I hope you remember Mighty Max. The adrenaline pumped up equivalent of Polly Pocket. All you fun loving compact-hands holding and playing around people who were kids when it was 1992. That’s me! That might be you. So what’ve we got here? A bit of artwork. This is a set of hands that graced the fronts of the packages that held the Mighty Max blister packed playsets. A couple examples of those are included below, plus the rest of the whole set of hands. They’re creepy and they’re cooky.

UPDATE 2: RE-POSTED FOR SIZE – this post was originally posted before we had a site layout that allowed images larger than 500px wide. Now we do, so now this is!

Now there’s a guy out there, one heavy collecting dude. He loves to get toys, images of toys, everything that’s got to do with toys. One’s that had big effects on our brains as kids, especially when the toys were small. This guy’s name is Spectrum is Green and he’s got it all. He’s also on the lookout for new playset-related toys all the time so drop him a line if you’re into getting rid of all of yours, or just want them to go to a good home.

UPDATE: After an extended conversation with the collector behind the “Spectrum is Green” collection, (his name is Guy Himber,) we now know that these pictures are scans of the original artwork, aka the painted images as they existed before being applied to the packaging. Hot! Sexy! Amazing!

Now what you’ve got here is monster playsets and their monster hand equivalent. Sometimes it’s a wolf with a wolf, sometimes it’s a shark head with a mass of octopus tentacles for a hand. And they’re nice. They’re really simply painted, really precisely executed. Looking really pretty all the way through.

Now check it out – we’re on the lookout for the artist of these masterpieces. They were on the boxes, so maybe the boxes have a little signature on them? Anyone whose got one of these in the package still should take a peek!

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

Illustrator Naresh Ch Das, straight outta Hyderabad (India), presents his fantastic skills with the swiftness. Each of the works you see here took Das a very very small amount of time to do, in MOST cases somewhere around 20 minutes. Holy crap you’re saying, and will continue to say throughout this post. The gallery is full of magnificence, a bounty of natural, human habitat, and science fiction horizontals are spread over digital canvases in a world I’m sure heaven isn’t too far apart from.

SPEED PAINTING is what this is. Let me repeat, these paintings were all done in under an hour, in most cases under a half hour. Frajabulous!

Das tells us his work is the painting and coloring of dreams. He paints what he feels and what he enjoys, hoping to touch hearts of the viewer through the sensual nature of the brushstrokes. Heavy stuff! Really noble stuff too, in a very unique way, reaching out to the world through digitally based landscape illustrations.

There’s some heavy robots in there too, sometimes with flamethrowers, and they sneak up on you, so watch out for that. If you’d like to get in contact with Naresh Ch Das, email him at dasnaresh @ gmail.com, or visit him at his blogspot blog type http://lostinarc.blogspot.com/ online portfolio – updates on the often!

UPDATE – more info sent in from Das:

I use all the mediums – oil, acrylics, charcoal, watercolor, and also digital..but most of the work on my blog [including these Speed Paintings] are created in digital…

I am currently working for a game development studio as lead concept art/visual development artist… my strong points lie in the pre-production part, i.e. concept art, character design and development, story boarding, matte painting, 2d traditional animation, layout and background painting (both manual and digitally.)

Keep on rockin!

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

There comes a time in space every once in a while where none other than GOD himself grants us thustly a favor of time and need for intricacy. It is during these times that we’re allowed to take that time and create that intricacy for the greater good of fine art and design. This is one of those times, pre 1861 United States of America, in a time when money design was needed and the only defense against counterfeiting was high amazing detail, as done by engravers with the most fantastic of skill.

What we’ve got here is a small collection of pre-1861 engravings done for money around the USA, all of these part of the British Museum Archive. Strange, yes? Take a look in their archive site there for a mastertastic collection of the finest treasures from the entire globe and throughout history.

But do that AFTER you take a peek through these images, all of them so fine. And if you’re an illustrator, designer, or artist, hope and pray for the opportunity to take such an amount of time as these folks certainly did use to make such timeless works. What a gift.

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

This fella right here, Thomas B, aka Bergie81, created a lovely masterwork here, a Star Wars scene done in heavy pop fashion. Specifically in the Sunday Funnies style of Roy Lichtenstein. This particular work “Battle” is done in direct tribute to the painting “Whaam!”, done by Lichtenstein in 1963. The style is hot.

Magnetic, that’s what these two entities are. Star Wars and Pop Art, together forever and never to part, together forever we two. That’s their song for each other.

Now here’s a couple words from Bergie:

I do admire the art of Roy Lichtenstein and I tried to convey his PopArt to the Star Wars theme.
Source of inspiration was his masterpiece “Whaam” from 1963 which is one of my favourites. Due to the fact that I am not George Lukas, I cant use it for commercial purpose. And again I say while pointing the finger:

DONT USE IT FOR ANY COMMERCIAL STUFF!

May the fairness be with you!

Yay free! You can hang out over at Bergie’s site for the PDFs of these works, or you can go in the gallery below for some rather-large jpg versions. Also included are Bergie’s Lightsaber Pop works. Cute!

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

When you’re insane about design, as all of us here at World Famous Design Junkies are, you bet your biffy, you carry around a tiny camera in your pocket and photograph everything in your wake, most especially those things that blow your mind for one reason or another. Design moments, wild moments in everyday strange life in writings or color or shape or form, anything that inspires the eyeballs. Here is a collection of these photos of which I speak. From a flea market in North West Minnesota to a Target store in Minneapolis.

John Travolta, Professional Pilot

The ever-epic photo of Chewbacca feeling up Princess Leia (also to be seen in our ULTRA AMAZING collection of rare Star Wars photos) put to good use on a gig poster

The wording “A Most Liveable Community” in a community that would never, in a million years, word it as such (Saint Cloud, Minnesota)

Toilets in a basement bar being re-done

A folder of collectable Desert Storm cards at the flea market in Wright County

Bucky O’Hare action figures in their original bubble packaging

A custom-painted toilet seat cover

A personal message of pride to the world made in order to sell postcards in frames

Wolverine channels Rambo

Pogs, lots of pogs

Hand-painted corn dogs sign, with bonus “FREESYS” note

Record cover peeking out of backpack

ESPECIALLY no U turn

Fabulous choices in the jukebox at Psycho Suzi’s biker bar and restaurant

Re-painted facade at the 400 bar (where a friend and I once saw YTCracker!)

Clean broken sign

Sign covering a sign

A sweet ramp

21st Century Bank with futuristic font

Faced spraypaint cans

DESPITE license plate

That rock at the Subway in Osage

Cowlicks to Curls

Vandalized OBEY sticker

Drink fountain with both Pepsi and Coke (as far away from eachother as possible)

August Schell cap from New Ulm, Minnesota

Disco ball at Loring Pasta Bar in Dinkytown

UFFDA8 uff-da license plate (Norwegian slang)

Pile of weapons made of duct-tape

Dangerous cat warning written in chalk

Frattalone heavy machinery brand name

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

Ever have a day when you felt quite spacey? I’ll show you a guy right here who felt that way for a while. This is illustrator and colorist Angus McKie. He’s done a bunch of covers for paperback science fiction novels including some fabulous works in Stewart Cowley’s “Terran Trade Authority” illustrated books. Along with a group of other lovingly talented draw artists of his generation, he developed a whole spaceships in heavily detailed backgrounds. Then, most importantly of all I think, he illustrated the entire “So Beautiful, So Dangerous” segment of the 1981 animated epic Heavy Metal.

Take a peekie peek at a slightly edited (for boobage, if I’m not mistaken) version of “So Beautiful, So Dangerous” from Heavy Metal, then head on down to the gallery below for a bunch of pics made by the man we be speakin of right now, Angus McKie. And give him a high five for excellence.

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

First Avenue is being repainted, just incase you didn’t know, all of it. First it was blackened out completely, then re-starred in a regular grid (the stars were wacky before), then the title added. All’s we’ve got pics of here is the title over a few days time, but peek if you can at those stars too. Inside each of them is the name of a superstar musical artist or group that at least once performed in the main room on the First Avenue main stage. It’s all very slick now, very sassy, very clean.

Also there’s a new restaurant in there and I think they’re building a spaceship in the garage and Michael Jackson is going to do a reunion concert on top!

EDIT 7/16/2010: star painting pics added via First Ave on facebook.

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

I’ve got some healthy amount of rage in my heart today. That’s why when I happened upon these “Animal Gangs” images illustrated by Mostrico!, I was totally pumped up. Mostrico is a very talented illustrator that hails from Medellín, Colombia, and also goes by the name Alejo Giraldo. These animal heads are part of a set, as many fantastic projects are – a set that includes a Cat, a Zebra, a Panda Bear, and a Fox, each of these with their own animal pack to run with them. Stay hard!

Each of these images is a pencil/pen and ink drawing turned to digital illustration and coloring image. Also they are each of them completely bad ass. Gangs are as follows:

The Lower East Side Bandana Foxes

The Downtown Roller Bears

The East Village Zebra Punks

The Upper East Side Dagger Cats

Which one would you choose to affiliate with? You know good and well which one I’d have to run alongside.

This whole project reminds me of the classic gang-battle action film The Warriors. In that movie, it’s not long into the future and all the gangs of the 5 boroughs of New York are called in for a meeting by the leader of one of the baddest of all the gangs. This leader’s name is Cyrus and he rocks a speech about how if the gangs, diverse as they are, as disparate as they are, rolled together, well then they’d run the city. All of them so strange.

All of them so wild.

These gangs reflect that. Each of these animal gangs is super fabulous for their own unique qualities and skills. Each one of these illustrations is amazing on its own, but without the power of the rest of the animals, they’ve just got so much to work with. Together, in this set of colors and lines, in this new collection, the powers each of them creates is more powerful than the sum of their parts — synergy!

To find more info on the designer / illustrator / artist Mostrico!, just head on over to his flicker account and do a little dance. To send him a message, head on over to his Behance message center.

ALSO, BONUS – included below the animal gangs images is a set of other images from the portfolio of Mostrico! I’m sure you’ll grow to love them as I have. They are all cute and have faces prettier than a mother could love.

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

Agh! Claws! Oh no, also robots! Wait, these robots have fantastic beats and French bits. They are Les Robots! Or, as I call them in my head, Daft Bear. They are one of a collection of bear-related background images from the extended collection of bears called “KING PANPAN,” a 365 day-a-year, image every single day, project by Julius Santiago. It’s 365 days starting at the beginning of 2010, so that’s a whole bunch of months already, with a whole bunch more to go! Check out more of the collection in the gallery below, then head over to Santiago’s twitter account to send him some suggestions for more bears!

This excellent trend of attaching yourself to a 365 day schedule, one a day, is extremely difficult. Don’t fool yourself into thinking “oh only one a day – that’ll be simple, one is easy!” It is easy to do one. But the next day, that’s when it starts getting harder. Each day wears on you a little bit more, and in the end you hate it! Unless you’re amazing and involve other people like Santiago has done here. No artist is an island, remember that. Designers, the same thing goes for you. You’ve got to stay inspired.

Inspired to work.

Inspired to play.

My name is Julius Santiago. I’m a graphic designer and Illustrator.

King Panpan is my little project to create as much art as possible. I’ll be creating one bear illustration a day for all of 2010. Drawing them is the easy part. The hard part is coming up with 365 ideas. Hopefully this is where you can help. Leave me a reply via twitter and I’ll add it to my list.

The images below are all from Santiago’s wallpaper collection, so once you click them, they’re gonna show up HUGE! Feel free to download and share, but remember to always attach links to Santiago when you do it. He’s gonna keep on bear-ing in the free world for the whole rest of the year!

Check filenames for inspiration on each bear situation -Robocop to Pokemon.

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

OR! Onomatopoeics!

At the heart of every great piece of pop is a simple combination. A combination of words, a catchphrase, a combination of colors, an iconic image, and sometimes a combination of it all, so perfectly distilled that it sends shockwaves through our collective systems that never stop! Behold, Bat-viewers! It’s the action cards! Those everloving combinations of color and exclamation the likes of which have never been used as effectively before or since! Gotta catch em all, someday, you never know – a good shot is below!

This is a collection of bat-cards used at the point of contact in the Batman live-action television series and bigtime bomb movie! You’ll see combos of 2 and 3 colors as well as singular splashes over the still-moving screen. These kinds of cards of course come from the colorful creations drawn into comics since the dawn of coolness. Keep reading, bat-lovers, because the story doesn’t end there. Nay!

One must attest to the greatness of those who took and take the time to scour the great bat-archive for these images. Those fine folks with the time, effort, and great and holy task of watching every single episode of the Batman show and movie to find these indubitable images, look them up, they’s amazing! These are them: John (A.Pennyworth), Scott Sebring, Shadenfreude!, Bat Mania!, TV Squad!, Batman 66!, M-Rumors!, Cynical-C!, TV Acres!, Graphics Hunt!, Bat Blog!, Museum.TV!, and a bunch o’ random folks on Photobucket!

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

A hundred and twenty-three years before 1995, there was railroad built in Costa Rica that connected San Jose to Limon in the Caribbean coast. A hundred and twenty-three years later, the Costa Rican government shut it down. Some years after that, in 2003, photographer Guillermo A. Durán and his pal (unnamed) took a two day hike along the length of the lost railway. This is that journey nutshelled inside a collection of some fabulous black and white photographs. Be prepared for some nature-rules-rocks.

This journey officially begins in the tiny town of Turrialba and aims for Siquirres town, down inside the Reventazon River canyon. If you’d like to take this entire journey en español, take a peek at the blogspot blog that accompanied along the trail: Cuenticos 506. This is a sort of journey every photographer aught to have to take: one that follows a trail set by a person or organization before them, one where they’ve got to capture a set of images inside a wholly especial set of events during a set of days that had been laid down over a long set of years. In this case, that amount of days for the photographers was two, while the remains of the events they collected was over a hundred and twenty three!

While the photographer’s ultimate goal, that one where they attempt to collect the heart and the soul of their subject, is ultimately impossible, try they must. And try we must to support, for even the most lofty goal is important for the human spirit to run after.

Now take a peek at this one.

To get in contact with the photographer Guillermo A. Durán, email over to gds506 at gmail.com. To continue to fawn over his works with your eyeballs, take a look in the gallery below, then head on over to his official http://duranfoto.net/ internets.

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

Today (I wrote this a few days ago) I hear the sad news that one of the ultimate original players in the Graffiti and Hip-hop world has kicked the bucket. “RAMM::ELL::ZEE” or Rammellzee as he was called died today [June 27, 2010] whilst, if the rumors are true, he was doing math equations in none other than his home town and city, Far Rockaway, Queens, New York. How unbelievably appropriate for one of the most mathematically sound wild-style artists of many generations. The first I ever heard of him, he was being described in the Graffiti documentary film “Style Wars,” his paintings of weapon-clad letters being shown by his pal Dondi, another king.

In humble celebration of the passing of Ram, I and we present to you a gallery of armored letters, operators that blow the lids off all that they encounter. Rest in peace, Zee.

“The letter is armed to stop all the phony formations, lies, and tricknowlegies placed upon its structure.” – RAM EL ZEE

Rammel is an enigma. An eternally complicated graffiti man who, according to wikipedia, revealed in an interview that his name meant heavy, heavy stuff – derived from “RAM” plus “‘M’ for ‘Magnitude’, ‘Sigma’ (Σ) the first summation operator, first ‘L’ – ‘longitude’, second ‘L’ – ‘latitude’, ‘Z’ – ‘z-bar’, Σ, Σ – ‘summation’.”

Dondi speaking about a work with Ram in a Style Wars “scene extra”:

And that’s just the tip of this metal, mental iceberg. Look for some videos of this crazy brilliant man if you dare. He’s wild. Above begins and below continues the gallery including a couple of works by Ram himself (above being a “B” by Ram owned by a private party), plus a bunch of paintings by adventurers that were inspired without a doubt by Ram’s life in one way or another. Have a feast on these giant masterpieces in his honor.

Where appropriate, the filenames of the letters in the gallery below will lead you to their sources. Due to the super-futuristic nature of Ramm Ell Zee, I expect you to know how to access that information. Internets, graffiti, letters with weapons. Activate!

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

Let me tell you about the best little giant toy company in the world. Medicom. They’ve got contracts with some of the greatest toy designers in the world and they do not-hold-back! They make the greatest stuff ever! Lemme give you a rundown of their latest achievements. First, let’s talk about that KAWS Pinocchio and Jiminy Cricket set you see above. They were first blasted all over the internets by Arrested Motion who, when walking about a museum exhibition, spotted the little cuties. This was (is) The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum‘s first KAWS exhibit, as well as Brian Donnelly (KAWS)’s first solo museum show. Then there’s all sort of other toys like EAMES, Ren and Stimpy, The Clash Mickey Mouse…

Oh my god the excellent things that are about to be released unto the world.

Arrested motion claims to have confirmation that these Pinocchio and Jiminy Cricket toys will be coming to life via Medicom. It seems totally reasonable so there’s probably no reason to doubt it. Feel free to send me a set!

Then let’s keep going down the list. All of these are pictured in the gallery below, right after photos taken by Arrested Motion of the KAWS figure as pictured at the museum show. TOYS: There’s the EAMES yellow and black furniture pattern Bea@rbrick (which, if you don’t know what is, it’s a bear-shaped canvas-sort of toy onto which hundreds of designs have been placed), super flat black and white Mickey Mouse brick, Star Wars original packaging Kubrick set of 6 (Kubrick is very similar to Be@rbrick, only they’re more open to interpretation, not just bearish) -series 3 with C-3PO, Han Solo in Carbonite block, AT-AT driver, Lando Calrissian, Wicket W Warrick the ewok, and a jawa!

Next there’s a black and white version of the iconic London Calling pose (The Clash) Mickey Mouse, SpongeBob and Patrick Star Kubrick, Star Wars Kubrick series 1 (I don’t know what happened to 2) including Luke Skywalker in Jedi Knight uniform, C-3PO with Salacious Crumb, R2-D2 with drink serving tray as he had on Jabba’s Barge, Chewbacca (Bouschh’s Prisoner), the seen-once-maybe-twice in Return of the Jedi tall yellow and green alien Amanaman, and Jabba’s right hand man Bib Fortuna.

Then there’s REN AND STIMPY BE@RBRICKS what in the world?! There’s a plain set of them then there’s SPACE MADNESS. Then, since we’re in space already, there’s a Kirk and Uhura Star Trek pack of Be@rbricks – these have a very interesting style to them that makes me wonder who did the artwork.

There’s some KAWS “teeth” shoestrings that I’d like to have a whole case of because they’re so awesome I’d put them in all my shoes forever, “Deep Sweet Easy” and “Kuredosukopu” Be@rbricks with strap that are super gorgeous and will have profits donated to JCV polio vaccines, and surprise(!) a Pinocchio and Jiminy Cricket Kubrick set. How much you wanna bet they got a deal on licensing for these two characters and came to KAWS with the idea of rocking out on a version of his own?

And that’s my conclusion. See how the world all connects.

For more info on the KAWS artshow at The Aldrich: http://aldrichart.org/exhibitions/kaws.php
For more MEDICOM news: http://medicomtoy.tv/blog/
For amazing hotdogs: http://unclefrankys.com/

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

Well, the day has finally come. June 29, 2010. This marks ten full years since the release of one of the most addictive keyboard-and-click video games ever created. It was there, in that game, online with thousands of other players fighting, leveling up, collecting treasures, that I realized my obsessive personality. I believe every modern person has this sort of “disorder” to some degree, they call it Obsessive Compulsive Disorder if I’m not mistaken, OCD for short. Diablo II (aka Diablo 2) took hold of that piece of each of us, the people finding themselves part of this new internet community, and held on tight.

Ten years tight.

And then there was the Social Media. And the clicking.

Now you might notice the “DIGG” logo mark stuck to the Diablo II image above. Why? Because it’s the same. Over the past few days I’ve attached myself to the community of DIGG like it was a game. Because it is a game. When you’ve got a brain like me and the rest of us young gentlemen and ladies who can’t keep their hands still, all you’ve got to do is provide a ranking system and you’ve got them occupied.

If you want to survive in today’s capitalizing network, you’ve got to keep your head. You consider your obsessive nature a disorder and you’re stuck feeling bad about it. You tell yourself you’re strong and that being obsessed allows you to do mass amounts of work, well, you’ll burn out, buddy. So what’s to be done? How many roads must a man walk down? Do girls just want to have fun?

Let’s talk about what we do on WFDJ to stay occupied in a healthy manner, or at least a progressively social manner. Sound good? How about we number this list, too.

1. DIGG – On this share and read site, I’ve found it beneficial to be yourself: ca77 is the name I go by. We had a WFDJ DIGG and it petered out. It had a little bit to do with that I lost interested back when I started it, and a lot to do with the fact that people on DIGG like to feel like they’re working with people as opposed to organizations. Now we’re making friends, connections, and cross-links. Up-voting per friendly suggestions, rooting out false prophets aka spammers, and submitting our own material here and there to capitalize on the work it does take to be a helpful member in this squad of workers.

2. FACEBOOK – Here we’re in a few places. There’s my personal page, something everybody’d probably enjoy having if they had one, then there’s both the WFDJ website page and personality. These both have their own unique abilities, both of them important to how we round out our facebook presence. The website page is the place where people basically thumb-up our page and suggest it to others. Real simple. The personality page is the same thing you get when you sign yourself up for facebook. If you’ll take a look you’ll see the name on it is “WorldFamous DesignJunkies” because we’ve got to fool fb into believing the presence is a person. People see this, find it unique, and friend it right away. 946 friends end up being much more valuable than 2,000 thumbs-ups. For real.

3. TUMBLR – A super-simple and lovely genius setup for bloggers from the start to the super-used-to. The WFDJ tumblr account acts as a subsidary of WFDJ’s main news page, allowing for more attention to be payed to individual images and quotes from pages. People today on these internets are interested not only in the content they’re peeking at, but in the way they’re peeking at it too. Tumblr is unique in it’s…well… twitter-list sort of friends feed, showing updates from everyone they love at once, with simple buttons for liking and re-posting. That, and if you’ve got the personality we’re talking about, tumblr’s a place where you can post thoughts and sub-images that come to your knowledgeable mind throughout the day not big enough for a whole post.

4. TWITTER – Have one. Love it. Don’t hold back. Unless you’re the kind of person who posts every 5 minutes, because that’s a cause to hold back. People de-friend people who post too much. I’d wager to say that posting too frequently is the number one reason people de-friend on Twitter. An awesome service to use to post to twitter is http://su.pr/, a site made by StumbleUpon for people to have instant url-shortening complete with a handy SU head-board. Always with the head-boards. Always with the grasp of the fingers.

5. STUMBLEUPON – This community is perhaps the most difficult to be a part of because of it’s dis-jointed nature. There are message boards and there are ways to send messages back and forth, but there’s so much sharing that it’s basically impossible to work with other people. Your best bet for becoming successful at SU is to follow the rules you’d work with for Reddit or Digg. Be sensible, work on helping other people first, yourself in the back of your mind most of the time, in front every once in a while. We’ve been at it so long that our method is to post different singular images from WFDJ, using SU as an image-sharing program rather than as a news aggregator.

6. REDDIT – Find your favorite sub-Reddit and thrive in it. I’ve had some little success working with the people who run the Star Wars list. Each subreddit has its own moderators and family, so it’s possible to be cool with these healthy “medium groups.”

With all of these plus finding the content plus preparing and publishing the content, one has the opportunity to have this OCD nature without messing a single one up by too much participation. Always keep in mind that everyone on these internets is a person, and that many people go to multiples of these sites. That means if you post the same thing to each of them, these people will find you and they will slap you in the face, digitally. So be new and unique with each little thing you post. In fact, just to be safe, never post the same thing twice. Not only is that healthy, it keeps you spry.

Stay spry!

And if you want to eat your life alive, play D2… or depending on when you read this post, play D3. And good luck, you’ll be alone there. It’s going to be TOO good.

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

Master of oddities Michael Gaughan had an amazing idea. He said to himself, “self, you know that movie Spinal Tap and how in the movie they never produce the original artwork for the album Smell the Glove? You should have an art show about that.” And thus he initiated it. To be held at the relatively new (1 or 2 shows deep so far, max) CO Exhibitions gallery in NE Minneapolis.* This show is to be known as the “Smell The Glove” show and is completely open for submissions. That’s hot. That’s amazing. There’s going to be so many submissions that it’ll be a stench of glove by the time the doors open.

*This location is literally one floor above Burlesque of North America and First Ammendment art gallery. Read these words written by Mike of Burlesque Design:

CO Exhibitions is located at 1101 Stinson Blvd at the corner of Broadway & Stinson in beautiful and historic Northeast Minneapolis. We are open weekdays 12-5pm and admission is always free.

The actual show is going to have a screening of Spinal Tap, a Spinal Tap cover band performing, and will have surprises! I hope the surprises include asparagus like the last CO show, I saw they had some in the pics from the show.

Love to eat that stuff! It’s so smelly.

SUBMISSIONS
If you’d like to see yourself be a part of this show, you can submit your own work!
Deadline – July 15th, 2010
To be mailed or dropped off at

ATTN Michael Gaughan / Smell the Glove
CO EXHIBITIONS
1101 Stinson Blvd
#12
Minneapolis, MN
55413

Medium: whatever you’d like. Any doubt, contact Michael or one of the fine folks at Burlesque and I’m sure they’ll set you straight.

SMELL THE GLOVE
Opening party Aug 7th, 2010
7-10PM
Spinal Tap cover band, movie screening, and surprises
CO EXHIBITIONS
1101 Stinson Blvd
(at the corner of Broadway and Stinson)

Michael Gaughan has several internet connections: first, check his youtube channel out at michaelgaughanicerod, then go over to his hot online portfolio of magic and paint. Then if you want to contact him, michael.gaughan@gmail.com is his email.

NOTE: Michael Gaughan graduated from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, the same place I graduated from. You know what that means? It means he rocks, and it’s basically like we’ve go the same blood. But he has more rock and roll in his soul. I don’t go around saying that about just anybody.

DOUBLE NOTE: One of the greatest things MG has ever done is make a band with his sister, a band which you may have heard of: “Brother and Sister.” I once saw them perform at the Minneapolis College of Art and design with a candy guitar – during the set, MG asked people to come up to the stage and lick the guitar as he played it. The entire situation was magnificent. If that’s any indication of what’s to come, expect greatness. The kind of greatness that only comes around every once in a while. Believe that.

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

It’s that time again, that time when the whole world (surprisingly, even the USA,) is embroiled in the heat of futball madness. It is the World Cup of soccer right now, and we’re getting down there in teams already. USA is out, Britain just got beat by Germany by about a billion points, and Ghana’s advancing toward the goal. Then there’s the losers. The people who totally got destroyed, and only one person’s to blame. The goalie. Always with the goalie. Of course, it’s them who saves the game as well. It’s never easy being the highest commanding officer in front of the net, and photographer Bill Cramer knows this. In this recent set, Cramer sets eyes on the prize, depicting the the world of füssball with a female goaltender with a fabulous jersey in orange, white, and red.

Bill Cramer is known for his intensely intimate portraits, having taken photos of such people as Barack Obama, Fat Joe, and lots and lots and lots of magazine covers. It’s an intimacy that turns any face he captures into a tapestryesque work of art.

This set consists of seven photos taken on a nearly-rainy evening some time in the past 12 months. Probably even in 2010 if I do dareso take a guess.

Behold the power of perfect lighting on the game of the gods.

Held still.

If you’d like to contact Bill Cramer, get ahold of him by emailing bill@billcramer.com, if you’d like more examples of his work, take a peek at his http://billcramer.com/ online portfolio website. His work is unstoppable, and I feel like he’s just begun. I love finding people like that, don’t you?

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

We’ve been submitted some anonymously-photographed photos from the empty BUNGE tower over in Dinkytown, Minneapolis. These photos are full of lots of fabulous (and some terrible) graffiti and other silly drawings. All on the walls, all on the trains. From the looks of it, the train photos were taken right next to the tower, and the dark photos were taken inside the tower, probably all on the first level. You’ll notice a couple pics of some writing up at the top of the tower – this paint was up for about a week or two in early June, 2010, and’s now painted over. This happens up there from time to time.

Pretty sassy. Pretty dangerous.

BONUS: since we got our BIGTIME gallery going, we re-uploaded the photos from this project as full-sized. Take a peek through the gallery below for some hotness.

Now like when we get any set of anonymously submitted photos, you’ve gotta note that we DO NOT know who took them. I’m certain that it’s trespassing being inside this building, so the photographer more than likely does not want to be tied directly to these photos. That doesn’t mean you can go around taking credit for them, but it does mean you’ve got free reign over using them. Feel free to print them out, for example, if that’s your bag, but be respectful. Even illegal work is still someone’s work.

NOTE that we do not advocate the taking of any photos where you’ve got to be somewhere where it’s illegal for you to stand, and will not post anything of the sort (unless, of course, they’re submitted anonymously.) Stay safe! And don’t go out at dark. Be smart.

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

Perhaps you know that Japan is a wild and crazy place. Perhaps you know that. Something you also maybe know is that generally their autos, because of the congestion in their small world, are also small. What you may NOT know is that sometimes they get big. Really big. I mean like semi-truck big. And when they do, (not always, but I WISH always,) they go wild. Mister Roger Snider has a camera. Mister Roger Snider went to take some photos. Mister Roger Snider got some bright lights.

Mister Roger Snider goes more often by the name Roger Snider, and works with his fantastical set of photos he calls “Ultra Rigs of the World” or UROTW. This set of photos spans back to the late 1990s, with these seriously fantastically amazing ones still popping up today. In fact, the set you see above and below is his latest set, taken on a journey to Japan in May 2010.

A few words from Snider:

My 1st trip out of the country this year led me back to Japan. Capitalizing on my shoots from back in 2008, I really dove deeper into the culture this time. I also brought my Profoto strobe with me to shoot portraits and interiors. I think you can see the upgrade in production value.

What these trucks are called, or what the act of making these trucks is called is Dekotora. According to this wiki article, it’s believed that the first “Truck Guys (トラック野郎 Torakku Shōnen)” (1976) movie was the source of this modern Dekotora lifestyle, or at least the first boom of it. This “Truck Guys” movie (and its 7 sequels) was put out by the Toei company, a favorite of mine because they’re responsible for the ultra-gory cult-classic “Battle Royale” (2000). Each of these trucks of course has their own individual aesthetic, the opportunity for customization super-high now compared to when this fabulous hobby / lifestyle began in the 70′s. Back then it was hardcore, find the pipes and lights from wherever you could find them. Now there’s manufacturers and custom shops that’ve got the skills to do the deals.

Below you’ll see Snider’s May 2010 Japan set. It’s hot. It’s amazing. It’s trucks with so many lights on them that you wont know what to do with yourself when you see them.

It takes a special kind of person in an amazing sort of financial situation to create one of these rigs. The style and grace you can very obviously see in every one of these trucks is, thought it’d seem the opposite here, not easy to come by. It takes not only vision and skill, but craftsmanship and a LOT of dedication as well. Any project that’s had this amount of time put into it deserves a big hard look, handshake, and even a hug. The same goes for Snider, whom without, I and you might never have seen such magnificence. Thank you Snider, and please PLEASE continue to do this.

You can contact Roger Snider at roger@ultrarigsoftheworld.com, find him at his WordPress blog and leave him a nice comment, or take a peek at his fabulous portfolio site at http://ultrarigsoftheworld.com/ for real.

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

Look through these images using our sassy new gallery mode!

It puts the lotion on the skin? No. Put shoe on head? Yes. The following is a set of selections from graphic design group Akatre‘s photo project “Mains d’Œuvres” – Series pictures for annual communication. They take these photos, yes, then they print them up and mail them out as “mailers” – communication papers to their former and current clients, friends, and maybe even family. This is not only a perfect example of taking the basics of one’s life to an extraordinary level, it’s also just the sort of pie anyone could make to fly over the pages of the entire internet overnight.

What pie, what? I’m talking about modern internet skateboarding. Getting around, getting up, getting to the eyeballs of people for your own personal purposes. Get up and get noticed so you can get a job, get up and get noticed so you can have a popular blog.

Here’s the formula:

1. Base, understandable canvas.

2. Slight tweak of color OR mix with another canvas.

3. Repeat, repeat.

4. Collect into one set.

5. Proliferate.

Now this canvas thing could be anything from a set of photos to a wildly popular film series to an actual canvas. Sometimes all you’ve got to do is the collecting. In the project you’re looking at right now here in this post, it’s two canvases mixed together. You’ve got the portrait and you’ve got the coverup. Smashed together, simply, they get hot, so hot.

It’s a set to be admired and shucks about. Modern art, as I’ve read about a billion times is: “I could do that” “yeah, but you didn’t.” Ain’t that the truth?

To contact Akatre, email them at akatre@akatre.com or visit their portfolio site: http://akatre.com/. They’re really quite brilliant. Lots of projects. Lots of brilliance. Lots of professional amazingness.

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

BONUSSS experience our new GALLERY VIEW by clicking any thumbnail here!

This one’s for you, world. Here’s the first 38 items in an ever-expanding list of magnificence via designer Ian Collins. He calls this project “The Big Caption” and calls it a complement to Boston Dot Com’s Big Picture. He’s got more than one element in play here, and the type type is good. This tha kind of meme I love the best.

Now, take a look at how easy this was to do, and is to do. How healthy is it? I say very healthy. Cultivating wit at the same time as practicing graphic design is tops, especially when you’re so amazing at typography like Collins is. Also it seems to me that he’s got his fair share of amazing fonts up his sleeve. That’s sometimes important too.

Keep on describin’.

Keep on city vibin’.

I’ve seen lots and lots of these all by their lonely selves around these internets, especially on share sites like tumblr, dropular, ffffound, piccsy, buamai, and the like. They get separated. They get sad. But now they can be happy in more than one place. Be sure to hang out and subscribe to “The Big Caption” for more of this magnificent mayhem, and if you ever meet Collins in real life, give him a high five from me.

Normally I’d tell you how to contact Collins here, but I already did that. So suck it.

Look at these images.

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

It takes a certain type of person to stand directly in front of another person they’ve never met, taking a photo of them and running away. That’s what Samuel Hervas does, he does it so good. And you know where he does it? Rome. He’s got this set of photos called “Tourists”, the whole set of photos taken in Rome, Italy, the whole set of photos taken of tourists walking all about the city. I went there one time and never saw Hervas, but I would not be surprised if he sneaked a pic somewhere or another in there. I ate lots of pizza and gelato.

When you live in a city like Rome, it’s difficult to take photos of people who AREN’T tourists. When you do, you capture the Italians waving their hand backward saying “chau.”

Take a peek at this whole set, then peek a look back at the rest of the works done by Samuel Hervas on his portfolio site. On that note, if you enjoy excellent and fantastic photos of city-centric scenes and people in those places, take a lurk on up to the search bar here in your upper-right and type in the city of your choice inside quote signs for good measure. If you don’t see the city of your choice, enter the city of your choice in the center top submit section that’s normally reserved for portfolios. Do it. Rock it.

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

In honor of Portugal beating North Korea in their latest world cup game 7-0, oh my god, here is an image of Kim Jong-il as illustrated by Sakkan (サッカン). I want Jong-il to see this and change his mind about his more than likely plausible decision to murder the entire N.Korean football team. I joke, but also seriously hope they don’t end up missing. The image above, by that wild illustrator Sakkan, depicts Kim as a Pokemon hunter, the characters around him referring to North Korean abduction of Japanese citizens. Weird! But look, the idea that Kim is a Pokemon master makes it all make sense. Gotta Catch Em All!

The following information comes from the crowd at BoingBoing from when they discovered the Kim image a few days ago:

The red text in the lower left hand corner seems to read
“Rocket Monster Kim (Gold)” And the Pikachu rockets are labeled “pika-don” which I think means “Boom!” The blue text looks like “Let’s go kidnapping!”, a reference to the North Korean abduction of Japanese citizens over the years. – gmoke

More specifically, pika-don is a reference to the bright flash (pika) and explosive noise (don) of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. – oepn

Fabulous. Now let’s also look at the extended works of Sakkan. He’s a humorist in his illustrations, basically all of them, a wild and crazy sensibility that generally comes standard with the anime-style way of executing stories and people and situations. Look at how cute! Also take another peek at how excellent Sakkan is at portraiture. That’s definitely Kim up there, and down in the gallery you won’t be mistaking Bruce, Sam, and a couple other sassy fellas and ladies. And don’t forget his take on the Twitter Overload image.

To contact Sakkan, visit him at his Sakkan webpage, a page full of Sakkan illustrations and lists and lists of his accomplishments. If you happen to find out more about him in the way of screenprinted posters, let me know, must have!

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

The most excellent sculpture I ever built in art school was one I made out of free wood glue and wood scraps from the scrap wood bin. All free, all A+. That’s sort of, in a way, what’s going on here with these newest works of wood and paint magic by Shawn Smith. Plywood, acrylic paint, and sometimes ink. That’s what these masterworks are made of. The heads of animals is what they replicate. The eyeballs of the elite are what they attract.

Your dollars is what they HOPE to attract. Buy them, gallery owners. I must see more! The only way for an artist to have the amount of time it takes to construct these things is if they’ve got the cash to eat dinner! So gallery owners, I say again, support Shawn Smith! This whole wood chippies glued together idea is fantastic!

The gallery below is in chronological order by year. Each year, starting in 2005, there are several works which were produced throughout the year. The gallery is ordered top to bottom, the newest ones at the bottom. Then after the gallery of individual projects, you’re going to see a set of images that all look alike, all of them with buzzards attacking an office. This is the bigger project of Smith’s dealing with these woodies. It’s called Vicious Venue and it’s a total bird attack!

Take a look at some words from Smith on the project:

Vicious Venue My recent work explores my interest in birds of prey as a source of conceptual inspiration and analogy. I am fascinated by vultures and the visceral way most people react to them. For my exhibition at Lawndale Art Center, I asked the question, “What would a digital vulture eat if it was somehow trapped inside this reality?” Vicious Venue is a sculptural installation consisting of a group of life-size pixelated vultures devouring an analog office full of obsolete technologies (like a typewriter, rolodex, and a rotary phone). The viewer becomes an intruder into the space, as if they are stumbling into the middle of the ongoing carnage as the vultures pick the office’s carcass clean. The title of the exhibition, Vicious Venue, refers to the double meaning of “venue” as both a place, and a group of vultures.

Scary. Again Vicious Venue is at the bottom of the gallery in it’s entirety.

To follow the further artworks and designworks of mister Shawn Smith, find him at his portfolio page, the gallery that represents him in Dallas: Craighead Green, or the gallery that represents him in Austin: DBerman Gallery.

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

I don’t mean to call designer Mike Lemanski an alien from an Orson Scott Wells novel, but he IS a bugger! He’s got so much good stuff! So much stuff that is good! In this post you’ll see but a fraction of it in the form of posters. Poster gallery yay! Everyone loves a good poster gallery. The image you see above is the least “posterish” item in the set in that it’s not any bigger than a standard size handheld piece of paper, but because I would LOVE to have it screenprinted gigantic and hung on my wall, it’s up there at the top.

The way I found this particular genius shape and letter arranger was over at It’s Nice That, the image from which was posted over at Buamai. There, now you know a couple of my secrets you didn’t know before. Digg it?

Now Lemanski is an excellent dude. He’s got senses for excellence that some folk only bubbles in bong dream of. Puff high, you sons of sam, you’ll never be able to quite click the colors in the right columns like Mike. You all want to be like Mike.

But lo! You can be actually. It’s just that Mike Lemanski’s got his portfolio locked down. He knows, or maybe doesn’t know he knows but DOES know, exactly, what, he’s got to present in order to get noticed. His best stuff, his most amazing works, and they all work together in an excellent way.

Hey all you design students out there! Stop digging through the trash! Put down your crappy new-age iCrappers and put up a simple portfolio as fast as now! Get published and find yourself in a whole new world of opportunity!

Look at these posters. Mike Lemanski is excellent.

NOTE: some of these posters are for work, some of them are for play. All of them are important in their very own way.

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

Who loves monster magazines? I love monster magazines. It must be a strange life, investigating and reporting on the world as it’s affected by monsters. As the monster turns toward the audience and says “people!” running away in a dash, the reporter takes a flash, another front page for Famous Monsters magazine. This post focuses on that, the Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine series, in particular the covers. So rip off your safety belt, jump out of the car, and run screaming into the woods, because it’s time for MONSTER MAGAZINE COVER MADNESS! Presented in technicolor!

Don’t move a finger, a hair, or a heart, cause this is about to get real wild. Creatures featured in any manner of ways, the covers centralized on one monster each. It’s like a portrait of the grotesque on most of these magazine fronts, only a few derivations for sneaky fantastic or otherwise cooky special editions.

Devour if you dare! The following collection begins with issue #1 from 1958 and continues on through the first 100 mags. For further Monsters of F viewing past this point, take a peek at MovieMags, Modern Fred, Inanimate Hitchhiker, Science Fiction Unleashed, Joey Von, Budhha Is, Alternative Cinema, Zombie Babe, VooDoo King Designs, Mark Berry, Martin Prine, Video Challenger, Alan E Robinson, Mad Monsters, Pengarift, and Gorilla Men. They’ve all got the nackering.

And never look away from a mirror then back at it again.

GUARANTEED MONSTER.

ALSO: These magazine images are under copyright, not only because they were made well within the confines of copyright rights, but also because Famous Monsters is basically restarted now, and are putting out new magazines as we speak!

Scary!

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

Each of the works above and below are, as the title suggests, made with permanent marker on paper. Each of them shows a bunch of video tapes or other cartridge game or video. What kind of realism is this? Some sort of modernism. When I first happened upon this project, I saw one of the tapes pictures and assumed it was a photograph. This was interesting, as collections of anything that involves packaging AND a dying or dead format of media, well, that’s gold to me and the WFDJ community! But lo! It was an illustrated image! And what’s more, it was permanent marker, which of course you know is heavy kitsch.

And kitsch is the magic word for 2010 modernism! Isn’t it? I think so. Each of these, marker on paper, (except for one, the vertical tapes with Kodak in the middle, which is just acrylic on canvas,) makes for a masterpiece of translated reality into artwork. Design artwork if I do dareso say myself.

Details (not in gallery order):

VHS (vertical tapes)
acrylic on canvas
01-31-10
10 x 13 inches
hbt10-001

Atari & Flower Wallpaper (wallpaper and tiny tower of atari)
permanent marker on paper
03-17-10
22 1/2 x 30 inches
hbt10-p018
Private Collection

VHS (massive array)
permanent marker on paper
04-10-10
22 1/2 x 30 inches
hbt10-p020

VHS (three stacks)
permanent marker on paper
01-15-10
22 1/2 x 30 inches
hbt10-p002

VHS (small stack)
permanet marker on paper
12-21-09
8 1/4 x 10 1/4 inches
hbt09-p087

Atari & Jellyfish Wallpaper (aqua wallpaper, three stacks of atari)
permanent marker on paper
06-07-10
8 1/4 x 10 1/4 inches
hbt10-p027

To contact the artist, Hollis Brown Thorton, email at info@hollisbrownthornton.com or visit the portfolio site at http://www.hollisbrownthornton.com/ — you’ll be interested to know that there’s a range of these tapes drawings and paintings going back years. The drawings and paintings you see here are all from the year 2010.

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