Starve a Cold, Feed a Fever
Fever [myspace.com/feverzine] is an A5 black & white lo-fi zine. That’s the cover of issue 2 up there. I asked the creator, Alex Zamora what’s it all about…
Boicozine What is it?
Alex Zamora Fever is a complete mixture of topics; music, art, photography, fashion, e-culture, zine culture, random stuff… We strive to provide an interesting and beautiful read and have started providing a platform for many talented individuals to get their work out there. Our contributors are a varied mix of established and upcoming creative talent.
B How’d you get started?
AZ I had published a limited-run zine at the end of 2005 called Barometer. It was the year before I came up with Fever. I put it on sale at a well-known zine hotspot in London’s East End and it sold out. It was inspiring to know that there was an audience for that kind of publication and it gave me a real zest to produce something more interesting. I started Fever off lo-fi and even though our production and design have improved we’re still lo-fi. This is definitely a positive thing and gives us a lot of freedom to do whatever we want to.
B Why call it Fever?
AZ I’m not entirely sure how the name came to me, but it wasn’t contrived. Once I thought of it I couldn’t help thinking that it was a pretty good name for my publication. It’s proven very popular with readers. I’m not sure how it relates to the content, but fans on Myspace like saying they have a Fever.
B Who did the cover for issue 2?
AZ When it came to choosing issue 2’s cover I contacted illustrator Andy Council [myspace.com/andycouncil]. I’d seen his illustrations on Myspace and admired his dinosaurs made out of everyday objects like trainers or cars. I approached him about doing something similar for Fever, but using the Fever font. As it turns out he’d never tried working with typography in that way and relished the opportunity. The resulting ‘Feversaurus’ as he called it was based on the Spinosaurus from Jurassic Park 3 and has been a huge hit.
You can buy issue 1 & 2 from Fever’s MySpace page [myspace.com/feverzine].
Here are some spreads from the latest issue…
The Lone Wolf
Everyones favourite Bob [sandersonbob.com] has got some fantastic new things on his web house. No more fun beach balls to play with, but lots of nice new work to look at. His unreleased stuff is by far the most exciting. Check it out.
Into the Hyper Spectrum
Beautiful Decay [beautifuldecay.com], the rad creative mag published out of L.A., has caught the zeitgeist and commissioned Alex Trochut [alextrochut.com] to produce a cover of their latest issue. You can see the artwork above and, if you’d like to have a portal into the Hyper Spectrum of your very own, you can order a copy or purchase a poster version via the brand spanking new Beautiful Decay website [indiemerchstore.com/beautifuldecay].
White Lies of London
A little while ago I was chatting to Aaron over at Temporize [aaronmoodie.com/blog] about Adrenaline magazine and Little White Lies [littlewhitelies.co.uk], the ace film magazine produced by ex-Adrenaline staffers and he was saying that you couldn’t get it in Australia so I thought I’d post some pics from said mag. It is very excellent. If you’re a film buff and haven’t checked it out make a B-line for your purveyor of fine periodicals, it’s often worth it for the illustration alone thanks to creative directors Paul Willoughby [paulwilloughby.com] and Rob Longworth [roblongworth.co.uk]. The reviews section is pretty darn special too.
Boggle-Eyed Pre-Jarvis
Before James Jarvis [studiojarvis.com] began filling the world with blobby, boggle eyed creatures there was another equally prolific illustrator from Australia who was doing a similar thing back in the 70s and 80s. If you grew up ‘down under’ during the 1980s there was no escaping the graphic handy work of the Mambo group [mambo.com.au], Ken Done [kendone.com] and, the much more anonymous, Alex Stitt.
Best known for the, now slightly creepy, ‘Life. Be in it.’ campaign used to promote health and efficiency to Australians nationwide; it featured a character that was to become a household name – the archetypical lazy man on a couch – ‘Norm’ [lifebeinit.org]. His work also appeared in a lot of educational materials such as annual sing-a-long books distributed to government run schools. At the same time he was helping run the graphic design agency Weatherhead and Stitt. A rare interview with the quietest of the Aussie design and illustration behemoths appears in the latest edition of Doingbird magazine [myspace.com/doingbird].
Shadwell goes Calibri-tastic
In a perfect world you’d get to choose your own screen fonts. You can — sort of — providing the person viewing your site has the typefaces you’ve specified installed on their machine. I’ve recently become glued to Google Reader but am getting kind of bored with the interface and started thinking about my ideal set of screen fonts that would replace the sad bedraggled bunch we currently have to put up with.
Dolly [underware.nl], Balance [fontshop.com/evert_bloemsma] (a Boicozine fave), Gill Sans Schoolbook [identifont.com], Akkurat Mono [lineto.com/akkurat+mono] would be ideal additions to the visual language of the wwweb. Those that can also stay: Georgia, Helvetica Neue, Futura, American Typewriter, the Lucidas. Those that have way outstayed their welcome: Arial, Times, Comic Sans, Trebuchet, Verdana.. shove off you miserable looking shabby shabblers. Yay to the new Cleartype fonts too [ascendercorp.com]. There are already some appearing in shopfronts around the YCN [ycnonline.com] office in Shadwell (the default face being Calibri as displayed above)…
Ordinarily Overpowered
Scott King [scottking.co.uk] has contributed his creative prowess to the latest Róisín Murphy [roisinmurphy.com] campaign, commissioning Jonathan De Villiers to photograph the cool priestess of pop. Between the three of them, they has effortlessly managed to create a unique mixture of the mundane and the fantastic by dressing Róisín up in some, sort of, outlandish creations by designers such as Gareth Pugh [garethpugh.net] and Victor & Rolf [viktor-rolf.com], then photographing her in some typically ordinary London settings. Boicozine declares it to be the campaign of the season. There’s some copy floating around on the internet highway (I’m guessing it’s from the press release) where Róisín talks about working with Scott and the ideas behind the images and it goes a little something like this…
“I have worked with him (Scott) once before. First thing he showed me was footage of David Bowie walking down a London high street in the video for ‘DJ’. Scott’s idea of me is like a kind of street-diva, ready for my close up in off-the-wall couture, even when getting my fill of beans and sausage down my local greasy spoon. Or like the Queen of the Tinkers photographed in resplendent garb, going for maximum impact whilst out shopping and/or shoplifting on the Cricklewood Broadway. For the ‘Overpowered’ single sleeve I was dressed in a Viktor & Rolf frock that comes with its own lighting rig attached to the body on a full back brace. The rig is very heavy scaffolding, like the stuff they use in music venues; the dress is hooked up on the rig so as to become rather like the sail of a big boat (great for shoplifting). It was very windy on the high street and I couldn’t move my feet in the clogs, with the bits of wood nailed on, to make them into high heels! A stray gust of wind almost carried me over a couple of times. Luckily a burly Grip was put on hand, just out of shot, to catch me.”
What’s Up #19: Draft
The annual Chaumont Poster Festival [ville-chaumont.fr/festival-affiches] grew bigger still this year in order to encompass Graphic Design in general. It’s new agenda is outlined in the 5th edition of the Chaumont Annual compendium [artdesign.fr] along with some lush artwork including some work for Tokyo’s Laforet [laforet.ne.jp] by quirky Japanese design agency, Draft Co Ltd [draft.jp].
What’s Up #18: Superscript²
Superscript² is [super-script.com] Patrick Lallemand and Pierre Delmas Bouly. Superscript² love typography. Superscript² like to make their own typefaces, in their own distinct way. AZL3 Poster is a chunky and robust a typeface as any and yet makes the most intricate patterns when mooshed together (that’s the *ahem* ‘technical term’ for running your leading and kerning ultra tight). Minimal Blok is building blocks for grown-up typo-fiends. Their graphic design work is just as lush. Go have a geez. Found via Vvork [vvork.com].
What’s Up #17: Alex Trochut
The name Alex Trochut [alextrochut.com] seems to be popping up a bit lately and it’s no surprise lately when you see some of the work this creative from Barcelona is producing. He has already produced a poster design out of play-doe for Dani Navarro’s Poster Project [posterproject.info] as well as being snapped up by Nike and Channel 4 for various pieces. His type experiments are well worth the visit.
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