And so, BlackOsprey shall be at a place with a bunch of works. Aaron Horkey makes ultra amazing fantastic works of magnificence. He’s the most insanely wonderful detail oriented illustrator I know about, and he’s got this show coming up. It’s at Remick Gallery in Windom Minnesota and the opening night is on September 12th 2010. It’s totally free and there’s refreshments. Dranks. It’s from 2-4PM which means it’s more of an Opening Afternoon sort of situation, which is more than totally appropriate for his excellent works.

Below you’re going to see a small cross-section of Horkey works for you to sink your eyeballs into. Above you’ll see the poster made for this new solo show, all made of swooshing and swishing letters, and nothing else. Hard.

Associated act: Burlesque Design.

This post is part of the World Famous Design Junkies illustration category.

Apparently David Choe is the most baddest of all dudes or something because he’s always hanging out with naked women and terrifyingly brutish looking men. Did you know this? Just four days ago he released these photos he took of Danny Trejo. Choe is known on the whole for his undeniably masterful paintings, but he’s also an intense photographer. And he’s got a book out right now to promote, and Trejo has a movie coming out (“Machete”), so they called each-other up on their dial-tone phones and decided to have a play date.

Stop. If you don’t know who Danny Trejo is right now, instantly watch this video which is a trailer for Machete. Trejo is one unique individual, unmistakable whenever he’s on the screen, on the screen hundreds of times, “discovered” in a prison cell. Killer.

Above and below you’re going to see what seems to be a piece of meat cut off of a tiger-sized project that’ll be out in the future. More Trejo artworks by Choe is better artworks. You’ll notice Choe artworks all around, looking at the face of, and ON Trejo.

Facehand!

Some words from David Choe in regards to this mini photo project:

“I CANT FEEL NOTHING, DON’T LEAVE ME LIKE THIS, PLEASE HOLMES “– one of my favorite lines ever from one of my favorite movies ever HEAT, from the baddest dude in town DANNY TREJO.

you know who he is, he’s the bad dude in every movie, He’s the first Latin Superhero, he’s Mexico’s version of our asian bad dude, AL LEONG, who is also in every movie, i always hoped some asian director would recognize Al’s skills and give him a starring role in his own major motion blockbuster, but the latino’s were smarter and prouder and director robert rodriguez, gave DANNY TREJO the starring role in his new dream project MACHETE with Robert De Niro, Jessica Alba, Michelle Rodriguez, Steven Seagal, Lindsay Lohan, Cheech Marin, Don Johnson and Jeff Fahey playing supporting roles. Congratulations Danny! you deserve it! look for it in theaters next month, here’s some flicks i recently took of Danny at the studio, he’s one of the coolest, nicest, and funniest fuckers ever, i don’t think it’s still considered rape ,if you let someone rape you, look for a collaboration project in the very near future, stay tuned holmes.

Also below are some poster-looking concoctions of cool people holding a new Choe book made for promoting the purchase of the book. Gotta catch em all.

This post is part of the World Famous Design Junkies collaboration category.

Although I’m sure there are many… pieces… missing from MST3K – pieces of brain matter, sensicality, other bits of film and metal, this is the piece we’ve got. What’s going on right here is the collected POSTERS from the movies watched and spoken on by the MST3K robots and dude. The films this crew watched ranged many years, through the 50′s, 60′s, 70′s, etcetera, through graphic design terror and genius. Turns out the posters for the movies they featured on this show have QUITE a range and, now that the internet is around, are totally sitting around all over the place. And now they’re all here.

A big fat gallery of posters from the MST3K movies. Here. Now. Instantly.

MST3K is also called, by those long-winded folks in the audience, Mystery Science Theater 3000. It’s a show made by some people living in our home-town state Minnesota, the first episodes recorded at the now defunct Paragon Cable studios and customer service center in Hopkins, Minnesota. It went on to collect an intense cult fan base and rock for almost 200 episodes, plus live shows, plus mini specials. The entire experience consists of a dude and several robots sitting in a movie theater watching old, weird, and often terrible movies, commenting out loud about them as they’re shown. You may recognize the shadows of these fellows and the movie theater seats at the bottom of the screen, it’s the most iconic bit of the entire show. For example, here during Radar Men from the Moon:

Each episode of MST3K a movie is introduced, watched, skewered, and giggled about and that’s it. But those movies had lives of their own before this show. They had time in the theater, time in schools (if they’re informational “growing up movies”), sometimes even time in people’s homes, and for that they needed posters for promotion! We’ve got the big list of those movies, and using our long, tendrilly fingers and amazing archiving sites such as the most fabulous Wrong Side of the Art and MST3K Temple, we’ve collected the major bulk of the MST3K series – in poster form.

Curation of this collection often produced one single poster, more than likely the most fabulous one, but in some cases the whole lot was necessary. For example, Godzilla vs. Megalon – that movie was loath to create a poster that wasn’t basically perfect. But then there’s also films whose posters were just terrible, just as bad – or sometimes worse! than the films themselves were, but are now amazing because of it. A giant hand!

Below you’re going to find this gallery of posters in alphabetical order. The big list of MST3K’d films can be found here: mst3k.wikia. If you see or know of a movie on this list that doesn’t have a poster in the gallery below, AND you know where to find one, speak up! We’ve got 150+ out of the nearly 200. Note that the alphabetical order of this list is based on the “official” film title as it comes from that wikia list, not as much from the posters, as lots of them are in the situation where they’ve got several releases and several titles.

This post is part of the World Famous Design Junkies bad taste category.

So. The internets hath provided the world with some nicely-produced movie footage of a Mortal Kombat story in short-film format. It’s meant to be spread virally, which I’m sure it’ll do, and is doing, and it’s meant to create EXCITEMENT – which it IS doing. The clip you’re about to see is made by a … dance video director?! Kevin Tancharoen, who, because he was tentatively signed on to do a “caught in pre-pre-production limbo” Mortal Kombat, decided to make his own short, teaser version of what the film might look like. This is that. Many/most of the people in the short donated their time (maybe to get the chance to be in the final version), and the entire thing cost $7,500. And it’s gruesome. Totally gruesome.

It’s gonna be like a police movie!

Or maybe like a kung fu… gore… MORTAL KOMBAT.

Now the MOST and MOST FACTUAL information on this situation you’re going to get, you’re going to get from an interview done the day after this clip was released between the entertainment news source Collider and mister Tancharoen.

In that interview, Tancharoen begins:

KT: No. They [the studio, or anybody involved with the video game] did not [know about the mini-movie]. (Laughs) This was something I did completely on my own. However, there is a little bit of a tie-in, because I happen to be friends with Oren Uziel. And since we’re friends, I just called him up and said “Listen, I want to do this. This is what I have in mind. I want it to be contained, because I am not a studio with endless amounts of cash.” Then we started storyboarding from there, and started calling my friends, and started pulling as many favors as I possibly could. And I was thrilled that they all said yes. (Laughs)

Collider notes that Oren Uziel wrote the short. He’s currently listed on IMDb to write the next Mortal Kombat movie at Warner Bros. Tancharoen continues:

Now like I said, because I am such a fan of the Mortal Kombat series, I know there’s a lot of concern about the mysticism and the special powers and all that kind of stuff. Well, like I said, this is really designed — the short so far is really designed like a prologue to the movie. Now, in a movie version, I am going to have that mysticism there, but it has to be done in a very tasteful way. I wouldn’t like it too campy or too cheesy. I know this is a weird analogy, but it’s the best one I can think of right now. It’s kind of like when in Harry Potter, there’s two universes that coexist with each other. There’s the real world, and then you get on the train and then you go to Hogwart’s, and that’s where all the magic is.

That’s all I needed to hear. Make it AVP quality (low) or better, and I’d even go so far as to see it in the theater! All I need is a tiny bag of popcorn and one of those GIANT GULPS of soda they have at the theater now, one free refill!

Oh and… and…

This clip features the following actors and actresses: Michael Jai White who I knew played “Gambol” in the Dark Knight, remembered played SPAWN in that one movie called SPAWN, but had no idea was in The Toxic Avenger Part II – wowie!, Jeri Ryan whom you MUST know as “7 of 9″ from the Star Trek series Voyager, plus about a million TV shows, martial artists Lateef Crowder who is going to be in a 2010 movie about the other hugely popular fighting game TEKKEN, Ian Anthony Dale also in TEKKEN, and Matt Mullins who has done lots of great stuff, but whose proudest moment should be, I think, having been an actor in the 1996 video game AREA 51.

So peek at the clip and peek at this gallery clipped out of the clip and clip your clip with a clip and GET OVER HERE and clip clop clip. Yay Mortal Kombat!

This post is part of the World Famous Design Junkies ARCADE category.

Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey. The Greatest Show on Earth. Al G. Kelly and Miller Bros. 2nd Largest Circus. These are the dirt and mud spawning beds of some of the most fantastic poster design in the history of the world. I’m drawing a line in the sand here, a circus line. One that clowns honk their lives on. Lions and tigers, trapeze artists, acrobats, and everything else they could fit inside three rings and a whole mess of tent. This is a poster collection consisting of the Princeton University collection of American Circus posters PLUS a whole mess of additional posters as wrangled up from collections across the internet, including of course the US Library of Congress – our friends!

NOTE: On the copyright of these items: for the most part, anything from Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey are from the 1940′s and 50′s and are probably still within someone’s legal right to claim ownership over. MANY of the other items you’ll find here are from around the 1900′s, making them so old that they’re legally entered into the public domain. If you do not know what this mumbo jumbo is about, please take the time to read up on USA copyright before you start your own tshirt and poster business with these images.

With fabulousness such as this, it’s tempting, isn’t it? Hella tempting.

Now the following collection is hella diverse. You’re going to find posters from the previously mentioned Ringling Bros and Barnum & Baileys all the way down to Al G. Kelly and Miller Bros. 2nd Largest Circus and Circus Krone. That one, Krone, for example, is German, but for the most part, this collection stays in America.

What we’re searching for here is excellence. Pre-cursors to the maximus minimalist design of today, here’s the extravagance without getting the jumblance. True masters are at work here, truly masters in their fields. And what’s ironic about that? Many of these posters were probably designed in a field. All grassy and inky. Covered in elephant dung.

Super awesome!

To access details about many of these posters, please move your brain on over to a collective page here that’s got each poster listed with the information Princeton uncovered about date, accession, size, and even the drawer they’ve got it held in if you ever plan on going over to see these posters in real life. I bet they get even doozier.

Another excellent resource for more information on these images is Wikimedia Commons, where searching for Circus Posters is as simple as doing a double backflip, catching a lion along the way! — Now let’s take a look down here. In some cases I left the whole poster (most cases, I should say,) but then in a bunch of pictures I cut down posters for you to see some magnificent close-ups.

ALSO: Check out these sources for more magical poster power – V. Poster Works, Circus Museum, Vintage Rock and Roll, and the NYPL Gallery Library. Note that this gallery is considerably large in the “American Circus” category, but some other languages and attractions were allowed to slip in due to awesomeness. Example: Solomon the Man Monkey – this missing link goes to church on Sunday!

This post is part of the World Famous Design Junkies celebration category.

Below you’ll find the rest of the gallery. Feel free to click any tiny image here to bring up a larger version, then move back and forth through the gallery using the “Next Image” and “Previous Image” links. Then, if you’d like the entire set in their largest format, don’t hesitate to download a big fat .zip file of all the pictures: wfdj_circusposters.zip courtesy of the hardcore design collector family here at WFDJ.

A little under a year ago was the last time I or we wrote anything about the artist / designer / wild animal known as AJ Fosik. Well I’m here to tell you: AJ Fosik rain in blood wasn’t over. It isn’t done. Last time you saw AJ Fosik there were mass amounts of beasts made in bright colors of painted wood over at White Walls. This time there are no walls. There are only bodies covered in what I can only describe as the most kitschtastic sweaters ever knitted. Each of them represents it’s own classic brand of beer. What a collection.

Fosik is slightly unclear on how these were attained, but each of them seems to have been a real in-production sweater knitted for the company by the company. For the beer drinker.

A word or two from the artist:

Promotional knit beer sweaters from the 70s and 80s. All of these sweaters were unearthed by me, rescued from moldy basements, plucked from dingy backwaters and ripped from the backs of greasy shitleopards. Unfortunately none of these trophies are for sale.

Please take a moment to inspect these massively appropriate for nowhere sweaters. They are fabulous, they are miraculous. To promote one’s favorite beer with their own clothing is one thing, wearing a bit of promotional material in which each stitch had to be well-layed-out in order for the logo and message to be clear, well, that’s a devoted fan of the genre.

I credit AJ Fosik at this moment to be one of the greatest design collectors I have ever seen. This collection of sweaters is fantastic, and shall go down in the record books as one of the most excellent design collections there ever was. Truly AJ Fosik is a design junkie if ever have I seen one.

This post is part of the World Famous Design Junkies bad taste category. Also this post can be found in the vintage, wearable, and Pizza Party categories. Go hang out at any of these and you will have a genuine time.

On the 16th of May, 2010, today, Ronnie James Dio, the king of our hearts and the one who brought up from hell the devils horns hand sign so that we might rock as hard as demons, is dead. Ronnie James Dio, who was known for his miraculous amounts of fantastic rock and roll music, has passed on. He will not rock in hell for all time, monitoring the kingdom of the dead with his all-seeing eyes and blackened hands.

All hail Dio, master of metal.

Dio’s wife released this message through the official Ronnie James Dio site:

Message from Wendy Dio

Today my heart is broken, Ronnie passed away at 7:45am 16th May. Many, many friends and family were able to say their private good-byes before he peacefully passed away. Ronnie knew how much he was loved by all. We so appreciate the love and support that you have all given us. Please give us a few days of privacy to deal with this terrible loss. Please know he loved you all and his music will live on forever.

- Wendy Dio

Below is a small gallery of Dio-related images. The rainbow illustration is provided by Abe Lincoln who drew it just for this occasion, and the pencil drawing is done by Alleycatsgarden, who is also metal. Please take this time to celebrate the wonderful world that Ronnie James Dio created, and continue to revel in the joy of his tunes.

This post is part of the World Famous Design Junkies black category.

For this occasion I’ve got to offer up this modified/chopped version of words from poet W. H. Auden: “Silence the pianos and with muffled drum. Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead. Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead. The stars are not wanted now: put out every one; Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun; Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood. For nothing now can ever come to any good.” Truly it is an epic moment for the artist who brought us decades of undeniably epic fantasy art, Frank Frazetta, is dead.

This man was a fantasy artist, completely and utterly. He painted and drew, illustrations that cannot be touched now or then or anytime. He worked on cover art for novels, comic books inside and out, movie posters, album covers, and every sort of painting small and large for the sale to the rich.

This past November, a cover art painting he did for Conan the Conquerer sold to an unnamed collector for $1million bucks. This was such big news that WIRED had a flip-out session about it. He did the utterly wild covers of Molly Hatchet albums, covers and insides of Vampirella, and yes, yes! the movie poster for Beastmaster. Plus a whole big batch, nest, mountain of other works.

I only mention the Beastmaster poster because it’s mentioned in the forever-classic graffiti film Style Wars. Frank Frazetta was an influence to shitloads of people, the readers of the fantasy novels he covered to the graffiti artists in this film. Dig it:

Now I’m not going to say much more about the man here, I’ll let his images do the rocking, but just so you know, he died on May 10 in Fort Myers, Fla, and he lived to be 82 years old. Also here I’d like to thank my main homie johnstonamerica for alerting me and the rest of thegiant crew to Frazetta’s passing.

Now devour his greatness!

This post is part of the World Famous Design Junkies ancient category.

Oh you Choe, you just keep on whipping it out and twisting it out. What you’re seeing here is a slim and lovely preview presented by David Choe for his brand spanking new show called SIDEBUSTERS that will be taking place April 23 2010. What you’re looking at is tiny clips of gigantic murals and some milk-chocolate sized paintings straight out of the painting room of Choe himself. These paintings will be shown at the Sidebusters show somewhere in Beverly Hills. I ain’t even know where the gallery is going to be, but maybe I’ll tell you when the time comes. And also? He’s hanging out with Die Antwoord then too.

Blarf! Antwoord! They are a crazy group of weirdos. Weirdos that make amazing music and have a look that is extremely unique. First in this post you’re going to see the paintings being done for the event, then you’re going to see Choe and Ninja and Yolandi Vi$$er (both of Antwoord) just hanging out, preparing for what must be a totally wild show coming up.

Just look at them.

Actually maybe the show might be called “Nothing to Declare.” I’m not sure, updates from Choe are pretty convoluted. It’s part of his art…form.

I’m sure we’ll have more about Antwoord on WFDJ in the future, but for now, all the info you need is up on GOOD. Wicky weird wild.

This post is part of the World Famous Design Junkies under the influence category.

There ain’t no two way about it, some pigs just have tattoos. And there is more than one ways about how they got that way. The piggie you see above is one inked by a mister Andy Feehan, who had a rather interesting obsession with drawing the little buggers before he found the perfect combination, the solution to his unstoppable tick tack, that being the application of ink to the pig. And thus it was done. Below you’re going to find quite a few pigs tattooed by artist Wim Delvoye, who has made it a large part of his art career to do just this sort of thing, along with a bunch of unknowns as well.

There is a question of ethics, but since I’m almost certain Dolvoye and Feehan knocked the pigs out while they were cutting ink into their skin, I think it’s just a lovely activity.

Now the spraypainting of cows, on the other hand, that’s pretty gross.

As I’m sure you’re aware, the skin texture and softness and basically everything else is very similar to that of a human being. Thus, tattoos on a pig act very similar to the tattoos a person gets. Of course, as the pig is generally a subject of some joking existence, the tattoos on a pig are generally made in parody, as you’re about to see.

Below you will notice pigs that are alive, pigs that are stuffed and posed, pig skins that have been taken off of the pigs after they’ve kicked the bucket, and pig skins in frames. Any pig skin OFF of the pig is from Wim Delvoye, he is the only person who inks the live pig, skins them when they are dead, and displays the skin in a frame or naked. Unless you count the movie GOZU, in which they do the same thing, only with humans instead. Blech.

ALSO, as Jane Rainwater kindly reminded me, tattoo artists that generally work on human beings also sometimes practice on the skin of a pig. This is a reason why I’m baffled that I was only able to round up the small amount of images that I have here.

Personally, I am ashamed at my inability to find a photo of a pig with the Motorhead dog inked on its back. I assume it isn’t made yet now that I’ve searched, so this post is also a call out to all you artists to get that sow and sow that sow a nice one, metal style.

This post is part of the World Famous Design Junkies unnatural nature category.

Let’s talk. I need you to know who Dan O’Bannon is. He’s one of the largest reasons the first Alien (1979) movie was written, produced, exists. He was one of the two writers on that film, and helped on it through production. Another thing about him that’s rather important I feel is that he was a good friend to H.R. Giger. The artist wild beast that is H.R. Giger is the one who illustrated the monster. Recently, I basically just found out, Dan O’Bannon passed on to death. This is a tribute to that man using his friend H.R. Giger’s artworks, the stranger wildnesses of the film, and the rarities that come from the darkness that is the evil corners of these internets. Be on your guard.

It is a strange legacy to have hit the world strongest with a film about terror. Instead of listing the positive, loving films O’Bannon’d worked on, let’s instead focus on this. The film Alien, basically the place where Dan O’Bannon shined brightest. He worked on a crapload of other things before and after, but this is the thing right now. Right now, nothing else is such a bright star. And in regards to what we, here, at World Famous Design Junkies push into space, there’s a lot of lovely, inspiring, and sometimes fantastically campy imagery, moving images, and sounds in there.

It’s a moment in history that inspired lots and lots of other positive things, wild things, and really really WEIRD things. And here they all are. All of them. Every single one.

DAN O’BANNON! Thank you for such a lovely thing.

ALIEN POST GO!

This post is part of the World Famous Design Junkies outer space category.

When you take a seat at your local sidewalk-side business, do you think about where you’re sitting in proximity to the windows? Perhaps if you do, when the windows seem too small, this becomes a non issue. Or maybe if you do, you sit close because you like to show off what you’re wearing, or maybe it’s spring and you want to stay close to the warming of the world? This photo project/collection “Through The Glass” by Stefano Mattia asks these questions, if you ask me, especially the one “what are you looking at, buster?” To the photographer. Or to whoever’s looking.

This project consists of a collection of 12 photos spanning Rome, Beijing, Paris, London, and Padova and two full years of photography, starting in 2008, going through the present, aka when this post is posted in early 2010. It’s what Mattia calls an ongoing project, so heed and take a peek at his page if this post is rather old when you see it.

It’s just as important to frame your photos as it is to frame your photo when you’re in this internet world. Blogs fire up their engines at the site of a set of pics that’ve got a name on them. When that name isn’t just some silly sad sack of arbitrary, the best things happen! “Through The Glass” is a classy set, each of the photos taken in a way that could never realistically be exact due to their proximity in the world, yet there they are, so nicely packed, they seem as though they could have been taken through the same pane of glass.

Fa real.

This post is part of the World Famous Design Junkies clear category.

Hello all you fun-loving satanists – keep your crappy rat-made tats. The following is a collection of images of upside-down crosses. This is not a collection of evil for satan’s sake. It is a collection of the tendency for images of inverted crosses to be wild and weird. It takes a special situation for a person to decide to flip a cross on its head because of the controversial reaction it might make. However, as you’ll be quick to see, many of these images are personal – images of flipped crosses written on hands, on desks in schools, and more, just for some sort of self-fulfilling need. But then again, they did photograph them.

Indulge in this weirdness, and stray not from the path of righteousness.

The following collection is made up of contributions from this list of generous donors: Rev. Xanatos Satanicos Bombasticos, LadyLadyLadyy, The Rev. Steve, LaruaLynn Patrick, John Hatfield, Criminal Intent, Toothpaw (illustration on text page), Swampy, Scott Prince, Klis, Angel D, Eggybird, Shbnggrth, Cemtry, Chwy, AntiMax, Hotspot O, PizDrunx, Yissah, BuChoy, Leo Curran, Jansenh, IEat Glamour, and Kahlerisms.

This post is part of the World Famous Design Junkies bad taste category.

But he ain’t deid yet! Not actually with a gun, either. Here’s a fabulous new art shot full of David Choe works of magnificence, new AND old! You can get your big huge painting on OR get your slightly smaller (but still gigantic) giclee print on. I can vouch for the quality too, I’ve got that one of a half-nude lady falling – it’s fantastic. This right here is called “Character Assassination” and it’s due to be released SOON through the Fifty24SF Gallery. The piece you see above is called “Rosie” and it’s pretty giant.

Most of these pictures (most?) are giants, huge pieces that cost several thousand bucks. But I can’t tell you that yet! I can show you pictures and give you a big fat list of titles though. Take a look at the list, take a look at the picture representation of the paintings in the gallery below, and match them up if you dare.

“Pink Party Hat”
“Tender Nob”
“Jesus (Head Study)”
“Peter (Head Study)”
“Pretty Unrealistic”
“A Hooker’s Feelings”
“Rosie”
“Seeders”
“Leechers”
“Mary (Head Study)”
“Judas (Head Study)”
“Party Hat #7”
“Flesh and Bones”
“Choebot K-Town Special”
“Choebot Mad Park”
“Choebot”
“Hedz”
“Dry Humping”
“Drum Kit”
“Death Blossom”
“Please Lie to Me”
“Loose Lips”
“Watching You Waste Away”
“Silent Dance”
“Jimi”
“Driving Home Alone”
“City Girl Giclee”
“London Girl”
“City Girl”
“Obama 1”
“Hell Houndz”
“Ignored Prayers (Print)”
“Seedy”
“Sound Eyes”
“Helmet”
“Falling For Grace”
“Sound Eyes II”
“Clothed Male Naked Female”
“Dokebi”
“Ignored Prayers”
“Ramona”
“Ballz Crazy”
“Haitian Girl”

A few of these works have been “available” before through different stores and such, but this is the first place they’ve been all in the same places at once. Get your Choe on.

Gallery Hours: Tuesday–Saturday from 12–6 P.M. and by appointment
Address: 248 Fillmore Street, San Francisco, CA 94117
Contact: Lynzy Blair / Phone: (415) 252-9144 / Email: Lynzy@UpperPlayground.com

This post is part of the World Famous Design Junkies burlesque category.

Welcome to the state of shoes. It is a police state. Get a load of these stilettos. Pump them on up to the highest point of insane fashion extravaganza street festival. That’s totally a level of awesome. For these shoes. Made by industrial designer Tim Cooper using entirely 3D technology to render these bad boys out. Ohhh mama. Lock me up and throw away the police shoes. I just can’t stand them! Amazing!

Welcome to self-expression. I’m going to kick a mouse into a corner just so my feet can be arrested by these fabulous shoes. It’d have to be some other-worldly combination of clothes you’d have to be wearing to match these. Although, with the lights and bars and amazing complexity and all that, I’m sure a nice black dress would do just fine. Lady Gaga’d have a conniption fit. Not to mention Miley vs whats-her-name in the movie shoestore brawl.

Arrest those women!

I’m waiting for the sneakers that match. As I’ve said before and I’ll say again: I just can not do heels. Right on my nose I go.

Yes, I took the name of this post from the tagline of the shoes themselves. Shame on me! But it’s so good, I just couldn’t resist! How about you, if these existed in the real world, wouldn’t you just flip your lid? Even if you weren’t the kind of person who’d ever wear them, wouldn’t you just want them to have and to hold and to turn the lights on for a cop rave? Me! I do!

This post is part of the World Famous Design Junkies fashion category.

You always wanted to see Doctor House doing a little dance for Vicodin, right? How about seeing an ad for the 1970 mint Mach 5 motorcar from Speed Racer? Here it is. The international smartman Chef Guevara? Check. Of course, what collection of oddities would be complete without a comic-strip-style poster of Batman and Superman enjoying a quick yet sensual kiss? All this and more in the new collection of images by design funnyman…

Scuzzo!

This man Scuzzo really does make dreams a slightly more real reality, I am telling you! Another example below there in the gallery is the poster from NOFX, made by Scuzzo, so it’s unofficial, saying “Don’t Drink and Drive! You might spill your drink!” In reality, it’s inspired by the NOFX song “You Drink, You Drive, You Spill.” Fun!

P.S. don’t actually do that.

Another fun thing about Scuzzo is his departure from DeviantArt. If you’ll check out the gray “do not enter” sign below, you’ll see his statement about the evils of the censorship that happens per-normal on DeviantArt, and how he did not dig such a thing! The original ban bar is horizontal, he turned it upright.

BONUS check out the photo of Scuzzo and his daughter at Disneyland! They are wearing matching Scuzz-Mickey shirts that say “Will Draw for Food.” Love!

This post is part of the World Famous Design Junkies celebration category.

Last time I was speaking about Rihanna she was doing some pyramid schemes up on the Glow in the Dark tour with some o’ her pals. Lots happened since then. Nothing so hardcore as this. This right here is a post containing some gigantic photos of Rihanna’s newest music…film? It might be more rough than a simple video would have you believe. These are photos from the upcoming song single “Hard” with Rihanna and Young Jeezy.

She’s got guns. And spikes.

UPDATE here’s a lovely moving pictures preview of the video also. I didn’t know MTV still promoted videos!

Get your eyeballs on the glitz of this fashionable war. Rihanna and I daresay Lady GaGa are spearheading the “high” fashion category of the music business at the moment, yes?

This post is part of the World Famous Design Junkies burlesque category.

These photos are technically not animal parts inside-out, but animals with their insides… out. They’re all taken by one Nazif Topçuoğlu who is one splendid and spectacular photographer if I do say so myself. These photos fit perfectly into his artist statement, in which he searches for images that remind the viewer of an unclear past. In my mind, I’m hoping he’s a slaughterhouse attendant as a child.

Head cheese.

STATEMENT

On no days of our childhood did we live so fully perhaps as those we thought we had left behind without living them, those that we spent with a favourite book.

M. Proust, On Reading

The underlying thread in my work is a constant preoccupation with time, memory and loss. I worry about the transience of people and things in general, and try to reconstruct unclear and imperfect images of an idealized past. Such an attempt inevitably requires the ability to recapture past, hence my constant art-historical references to classic paintings and photographs as well as to authors such as Proust and Thomas Mann. Hence I have no problems with my images becoming visually seductive in the process.

Another and more specific aspect of the recent Readers, is its pre-occupation with the contradicting positions of women in Turkey. When employing the representations of youth as imagery, one has to deal with the issues of gender roles and male gaze. In these photographs, unlike the more common examples, a respectful stance towards the female has been taken. The subjectification of the female youth as a gender-free ideal, inevitably involves her intelligence, beauty, energy, and struggle as the major concerns of this work

I do photography because… I need to produce the images which are provocative but not exploitative that I would enjoy looking at.

There are two sets here: COLOUR OFFAL and BLACK AND WHITE OFFAL – I’m sure with your super eyeball brains and such, you’ll be able to tell the difference between the two. Color is color, and so on.

This post is part of the World Famous Design Junkies grotesque category.

A most terrifying of categories.

Hope you’re not eating anything right about now.

What do you know, marriage isn’t so bad! Apparently now you get a nice shag carpet / fuzzy covered ball instead of the normal 1 ton! That’s what I like to hear. This and several other items also included in this post are sculptures put together and constructed by designer Karin Nilsson who goes under the “Crafts” banner at HDK design school in Göteborg, Sweden. Love the deconstructions!

Above: “Ball and Chain” Karin Nilsson 2009

These objects were certainly constructed to destroy or make fun of social amalgamations created to keep businessmen in business and consumers shopping. The ball and chain in pink is of course my favorite, but the carved “diamonds” and the soft version of Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountian” are not to be missed!

Karin Nilsson – Applied Art – BA Level – Grade 1
Crafts – Ceramics karin.son@hotmail.com

Just what we were looking for in the World Famous Design Junkies 3D collection.

Above: “Greetings to Marcel” Below: “Forever”

So lemme tell you this. These signs I have right here are from an old liquor store. You can tell because they’ve got alcohol all over them. I mean logos. Also I know because I got them from a liquor store. Take a look at the genius cleverness included in every card. And the type’s pretty pretty too!

These come from what was once Westside Liquor in Saint Cloud Minnesota. They’re some of a fad that continues to today, that being mutually beneficial ad cards, posters, standups, installations, made by the beer and hard liquor companies that advertise for them, but also add credibility and a professional look to the stores that carry them.

Seek ye the silliness and ye shall have the beer sales.

These are part of the World Famous Design Junkies collection of photographed signs that one of our most famous posts comes from: Sexist Vintage – photographed in an old garage, this time in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

This post is from the World Famous Design Junkies ephemera category.

Yes there are some times when its appropriate to draw sports figures, believe it or not! The golden, romantic age of sports heros is over – Michael Jordan and Bo Jackson do not play sports anymore. But here’s a couple of women who love sports men so much they draw them with felt pens & markers to this day! These illustrators are named Sandra & Annika and they go by the team name YAWN.

YAWN means YEAH! AWESOME! WOW! NICE! What a weird thing. Yawn is like a yawn, boring, crappy, tired, but then it means something amazing here.

It’s just totally clever, isn’t it?! It is!

An ongoing project. There are times when we tend to like certain stuff and then draw it almost obsessively. This is obviously a time when we liked sports guys. It all started when Annika wanted to get a football helmet…

Look around! Find a few sports figures! My favorite drawing is of the USA swimmers from the Beijing winter olympics MICHAEL PHELPS FOREVER.

This post is from the World Famous Design Junkies pizza party category.

So you’ve invisible, but basically the fact that you’ve got to be naked to be entirely invisible, that makes you so nervous. So you’ve got to wear clothing. What do you wear? Photographer / designer Jennifer Mao knows. This set of photos is called “With Or Without You” and it’s not necessarily about the monster mash.

Alternately I’d call this “When It Comes Down To It” for the lack of a anything else but the tiny subject there. What else comes to mind? With or without you, your socks still come to visit me. You’d be better off in life cleaning those, that’s for sure.

jennifer mao

is: a student currently breathing in seattle, wa.

enjoys: considering all viewpoints, paying attention to things, and the majority of the internet.

welcomes: correspondence in the form of comments, criticisms, long-lost reunions, and other awkward human interaction at:
jennifer.s.mao [at] gmail.com

This post is straight out the World Famous Design Junkies burlesque category because it’s about nudies with their naughty bits all invisibly flailing about.

EDIT: CONTEST OVER. Winners will be chosen soon and sent messages over twitter or email. Thanks to everyone who participated!

Hello and welcome, design world, to the first ever World Famous Design Junkies sticker giveaway! You see those stickers in the photo there? The ones that say a little something about Obama on a certain Unicorn? Yes. That is what we are giving away. You, yes YOU! could be the lucky winner of a 12pack of World Famous Design Junkies “Obama Ona Unicorn” stickers courtesy of our new best friend in the world, Sticker Robot!

So here’s the deal. Sticker Robot is running this competition thang where you think of a clever saying and submit it, hoping that it’s chosen, at which point you’ll win 500 stickers with that saying on them. WELL guess what happened? Writer Chris Burns (that’s me) of World Famous Design Junkies won on the very first week the competition was open!

And now we’re passing the savings on to you!

So to make a long story short (too late) all you’ve got to do is tweet! Get yourself a twitter if you don’t already have one, make sure you don’t lose access to that account incase you win, and just CLICK AND TWEET

Once you click that link, you’ll have the following entered into your twitter tweeter:

RT @design_junkies @stickerobot http://tinyurl.com/ykyfb2u Win a 12pack of Obama Unicorns from WFDJ!

Tweet that and you’ll be automatically entered! Easy as that.

If you’re chosen, you win 12 stickers, no strings attached, sent straight to your door!

END OF CONTEST IS WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 14 AT NOON, winners are chosen at random, 12 packs of 12 will be given away, one pack can be won per person, shipping is free. If you’ve got any questions, ask them below. If not, get tweeting!

All the noodity of lovely bare-legged type. That’s what nakedtype.com was gonna be all about. Juan Carlos Pagan had an idea for a type foundry exploring the perceived humanistic qualities of letters. If you take a look now by clicking http://nakedtype.com/ you’ll see it’s parked by godaddy. We talkin future baybay! For now, while you wait, there’s several really pretty posters for you to peek at. Each of these in the set is 24″ x 32″ printed on medium-weight bright-white paper.

Oh fashionable! The sleek look of the just-picked letterforms from your favorite font. That’s what I’m talkin about. I can’t wait for this site! The Humanistic Qualities of Letters – that’s something you could make a single post about on a blog, but shoot if it isn’t a subject that could be expanded up into a full bigtime educational website. A must do.

This post is a page out of the World Famous Design Junkies book of typography. And then if you’re feeling extra saucy, salt and peppery, you can head over to the official World Famous Design Junkies House of Burlesque.

addl!

Thanks everyone for all the love. But i cannot take total credit for all these posters. The lovely “K” poster was created by the extraordinary talent of Gaius Benbow. Check out his link here http://www.gaiusbenbow.com/.

-Juan Carlos Pagan

Thanks man!

Behold! The greatest place to buy do-hickeys in the entire world. You betcha. This post contains a patented MINI TOUR® of Ax-Man Surplus Store in Saint Paul, Minnesota. It’s cool, it’s punk, it’s just basically pretty awesome. Take note of the setup, really basic, but especially take note of the signs: all hand-made, all amazing. Find this particular store at 639 University Ave W, St Paul, MN – (651) 646-8653‎. Drive there, I dare you!

Feast your eyes! The official mission statement of Ax-Man Surplus stores! Every store should have a manifesto like this one, typed up and stapled to the wall by the door.

There’s No Place Like This on Earth!

Just what is Ax-Man Surplus, do you ask? We simply defy a simple description. For over thirty years we have been serving the creative and practical needs of the Twin Cities community. Simple to say, there aren’t any stores around simply like this!

Imagine going to one store and finding yards and yards of different materials, all kinds of wierd hardware parts, porcelain and plastic body parts, bizarre millitary odds ‘n’ ends like gas masks and dummy rounds, capacitors and power supplies, art materials, office products, and coffee pots- All in the same place!

Usually when people hear the word “surplus”, the words “used” and “defective” also come to mind. THIS IS A MYTH!When we say surplus, we mean merchandise that is new and in fine working order, but someone just had more on hand than needed, or items whose intended application just didn’t do it justice…

…Which is where you come in. Our business thrives on our customers’ imagination. We have scores of merchandise waiting for creative people to find new uses for them. Using a fly trap as a minnow catcher, for instance. Or using weight resistance bands as boat mooring lines. Or building a computer or amplifier with our bins and bins of electromechanical stuff. The possibilities are endless!

We don’t believe in UPC codes- the apocalyptic “mark of the beast” for the Nineties. We believe customers like to touch merchandise that’s not wrapped in bubble packs and laminated cardstock. When you come into our stores, we encourage you to browse around, read our signs, dig through our leather scraps bin, hunt for a vacuum tube for that old radio, and just have a good time! So if you’re in for a shopping experience, or just in the Twin Cities, pay us a visit!

This post is straight out of the World Famous Design Junkies rummage sale category. This isn’t a rummage sale in the same way a garage sale is a rummage sale, or the same way a flea market is a rummage sale, nay, this is a store. Generally the only place you find rummage at a store-like location is at a “secondhand” store like Good Will or Unique. This is not those, I say to you, nay again! This is Ax-Man Surplus.

This is the truly one-of-a-kind.

A sculpture for the wild books. This bodacious creation was birthed from the brain of sculptor Chen Wenling. His works include nothing less than weird, wild, and wicked! This particular sculpture is called “What You See Might Not Be Real” and is part of a new exhibition at Joy Art Gallery called “Emergency Escape.” Generally his exhibitions include a bunch of characters that sit inside a single theme (like pigs, or monotone Red people), so this is a fabulous departure of style and a crashing crank to subject matter. Discover for yourself the hugeness of this farting bull, and discover the celebrity devil he’s destroying.

The big fart! “放屁“ (fang pi) in Chinese literally means to fart but in slang it means to bluff or lie.

Chen Wenling’s previous exhibition was called “God of Materialism” at the Asia Art Center – logical transition to the subject matter here, yes? The bull is the economy, the man being smashed? Bernie Madoff. What a lovely composition!

Made of fiberglass, various paints, 20+ feet tall.

Emergency Exit
Joy Art Gallery
Beijing, China
Chen Wenling Solo Exhibition
Curator: Huang Du
Displayed through October 11 2009

This post from the World Famous Design Junkies sculpture category.