Another great record label with its own resident designer/musician is the UK’s Ghost Box, which I read about in an issue of The Wire from last year. Julian House does all the label’s covers, drawing on the traditional layout of paperback publishers like Pelican for a “institutional-retro” look. As stated in the label’s manifesto, the music of Ghost Box artists references “music for schools, cosmic horror stories, library music, English surrealism, and the dark side of psychedelia.” All of which is palpable in the nostalgic feel of their album covers.

Mount Vernon Arts Lab – The Seance at Hobs Lane:

The Focus Group – We are All Pan’s People:

Belbury Poly – The Owl’s Map:

The Advisory Circle – Mind How You Go:

The Focus Group – Hey Let Loose Your Love:

Eric Zann – Ouroborindra:

Belbury Poly – The Willows:

The Focus Group – Sketches and Spells:

Belbury Poly – Farmer’s Angle:

Hey there. I’ve continued collecting and archiving cool book covers, but they are now all on my flickr page, right here , instead of on this here blog. Thanks!

Kim Hiorthøy is the principle graphic designer for all releases on the Norwegian label Rune Grammofon. I stumbled across some of his designs while browsing Mimaroglu Music Sales, an amazing distro run by sound artist Keith Fullerton Whitman. Hiortøy’s work is amazing, and reminds me of the simplicity and attention to detail of all my favorite 60s/70s book covers. Here’s all the decent- resolution album art I could find (mostly from discogs.com ). Enjoy!

Arne Nordheim – Electric:

Biosphere/Deathprod – Nordheim Transformed:

Food – Veggie:

Arve Henriksen – Chiaroscuro:

Moha! – Raus Aus Stavanger:

Various Artists – Runeology 2:

In the Country – This was the Place of My Heartbeat:

Jono El Grande – Fevergreens:

Phonphani – Genetic Engineering:

Arve Henriksen – Strjon:

Moonlight – Free Music:

I recently finished a programming project in the Processing programming environment, which I just started learning this semester. I created a program which will analyze any image file, and spit out a tile-able swatch of camouflage based upon it.

The program selects 5 predominant colors from the image, weights them, and creates a background of color, and a number of colored blobs, whose size is determined by the prevalence of their color in the original image. The complexity of the blobs is determined by complexity of the contours in the image, and the transparency is determined by the range of colors represented in the image (this way, low-contrast images render “blurry” patterns).

The results aren’t extremely consistent, but pretty interesting nonetheless. Below are displayed several original images (scraped from google), each followed by a few swatches of camouflage produced by the program (which outputs square pdfs). I used landscape-type images, because they are a logical choice for camouflage, but as you can see by the last example, the program can be used to intriguing effect with any source image.

Source Image:

Procedurally Generated Swatches:

Source Image:

Procedurally Generated Swatches:

Source Image:

Procedurally Generated Swatches:

Source Image:

Procedurally Generated Swatches:

well, right before winter break, i finally managed to take decent pictures of all the furniture i’ve created over the past semester. i’m pretty happy with all the pieces, and i can’t wait until i get them put into a proper website, but until then, i’ll leave them all here. 

“slab” folding chair:

“slat” collapsible ash table (designed for small electronics and craft work, with removable planks of reclaimed maple, cork, and slate)

“clar” acrylic and hickory record shelf (joined with only pegs, holds 75 records + receiver/turntable)

vase, assembled from bent acrylic, pyrex glass beaker, and support arm

curio stand, holds 10 polystyrene specimen boxes, assembled from reynobond sheet and cherry

if i directed you to these pictures, please comment! let me know what you think of this stuff!

i dug up some pictures from the height of my dome obsession, last november. 

some small cardboard models, hanging on my studio wall:

inspirational images, hung up in studio:

my full-size cardboard dome, in process in the hallway outside my studio (it was too big to move all the way to the outdoor site by myself, so i left it in the hall for a day or two):

a closeup of the sign i left on the half-complete dome:

the finished dome, in place on cmu campus:

for the record, i’m definitely not done with domes yet. they’re just so awesome, they’ll have my love forever.

last year, i became obsessed with geodesic domes and highly geometric 3d forms. this is a concept image i made for a project in which we had to re-design the housing for a tivoli kloss model one radio. the concept grew out of experiments with folding paper, truncating simple solids to make more complicated ones, and making a useful object with no specific ground-plane orientation. i actually built a working model, but i currently have no idea where it is. i just stumbled across this image today, and thought it might be worth posting. i actually constructed a human-scaled geodesic dome around this time, as well. i will post some pictures of it when i have the time to find them.

here are some quick snapshots of my new folding chair design (taken with my really dodgy digital camera, sorry!). i’m really excited about this one! i hope to make a couple of them eventually, out of different woods, and with more refined hardware.details:
- made of locally grown ash hardwood, with reclaimed aluminum cutoff cross-pieces
- hand-cut aluminum and UHMW polyethylene hardware
- folds up to a single 1.25″ thick slab
- cut from a single glued-up piece, so the woodgrain matches up when folded, making it attractive for storage on a wall.

 unfolded: 

 folded front:

folded side: 

half folded: 

folded back:

art in america, december 1963. i got this at a booksale in high school, and found it when i went home for thanksgiving. the back cover is especially beautiful. both are compositions by george ortman, entitled “festival”.





caligula and 3 other plays, by albert camus. a nice cover for one of my favorite authors, my roommate spencer longo brought this back with him from thanksgiving break. it was his parents’ copy, printed in 1958.

couldn’t take the pressure. plus i hated that it was the first result when you googled my name. professional life, here i come. for anyone feeling nostalgic, i whipped up this memorial jpg:#