Photoshop in real life. Lovely attention to detail! Apparently it’s part of an ad campaign for something called CS4…

Seen over at Swiss Miss, originally uploaded to Flickr by wandaaa, so you can see it larger over there…

So there’s a Batman film out at the moment, I thought it was rather good. Christopher Nolan embarked on his retelling of the Batman story with Batman Begins in 2005 and he’s sure to deliver at least another installment before he’s got it out of his system. I enjoyed the film, and it made me think about the different ways a group of people can tell the same story. Don’t worry, this isn’t going to turn into a Bat-Blog but designers tell stories every day and as individuals they can do it quite differently. There’s a parallel in there somewhere…

Batman is a good example because it has received many different treatments and been retold according to some very talented people’s vision. I remember the original Batman movie coming out in 1989, and being swept away in the event as a child, collecting the sticker book, playing the Commodore 64 game etc and just generally reveling in the spectacle of the thing. Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson’s portrayals formed the basis of my perception of those characters for a good few years and Tim Burton’s vision of Gotham City and it’s inhabitants was incredibly rich and atmospheric. It was certainly at odds with the 60s TV series.

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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…

Penguin are reissuing George Orwell’s 1984 (and Animal Farm) with a Shephard Fairey ‘Obey’ cover. Seems like a natural fit and is sure to boost sales, but while its all very nice, it seems only the tiniest little bit of a shame to spread this potentially-ubiquitous style across such a visionary title, but then again, perhaps that’s appropriate. Still, in my book, Led Zeppelin, George Orwell and Barack Obama need not be branded with the same identity…

Anyway, all this led me to wonder how many covers 1984 has actually had, and, well, it has had a lot:

Recurring themes are big typography, austere gentlemen and the all seeing eye. Some are really very nice, some are not. Click for a look at more of them, just a shame you can’t see them closer up on LibraryThing. Has anyone seen any other good ones? What would you do given the opportunity to design such a famous book cover…?

I love that last one…!

Someone’s busy removing Garfield from all the Jim Davis strips, and it turns out the remaining cartoons document the sad mental decline of Jon Arbuckle. In fact, was Garfield ever there? It’s kind of like the end of the Sixth Sense…

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Just booked a few nights in New York for later this month, so I thought I’d post this old illustration of the New York skyline from September 2001…