Urban Design

Urban art legend Shepard Fairey just did it again: After he designed the Obama cover for Time Magazine’s Person of the Year issue back in 2008, he also designed the latest cover which this year honors the Protester and features stories from the Arab Spring to the Occupy Wall Street movement. In my eyes taking Shepard Fairey’s design was a good decision. I mean, who could be a better than someone who’s famous around the globe for a certain, eye-catching propaganda look and feel and who also started his career on the streets around the world with his subversive Obey campaign?! ...

Following the mantra Style needs no Color, From Here To Fame Publishing’s second issue of their Schwarz auf Weiss (Black on White) book series brings again some dope urban-inspired illustrations by well-known artists in a nice collection! Style needs no Color has invited a diverse range of international artists to contribute black and white illustrations, vector graphics, street art and graffiti styles to this impressive publication. On about 140 black and white pages the book presents selected works of artists, following the philosophy that artwork should be able to stand alone without unnecessary distractions. For that reason, the Style needs no Color artists restrict their palette to black and white and create in that way a contrast to the excessive use of color and flashy techniques for example in advert… ...

One of the most interesting think about spray-paint is my eyes that it allows you to customize almost everything, for example your car, trains, concrete, trousers, caps, and even umbrellas! Dutch graffiti artists Sons and Romeo just showed how it’s done and who knows, now as the weather is getting wetter and wetter, probably I will try spray-painting my umbrella myself… We had some fun customizing our own graffiti umbrella. Romeo came up with the idea of painting an umbrella in graffiti style a while ago. Since it was raining we couldn’t paint outside, so we decided it was about time to pimp the umbrella’s. (Sons) ...

I’m pretty sure, some of the Berlin-based readers already heard about Artconnect Berlin, nevertheless I have to write some lines about this new networking platform for artists, because I like the idea behind… Artconnect Berlin is a free tool for Berliners and provides you the opportunity to have an online portfolio, tag yourself by your skills, and find or be found by other creative heads. Additionally you have the possibility to offer jobs, and post classifieds about material, studios and general questions about Berlin and it’s creative scene. All in all this sounds like a nice, new thing to check out, especially because the creative scene in Berlin changes every day. I already joined, so make sure to add me as a contact after you did the same! ...

I have a foible for maps in general - you should know that since I posted about the map cuts by Karen O’Leary or the worldwide subway map source - for what reason I was delighted when I recently found the transamerican map artworks by Matthew Cusick. Matthew creates mainly portraits by cutting and pasting together snippets of physical maps! The results look just great and I’m really wondering how many maps he already utilized… ...

It’s summer time and although we don’t have that much sun in Berlin right now, I beat about for some new sunglasses. What I found are those new Skateboard Shades by Eric Singer from Portland-based Shwood Eyewear… Crafted entirely in Shwood’s local woodshop, this one-of-a-kind pair of sunglasses was created out of curiosity, just to see what was possible. For his latest project, Eric met up with Keith Hufnagel and others to claim the streets of Los Angeles in pursuit of destroying some skateboard decks. The reason: He creates sunglasses made from broken skateboard decks! ...

This is the first time ever that I post about music, but this is just superb! Samy Deluxe just came up with this great new music video for his new single Poesie Album from the upcoming LP Schwarzweiss. Supported by the independent design studio Typeholics from Hamburg, writers, motion graphic designers and other creative guys, he created a typo-packed video featuring some nice tag-styles, calligraphy and visuals! Samy Sorge aka Samy Deluxe, Wickeda MC or Sam Semillia is a German rapper, and hip hop artist from Hamburg and one of Germany’s most successful solo rap musicians. I’m pretty sure you will like the new video as much as I do!

As announced, famous Australian painter Anthony Lister did a nice live art performance in Jaybo’s Project Room (Herakut, Kofie, El Mac and other famous urban artists painted there before!) in Berlin two days ago… Tools, brushstrokes, spraypaint, electric guitar, doubts and hopes, hate and love, heroes on the walls, fallen dreams, questions and answers, visibles and invisibles - Mr. Lister will take the challenge to paint about, with and for Berlin. ...

ron english - studio visit The crew of itdrewitself.com recently hook up with famous US-American painter, interventional and pop propaganda artist Ron English for a small photo-shooting in his studio. Yes, Ron is the guy who is that famous for his billboard-bustings that he has his own vinyl action-figure and who did that crazy “Cloud Graffiti” stuff two years ago! All the more it’s of-course interesting to cast an eye at his most private working area, although it doesn’t look like a studio but like some kind of Ron English museum… ...

Redesign | Yes, now it’s done. As my Facebook-friends and Twitter-followers could already read, I was going to take Urbanartcore to the next level of evolution this weekend: To tighten the base of this independent street art and graffiti blog by building an attractive source for international news about urban art forms, artists and other urbanity-related stuff, I had to decide to switch the look and feel. I just got bored about the same view again and again with its more or less elaborated functionality, for what reason I changed from the formerly self-made design to this state-of-the-art design by the WPShower design team. ...