Just heard that Tony Hart has died. There goes another little piece of my childhood. Thanks Tony for making art fun on TV and inspiring me as a child, even if you never did show my work in The Gallery, it’s OK I came to terms with it.

They just don’t make TV like Vision On and Take Hart anymore. Contrary to rumour, Neil Buchanan is still alive and well…

There’s a lot on the net at the moment about work which has been ‘inspired’ by something else. It seems the Mad Men are mining popular culture rather than breaking out a new flip chart.

A while ago the Sony Bravia plasticine rabbits had everyone won over until it was pointed out that the whole thing looked rather similar to a Kozyndan art print:

Then we had the Sugar Puffs crimpin’ rip off from the Mighty Boosh…

…and only yesterday Ben Terrett noticed Lucozade’s new eerily familiar ad campaign:

Now today Creative Review has noticed that the Flight of the Conchords has been the latest victim of selling out to corporate advertising, but conveniently missing their pay cheque.

All this puts me in mind of the suspiciously familiar photoblog I found through my site stats, it even uses my own stylesheet:

I wonder if it will change now I’ve redesigned my website…

This was a leaving gift for a colleague at work. Everyone in the studio produced a 5 inch square canvas to say goodbye to our Creative Director. When I came to think about mine, ‘Thank you’ seemed the most important thing I wanted to say.

I enjoyed producing it, although it took a fair amount of time and I got through an obscene amount of fine black pens. I was thinking of producing a few more and seeing if people wanted to buy them…

Hard-Fi’s new album Once Upon a Time in The West is due to come out soon and it’s caused a bit of a stir due to it’s cover design – some people are even calling it the worst of all time…

To be honest, I like it, and I quite like the reference to the digital age, even though most people seem to be finding it a bit lazy, and I like how it is being continued through the single releases. I like it, but then again I’m a graphic designer and a sucker for simple type and colour like this. (In blue it could almost be “Holster®: the album”, which in turn could almost be “Grafik: the website” etc etc. The ubiquity of Avantgarde-esque typefaces in graphic design circles does seem to be getting very pronounced. I still remember getting repeatedly told off at art college for trying to use Futura all the time, but I digress…

…hope the album’s good…

www.hard-fi.com