Vintage O'Hara :: Random House UK

tomer :: writer John O'Hara was a keen observer of social status and class differences, and wrote frequently about the socially ambitious.

Appointment in Samarra - in December 1930, just before Christmas, the Gibbsville social circuit is electrified with parties and dances, where the music plays late into the night and the liquor flows freely. At the center of the social elite stand Julian and Caroline English—the envy of friends and strangers alike. But in one rash moment born inside a highball glass, Julian breaks with polite society and begins a rapid descent toward self-destruction.


the sentiment that lingered after reading the book is of someone being smothered to death by luxury and I wanted the composition to reflect that with a big oppressive shape closing in on a face.

BUtterfield 8- was inspired by a news account of the discovery of the body of a beautiful young woman washed up on a Long Island beach. Was it an accident, a murder, a suicide? The circumstances of her death were never resolved, but O’Hara seized upon the tragedy to imagine the woman’s down-and-out life in New York City in the early 1930s.


the sketch is from a specific scene in the book that seemed to summarize it all, the vulnerable human flesh, naked, under an oversized mink.

executions:

the big overkill :: breaking out of love

asaf :: this was one of those times. the AD was nice, the job's brief clear, and they even sent reference images. the article was about ways to break free from a romantic relationship. i started as usual with a sketch, but then was asked to do another one, and another, and suddenly found myself going full speed on a highway to nowhere.



when i finally got the sketch approved and moved to final, it turned out i missed the idea completely since they asked for a retro communist poster feel (meaning no contours, flat colors). i managed to forget this detail somewhere in between sketches, and here i was going all over it again.
with every new version the drawing lost a bit of energy, and the final result struggling to look alive. a bunch of lines on the highway to nowhere. a big overkill.

Design Museum Announces Award Winners

from the creative review blog ::

Tomer Hanuka’s jacket illustration for the Penguin Classics Deluxe version of Philosophy In The Boudoir by the Marquis de Sade

The category winners of the Design Museum’s Brit Insurance Design Awards have been announced with Penguin’s US Classics Deluxe editions winning in the graphics category and Haque’s Burble London installation taking the interactive prize

The category winners were decided by a judging panel consisting of Vitra’s Rolf Fehlbaum, publisher Lars Müller and architect and designer Antonio Citterio.

The Penguin books, also known as the Graphic Classics, is a series of re-issued well-known books featuring special covers by the likes of Chris Ware (Candide, below)

Lady Chatterley’s Lover illustrated by Chester Brown

And The Portable Dorothy Parker by Seth

In choosing them the judges commented (somewhat ungrammatically) “It’s a great achievement by its creative director Paul Buckley in commissioning a highly skilled group of illustrators and cartoonists whose creative visions have produced some fantastic atmospheric yet very individual covers with high artistic flair and design integrity.” For the rest of the graphics category (including two CR projects) see here

The Darker Mask :: book cover

tomer :: the brief : The Darker Mask is a collection of original prose stories recalling the derring-do of the beings we call Superheroes and the worlds they fight to save. But unique to The Darker Mask stories is that these plots and characters color a literary universe outside of what has been predominantly white, idiosyncratic, and male in previous homages to pulp. This is the stuff of urban legends, new mythos, and extraordinary folks who might live in a soon-to-be-gentrified ghetto, the dreary rust-belt of the city, or in another dimension. The Darker Mask offers an eclectic mix of popular fiction writers exploring worlds gritty, visceral, and fantastic.

free associations: an urban hero, a hero, captain America, suit with fish scales, like a chain-link fence, surrounding a ghetto, a sea of cement, a manhole half uncovered is half a moon, coming from under-ground, going through divides like they're not there, a secret power that can't be described with words, flickering like a flame.

later that day :

execution:

art direction: Irene Gallo, Design: Jamie Stafford-Hill