Cuban posters

This selection is from an early seventies Dover editions book of Cuban posters. Many of the stylistic motifs which became associated with Communist posters, such as the high contrast imagery and bold block headline fonts, were as much defined by the basic screen-printing equipment as by any particular aesthetic. Nevertheless the artists who produced these posters overcame their constraints to produce work which is influential to this day. I love the confident mark-making in these posters, and often go back to this book for inspiration.

Czech & Polish posters

I've just come back from Eastern Europe, where I came across this man's shop in Prague. It was tempting to buy the whole shop, but I made do with a handful of posters. The tall green screenprint is for a Czech film from 1948, and was apparently the last to be made in that format before the Communists standardised poster sizes. From the bold simplicity I thought it was from the '60s at first, and was amazed to discover how old it really was.

The four smaller ones are a mixture of Czech and Polish film posters, and finally the large one is from another poster shop, this time in Krakow. It's for a '70s literary festival, and the quality of the screened overprint is best appreciated close up.

I also bought some fantastic stuff from a market in Krakow, of which more when I get around to scanning it.

Sagrada Familia

I took these shots on 1200 ASA Kodak film with a Lomo, which explains the inky vignette. This overwhelming place looks more like a vision of hell than of heaven to me, and I think the grainy reproduction suits it well. The exteriors put me in mind of Rodin's Gates of Hell, and the charcoal-like interior shot makes me think of Piranesi's marvellously nightmarish Prison drawings.

Fact

As a long-standing admirer of Herb Lubalin's work I'm delighted to finally get my hands on some copies of Fact, the magazine he created with Alan Ginzburg's brother Ralph after the short-lived but influential Eros.

Eros is a staple of graphic design compendiums but Fact is seldom seen, perhaps because the content largely consists of two-column articles interspersed by political cartoons, al a The New Yorker. Nevertheless Lubalin produced some excellent, typographic covers for Fact, all built around the idea of completing the sentence begun by the logo. I've just received these two copies through the post. I may post more when I receive them.

First post

This is the first post of my first blog. I was inspired to create it partly by the excellent work of Jay and Kuchar at Esterson Associates, whose 'Things to look at' (http://thingstolookat.blogspot.com/) never fails to please with its varied selection of print work, and also by Jeremy Leslie, who keeps up a fascinating running commentary on the magazine world in his blog 'Magculture.com'.

I'd like to post similarly entrancing artwork to be sure, but I also want to create a repository of all those things which inspire me that don't fall in to the normal categories of graphic work. To that end I'm indebted to Paul Smith for my title, which is a paraphrase of his excellent book 'You can find inspiration in everything'.

Since much of the material I want to post needs either shooting, scanning or copying, my first submission is a modest one, but I found it tantalising all the same. I took these pictures in Newcastle last year. The fly-posters are on the front of a building which had been covered over since the sixties, so form part of an unintentional time-capsule.

One fragment advertises gigs for those frequent Top of the Pops-botherers Manfred Mann and Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Titch, whilst another announces the first ever solo concert in Britain for Alex Campbell, the melancholic Glaswegian folk singer, but most tantalising is a torn section of Sunday Mirror, proclaiming with apocalyptic tones 'It could happen here'. If you ever wanted a piece of enigmatic, Schwitters-style inspiration, surely this it. It could happen here? It probably already has.