Pictures for Clothes

Adrian Tomine for Perry EllisI’m going to make it a two-fer week for comics fans here: I never got around to writing about the Adrian Tomine-illustrated advertising campaign for Perry Ellis that kicked off earlier in the year, so following on my post about Seth’s wonderful “Wimbeldon Green,” I thought I would. It’s a fairly striking creative strategy for a fashion label that completely eschews photography for hand-drawn illustrations from the author and artist of the indie comic book “Optic Nerve.” Tomine uses his self-consciously mild drawing style to recount quiet moments of modest poignancy in the lives of apparently attractive, Perry Ellis-garbed young singles. He tells three short stories in comic strip form with the same attention to detail and deft draughtsmanship that you’ll find in his normal comic work. None of them are of any particular consequence, but reading each of them at PerryEllis.com, they come off as reasonably successful impressions for the brand.

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The Movable Feast Got Away from Movable Type

Movable TypeFrom time to time I get emails from readers asking some variant of the question, “What did you use to make your blog?” The answer is Movable Type, a very capable publishing tool to which I owe a great debt; without it, I’m not sure I would have written the hundreds of posts I have, probably remaining instead just a frustrated design and technology writer of dubious talent, wrestling with the limitations of Blogger. For publishing power relative to what was available even just five years ago for much, much more money, Movable Type offers a tremendous and compelling value.

Those questions are often followed up with, “Do you recommend that I use Movable Type, too?” That’s a little trickier, but honestly, I think I’ve come to the point now where I’d have to answer, no, I wouldn’t recommend Movable Type to new bloggers. Instead, I would recommend WordPress, very similar software that’s marked by a few key differences: it’s open source, which means it’s free; it’s PHP-based (versus CGI and PERL-based, like Movable Type), which means it’s technologically easy to modify; and it’s clearly the publishing tool of the moment.

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Score One for Books (With Pictures)

Wimbledon GreenThis weekend at The Strand, a downtown Manhattan bookstore that claims to sell “18 miles of new, used, rare and out of print books,” I picked up a copy of “Wimbledon Green, The Greatest Comic Book Collector in the World” a graphic novel by the popular alternative comics artist Seth. Though I have a soft spot for comic books, I often regard the romanticized, tactile quality of printed matter to be a bit overrated — when I can, I prefer to have things digitally. Not so in the case of “Wimbledon Green,” which is nothing if not physically beautiful.

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Score One for Books (With Pictures)

Wimbledon GreenThis weekend at The Strand, a downtown Manhattan bookstore that claims to sell “18 miles of new, used, rare and out of print books,” I picked up a copy of “Wimbledon Green, The Greatest Comic Book Collector in the World” a graphic novel by the popular alternative comics artist Seth. Though I have a soft spot for comic books, I often regard the romanticized, tactile quality of printed matter to be a bit overrated — when I can, I prefer to have things digitally. Not so in the case of “Wimbledon Green,” which is nothing if not physically beautiful.

Continue Reading …

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