A little late to be talking about Christmas I know, but hold back the lectures for a second. There’s a good round up of seasonal gifts and mailers on Creative Review including the Christmas by Colour cards from RAW design in Manchester which featured my very own Christmas colour submission, Bucks Fizz as well as a creative Fedrigoni desktop calendar which I hope to get my hands on for the New Year.

Some fine examples of good CD/Vinyl sleeve artwork over at Creative Review – Art Vinyl’s sleeves of the year.

Vote for your favorite of the last year at Art Vinyl.

My copy of We Are Friction by Sing Statistics arrived in the post yesterday. The info-graphics inspired cover is really catchy and the content — collaborations between writers and illustrators — looks very intriguing.

Looking forward to reading through some of the short stories over the coming week and a pat on the back to Jez Burrows and Lizzy Stewart for all their efforts that went into We Are Friction.

I recently discovered the very talented illustrator Jeffery Bowman aka. Mr Bowleg. I absolutely love his character centered work that is created using a variety of interesting textures and bright hues.

Excellent video for U2′s latest single, beautifully realised in this cell shaded animation. Directed by David OReilly, designed by Jon Klassen, animated by Chris Hutchison & Steve White. It reminds me a lot of the good times spent playing the classic Game Cube title, Legend of Zelda: The Windwaker which adopted the same cute and adorable style of art direction.

I took the time out to visit Anthony Burrill’s latest exhibition last night at Kemistry gallery. ‘In a New Places’ the title of the exhibition was very fitting, with the work on show moving away from previous iconic typographic pieces that have become synonymous with Burrill’s brand of prints. The bold lines, flat colours and simple geometric shapes are all still present, but there’s clearly a focus on illustration taking influence from nature. The show also showed Burrill’s experimentation with with laser cut perspex in the form of some beautiful wall mounted sculptures.

All in the all the private view was pretty packed, as always at Kemistry, with a small collection card reproductions of prints in the show, being given away (I’m sure I’ll post them later on in the week) along side small postcard books that showed off more of Burril’s work that most of his patrons would be familiar with. There’s also a really bold mural on the wall outside Kemistry, so make sure you don’t miss it.

Wallpaper* magazine were also there last night and have put together a small critique of the site along side production shots of the show as it was hung yesterday. The show runs until and check out the Kemistry website for more information and opening times.

Image lovingly borrowed from Wallpaper*.

I took the time yesterday to visit the Royal Academy of Art’s highly anticipated Summer Exhibition. There’ was over 1200 amazing pieces of work on show that took me the good part of an afternoon to get round. One of the artists that caught my eye where some amazing prints by Claas Gutsche (the work above was not in the show) as well as a very impressive sculpture from Damien Hirst.

Just discovered that the fantastic creative agency and collective, Big Active , have their own blog choc full of work from their very talented members such as Siggi Eggertsson. Siggi did these amazing illustrations for this months issue of Wired UK on Pirates in Somali.

I’m also very excited by the new that, Genevieve Gauckler, illustration above, is putting on a couple of solo shows later in the year, one of which will be on at one of my favourite galleries in London’s east end, Kemistry.

Darn it, looks like I missed the Secret Blisters exhibition at the Dalston Print Club again this year. By the looks of it though, there was a lot of tasty screenprints available to purchase and a great turnout.

Hopefully I’ll remember to check out their next show, which no doubt will be the same time next year. How annoying.

Stunning animation showing the making of The Seed by John Kelly. The Seed is an short animation created for Adobe to promote their latest line of products, Creative Suite 4. Simple and well crafted, this animation shows of the wit and attention to detail that Kelly demonstrated in his hit animation last year, Procrastination.