Urban Design

One of the first posts on Urban Artcore was about Graffiti-inspired Design, including graffiti candles, graffiti lamps and of course that amazing fat cap chair by the Swedish design duo Don’t Feed The Swedes (DFTS). What I didn’t knew when I wrote the article was that already in 2006 industrial designer Sander van Heukelom invented the design of “The Original Fat Cap Chair”, which is, as its name suggests, a fat cap formed chair made of fiber glass with polyester and will be available this fall! ...

Yes I know, everything is a remix and shared knowledge and shared creativity is great (that’s why all my photos are cc-licensed), but have you ever heard something about Michael Kadaz? Kadaz makes his money by copy and auction off reproduced stencil artworks by internationally well-known and successful stencil artists like Dolk, Grafter, Hutch, Mr. Brainwash, of course Banksy, and so on. And it’s not just something like an inspirational copying! He signs the works with his name and I wasn’t able to find a pointer to an attribution or something like that anywhere… ...

I received a nice e-mail by Dave the Chimp today, informing me that he has a new obsession: Socks! Limited to only 300 boxed sets, each set contains three different pairs of socks featuring my Human Bein characters, two big stickers, and a 48 page full colour book of the Human Beins enjoying life in the streets of Berlin and Hamburg. 75% of the socks in the world are made in China, but these beautiful box sets are made completely in Germany, with all the printing and box manufacture made within 5 miles of were I live. (Dave the Chimp) ...

Today I received an interesting message by LukeDaDuke - The Temporary Art Centre and cultural initiative WEI organise a no budget, mixed media festival including an cardboard art exhibition… The American city Detroit is the inspiration source for the No budget festival this year. I have been asked to fill a van with art for this festival. And I want you to join me in this project by making art on cardboard and send it to me. The size of the carboard is limited to A2. ...

The Berlin-based Redspective label is currently showing amazing typography posters and prints by the two urban and typography artists Otto Baum (Klub7) and Sven Neitzel (Nepomuk)! Dot per Dot is a collaborative project between Otto Baum and Sven Neitzel focusing on blurring the border between illustration and graphic de sign. The two designers use self-made type faces and playful drawings in order to attempt to shift these borders. It was the aim of the two designers to interpret old gra phic forms and create a new approach to design. The exhibtion will also include older works from the artists past 2 years. (redspective.com) ...

Update: Here are the winners of the Urban Photo-Contest 2010… Now it’s over! The Urban Art Photo Contest 2010 ended with round about 500 submitted photos by around 200 people…that’s great and I’m very happy about it! In the next days, we three jurors - Luna Park from New York, RJ from London and me from Berlin - will decide the five winning urban art shots, which will win the great prize packages the three big supporters - Montana Cans, Publikat Publishing and Urban Stylistics - provided. ...

Although I don’t have a big partiality for football - I like football, but I don’t like the patriotism - I know that the football world championship will start today in South Africa. Celebrating that multicultural football event, the US-American sports channel ESPN engaged South African artists (the Cape Town-based AM I Collective) to create 33 FIFA world cup artworks in the style of 80’s Ghanaian movie posters. Inspired by hand-painted African art found in the streets and townships across South Africa, and the entire African continent, the creative collective designed 32 motives for each participating country in the world cup and 1 for all nations. ...

Maybe you realized in some previous articles, that I’m not really a fan of Apple and for that reason it’s not my intention to promote new Apple products or something like that… Nevertheless, I would like inform the Apple users who certainly are under my readership - No, you don’t have to out yourself! - that there’s in addition to that urban art guide app, which is available in Berlin and Hamburg, another new street art app for the iPhone. The name of that new street art guide is “All City” and its aim is to collect and present interesting street art spot around the world… ...

After the typography-inspired bookshelf by Pieter de Leeuw and the great “Type the Sky” photos by Lisa Rienermann I will show you another alternative typography project, which is called Google Maps Typography… Creative director Rhett Dashwood, who is interested in creative media, including interactive, animation, branding, print, film making and digital art, was a bit bored in October 2008 and started for this reason to search for some letter-like landmarks and buildings in Google Maps. When he finished seven month later, in April 2009, he had created his own bird’s-eye perspective landform typography alphabet…fantastic, isn’t it? ...

It’s unbelievable! While clicking through one of my favorite German art and design blogs, I found out that there are some really crazy things going on in the international action figures world… Urban Art Action Figures US artist Mike Leavitt, whose interests are fine craft, sculpture, portraits, painting, performance, education, architecture, and animation, created Action Figures of Damien Hirst, Ron English and famous street artist Banksy! Leavitt’s Art Army toys are hand-made one-off toys depicting the surly band of marauders that’ll one day take over the earth. Spanning a range of historical subjects from Van Gogh to Tupac, Leavitt has stop-motion animated the articulating figures into movie shorts. (about Mike Leavitt) ...