The Swell Season: poster designs

I love these poster designs ALMOST as much as I love Glen and Marketa.

(All images below borrowed from TheSwellSeason.com, except for the autographed red lighthouse poster, found HERE)

Russian children’s book covers

All images from A Journey Round My Skull:

1971

The year Jim Morrison passed away (this time of the semester, my course on the Tortured Poet leads me to a Jim Morrison-induced haze).

1971 prints from ISO50:

{All images above from ISO50 except for the last image, which is from Designage}

Halloween Chills & Thrills!

From the Little Big Book of Chills & Thrills, published by WelcomeBooks in 2005:

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{Source for three above}

Throwback Thursday: Notgeld, German Emergency Currency

If all money looked this pretty, I’d definitely be more apt to save it.

The images presented below represent a selection from Lliazd’s unbelievably expansive Flickr set of Notgeld, which was German emergency currency used during the post-WWI years. Lliazd’s provides us with an in-depth look into the personal, political, and aesthetic significance of these images on his Flickr page:

After 800 years of life in the same region, my wife’s family left Germany. In 1935 Nazism had become unbearable. They were lucky enough to understand the risk it posed for Jews living in Germany and they left. Until then, her family was part of a comfortable and prosperous middle class, involved in the tobacco business in the city of Karlsruhe.

At the end of the First World War her grandfather started collecting Notgeld produced by many German and Austrian towns and companies to make front to deflation first and inflation later with the objective of providing stability to workers and residents. Notgeld (emergency currency) was issued by cities, boroughs, even private companies while there was a shortage of official coins and bills. Nobody would pay in coins while their nominal value was less than the value of the metal. And when inflation went on, the state was just unable to print bills fast enough. Some companies couldn’t pay their workers because the Reichsbank just couldn’t provide enough bills. So they started to print their own money – they even asked the Reichsbank beforehand. As long as the Notgeld was accepted, no real harm was done and it just was a certificate of debt. Often it was even a more stable currency than real money, as sometimes the denomination was a certain amount of gold, dollars, corn, meat, etc.

They made it very pretty on purpose: many people collected the bills, and the debt would never have to be paid. It was printed on all kinds of materials: leather, fabric, porcelain, silk, tin foil. (Read more HERE)

Behold, the beauty of Notgeld:

Blickfang: German book covers

The other day, I was fortunate enough to have a FABULOUS new Twitter friend retweet the link to my post on Carl Jung’s Red Book . This new Twitter friend, @roundmyskull, just so happens to have an amazingly overstimulating blog devoted to the treasures of “forgotten literature.” There, I discovered that, in German, “blickfang” means “eye-catcher,” and it is part of the title of a fabulous collection of thousands of book cover designs from Weimar Berlin, from 1919-1933. (Click HERE for a link to the book)

All images below have been graciously borrowed from the highly seductive blog, A Journey Round My Skull. I majorly encourage you to visit the blog… and the STELLAR Flickr stream. You’ll spend HOURS…

Target’s One Spot

You guys have all been to the One Spot/Dollar Spot/Whatever Spot at Target, right? A lot of times it’s overrun with holiday-themed items — usually headachingly BRIGHT holiday-themed items. But sometimes you can find that rare gem if you dig around the fluourescents long enough.

Yesterday, I found a set of alphabet stamps for a buck. Each individual letter = its own stamp. They’re awesome. They’re like these, except minus the numbers:

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And these are listed as $11.00 on Target’s website. And that’s just $10.00 too much.

So, I decided to bust open the pack and christen the stamps while using them to personalize the sleeves for some CDs that I made for friends.

So, that’s pretty fun, right? Sunday afternoons are great.

The Illustrations of Naiad & Walter Einsel

Naiad and Walter Einsel’s illustrations graced the pages of several prominent magazines during the 1950s and 60s. Whether in black and white or in vivid color, the designs never cease to entertain and leave you wanting more.

Just check out that cheddar ad (below). Cheese AND plaid AND awesome illustration?!? You’ll want more. Trust me.

Thanks to Today’s Inspiration blog for clueing me in about this beautiful husband-and-wife design team:

All images from LeifPeng’s Einsel Flickr set: