney rivalry was a myth, here’s proof that it’s very much alive and well and as spikey as it’s ever been [melbournesucks.com.au]. Apparently Melbourne is “a rip off drug infested hole” where “everything costs money” and “in Melbourne we do like to spell correctly” (grammar seems to be less important though), whereas Sydney has “nice weather”… a lot. I read somewhere (sorry, being lazy) that Melbourne’s population was set to outrun Sydney’s by 2020 so here’s hoping this one runs and runs. (Where’s our London Sucks website, surely that’s a site that would be immensely popular).

I couldn’t find any images of the ‘Melbourne Sucks’ posters that have provoked this recent furore (furore-ish) — if you have pics of said posters please let us know — so here’s an ace piece of artwork for one of Melbourne’s many hip shopfronts dotted around town [forepaw.org] instead. Oh, yeah and guess which city I’m from?

Things to Make and POD

The lovely Miss Gemma Leigh recently pointed us in the direction of some ace (and totally official) prints you can now buy, that are taken from the Ladybird books archive [ladybirdprints.com]. Cabinet [picturecabinet.com] is the name of the company behind the venture. They reproduce the archival images on a ‘print-on-demand’ basis through memoryprints [memoryprints.com] and also offer image archival services. They certainly seem to be doing something right, having chalked up an impressive list of clients in a short space of time. The National Theatre [ntposters.org.uk] (the Eqqus poster from the 1970s is pretty cool), the V&A [vandaprints.com] and The Royal Photographic Society are just some of the organisations that very signed up.

The Chaumont Massive

The Chaumont Poster and Graphic Design Festival is back and starts today… and, this year, it’s huge! If you are fortunate enough to make the pilgrimage to this little French village for the 19th International Poster and Graphic Design Festival of Chaumont [ville-chaumont.fr/festival-affiches] you’ll be able to take your pick from a smorgasbord of events such as Fanette Mellier’s ‘Circus (dans l’espace public)’, in which she uses her unique brand of typography (see above) to tell a story that weaves it’s way through the street of Chaumont [fanettemellier.com] and Pierre du Sciullo’s challenge to plaster a space in one’s Chaumont’s main squares with 4 posters per hour, in 10 hour periods during the course of the festival [quiresiste.com]. Of course, there’s loads of other events and designers involved as well as the Annual Poster competition Chaumont first became known for and a temporary events venue they’re calling ‘Le Super’ (see image below) which promises to carry the vague 1950s theme that carries through the festival this year. There are many events that seek to link the worlds of design and publishing this year too. Oh, and just in case you were wondering, this year’s poster is designed by Frédéric Teschner [fredericteschner.com]. The annual book produced for the event has just been released by Pyramyd publishing [artdesign.fr]. There’s a Facebook group too [facebook], natch.