Great post over at formatmag that shows 20 hip-hop album covers done in lego. Well, with lego characters anyway. It’s well fresh.

Granted a lot of the covers wont mean anything to a lot of people but there’s a lot there that everyone should own. Or at least hear at some point. Download some stuff. Expand your mind.

I really wish I could draw. Like really. If I could, I’d spend all day everyday drawing things like this. Except it probably wouldn’t be my job, and no-one does illustrated posters anymore so I’d have to make up the films. Stuff like “Revenge Of The Badger Lord – He Came From The Undergrowth To Take You To HELL!!!” or “The Creature With Poor Eyesight But An Insatiable Hunger For Blood. And Death! Lots Of Death!!” and they’d be awesome. But as it is, drawing things by hand is not my strong point, so I’ll just admire these from afar.

They’re taken from a couple of posts simply entitled 100 Illustrated Horror Film Posters Part 1 and Part 2 (you might be able to see where I stole this post title from) and as a whole suite, they’re a fairly impressive collection. Some of the films are well known (Jaws, Dawn of the Dead), others sound mental and make me want to see them (The Giant Leeches, Fiend Without a Face) but all of them are worth a look.

NXE by the way, stands for ‘New Xbox Experience‘. It’s the.. err.. new xbox experience (strangely enough). Released midweek, I got to play with it a bit last night and so far I think it’s an improvement on the old navigation system. The coverflow style stuff is obviously heavily apple influenced but it’s slicker than the old blades so I’m all for it.

Not too sure about the avatar thing though. It’s so Wii. I struggled to get mine to look like me (click on the image on the left to see Mii me), but it’s quite good to see the groups of your friends who are playing the same games or whatever.

But anyway, the point for this is to say: the ‘welcome’ video that it plays just after you install the update is nice. That’s it. If you’re not xboxed up, you can still see it online. Good work from Exopolis. Check the HQ mov or the LQ youtubism.

If you’re not sure who Futura is, you need to recognise. Go and look at his website. It’s a bit odd, and actually I think I prefer the older version of it which was really odd but it’s still worth a peep. Probably my all-time favourite artist/designer.. there’s just something about those shapes and colours that I always think is awesome. Not to mention his earlier graffiti work. The man is a legend. One of my top inspirational books is this which by the looks of it is rather hard to get hold of nowadays. Yay for being ahead of the game.

But anyway, there’s a small piece on him in issue 50 of vapors magazine. To be honest, it’s not the most in depth interview but it’s nice to see that he’s still doing stuff. I feel like I haven’t been aware of any new work for a long time, but maybe that’s just me being out of the loop. In fact, I did miss this Burton snowboard design which is supremely fresh. If I could snowboard, that’d be my shit.

So yeah, go and read the article.. and have a look at the other stuff in the magazine. It’s a good issue (some GZA, UNKLE, Jean Grae and other stuff inside).

So you already know what Pixar are about. They’re the animation studio with major skillage who used mess with Lucasfilms, Steve Jobs and Disney but now roll dolo. Their catalogue is pretty much the most solid collection of films from one studio ever. I still haven’t seen Wall-E yet but everything else gets a two thumbs up from me. Even Cars.

There’s tonnes of images and whatnot covering their work out there but I bumped into this site and particularly like the stuff they’ve collated. It’s not extensive by any means but there’s something to be said for being selective. Just a wee collection of artwork from the films, and links to other sources. It’s a nice selection, worth a look.

Yet again, I’ve decided to re-design this site (mattnortham.com in case you’re confused) because the old design was boring me a bit. It’s barely been a few months since that last design debuted and in fact, this design isn’t too far removed from the previous version. It’s more colourful at least. Most of the legwork can be seen on the homepage but there’s a few new things with links and stuff that you might notice by just clicking around.

I’m not normally one to go on too much about the design process or anything like that so I’ll end it here.. Just a note to say that it’s live. Oh, in case you’re using IE6 still, here’s a screenshot of what it’s supposed to look like. If it doesn’t look like that, feel free to comment and let me know.. I may decide to ‘fix’ it. My testing process has been admittedly a bit slack for this

A quicky here celebrating the wonder that is retro game covers. Sort of. They’re not strictly realistic (as pointed out by many geek commenters who really should lighten up) but it’s a fun reimagining of some current games and how they might look twere they downgraded to a pixel steeze.

via

I don’t see how anyone would fail to be a fan of old game covers/booklets. Much like illustrated movie posters, there’s this certain quality which can only really be achieved by many many hours of painstaking hand drawing. Proper works of art.

There’s plenty of examples to be seen at car boot sales up and down the country if you don’t mind getting up at 7 on a cold wet Sunday morning.. Or you could just check out this flickr set that I’ve been looking for an excuse to link to for years or this post full of atari game covers which has should help you to put those ‘modern’ ones at the top into context.

After a prolonged absence, I thought it was about time that I pulled up my sleeves and actually updated this site. So here it is. A new post and more pertinently, a new site design. Well, actually, it’s another realign because if you have any memory of what the previous design was like, then you’ll realise that this one isn’t actually straying too far at all.

I started working on this way back in April, intending to have it ready for the May 1st Reboot but as that deadline loomed, it was quickly obvious that it was never going to happen. That said, I did think it’d happen sooner than mid-June but there you go.

The most significant change can be seen on the overall site home page (http://www.mattnortham.com) where I’ve ditched the old basic static look and tried to incorporate more of the blog content (as well as content from external places like youtube and last.fm). It’s an approach I used to roll with when I first set up this blog on my scpgt domain but for whatever reason I didn’t maintain it over here. So now it’s back; complete with fancy sliding jquery goodness. It took a bit of tweaking and some wordpress custom fields to get it sorted but I like it now.

The design isn’t actually what I consider completely done so bear with me if there appear to be any issues in the next week or so – but I didn’t want to leave it any longer than I already have. This was supposed to a ’summer’ design and seeing as our summers are notoriously short, I thought it best to just unleash it as is.

But anyway, on with the content.. I promise to pull my thumb out and put more effort into this. Got a few bits of work to add to the portfolio too shortly so stay tuned….

Over at my portfolio site, I’ve unleashed a new piece of work called ‘ángeles perdidos‘ (use Babelfish if that doesn’t make sense.. it’s deep). Go and look.

It’s based on some photos I took in L.A. last summer.. specifically, from the ‘Bona Vista’ cocktail bar in the Bonaventure Hotel.. The views aren’t bad at all. I actually started doing stuff to these photos shortly after coming back from California last July but then promptly forgot about them amidst doing other bits of work; but then this weekend I found my scribblings nested in several old folders and decided it was worth finishing off. There were several other versions but the final one I went with is definitely the most easy on the eye.

You can grab it to use as a desktop wallpaper background thing from my aptly named ‘goodies section‘ too if you like. I have. It’s nice.