If you’re a graphic designer and you’ve designed a poster, you have to photograph it being held by the top two corners. Don’t ask me why, it’s the law. Clean under your fingernails and get to it.

This trend has long since jumped the shark, in fact even this blog post is passé, but now you can follow the evolution of the meme and keep up to date with various attempts to keep the art of poster holding alive, lest it dies out forever at Poster Goatse. We must not let it go unrecorded for future generations.

There’s graphics, there’s ingenuity, there’s careful finger placement, forgery and unbuttoned cuffs, there’s even titillation…

And they are doing sterling work, tirelessly researching the origins of the phenomenon…

Take a look at the site, the acerbic commentary alone is worth it. What’s a goatse? You’ll wish you never asked…

In the words of Ian and Alex who run The Art of the Title Sequence website: “Remember when your heart sank just a little when you realized the Pink Panther movie wasn’t a cartoon?” Check out their site for examples of great typographic, illustrative and imaginatively composed film and television title sequences. You can watch them in good quality too and then stick around to discuss in a suitably highbrow fashion…

In the meantime here are some of my favourites from the site…

…the obligatory Hitchcock, this time it’s Vertigo:

The haunting typographic treat which is Alien:

Read the rest of this entry…

Finally, there is now a half decent chance of being able to find something again that you added on Ffffound in the past. I was only wondering the other week if there was any way to actually get at your Ffffound collection, well now you can.

For years I kept a ‘nice things’ folder on my machine, where I put anything cool I came across online. Since I started using Ffffound though, the nice things folder has become a little neglected and as soon as something is ffffound, it is almost as quickly llllost.

Check out Ddddownload, you can download your Ffffound collection (or anyone else’s for that matter). Just type the username in and give your email address and a ZIP file is emailed to you. It takes a while if you have a lot of stuff (mine took 20 minutes and weighed in at 145Mb for 1500 items) but after it arrives it unzips everything intact.

Nice, now can someone email me a link to where all my odd socks have gone?

I’d noticed a few lovely classic film title screens cropping up on Ffffound! in recent weeks, then all of a sudden I stumble across this website, an archive of great (and not so great) film title screens lovingly compiled over a number of years by Steven Hill.

I could spend hours looking through these, the old ones are particularly lovely. Reminds me of watching classic afternoon films staying at my Nan’s house when I was little. No, we didn’t watch Battle Royale!

Thanks to Sean for the link…

Remember when you used to draw your logos with a pencil? Check out Bob Truby’s Brand Name Pencils if these days you’re more familiar with a mouse or Wacom pen.

I’ve always loved old book covers, especially the old Penguins and anything from Isaac Asimov or John Wyndham, so I was very pleased to stumble across this archive site of Pelican book covers, presented by decade for your viewing pleasure.