The Gerd Arntz Web Archive collects graphics from the career of the man who - in creating over 4000 Isotypes for social scientist Otto Neurath in 1930s Red Vienna - can make a serious claim to be the inventor of the modern stick figure. He attacked the corruption of German society as the Nazis rose to power, then joined Neurath in an attempt to create a transnational visual language that bore later fruit in Otl Aicher's 1972 Olympic pictograms and the AIGA passenger/pedestrian symbol signs. [via Mark Larson and Austin Kleon]
posted on Jul 7, 2008 - View this thread

NYTimes Crossword Drawings. Emily Jo Cureton creates an illustration for every Times crossword, using a handful of clues to create odd little scenes. [via]
posted on May 6, 2008 - View this thread

Doodles, Drafts and Designs: Industrial Drawings from the Smithsonian. Including crayon tests, the original telescoping shopping cart and more. [via the horse's neck]
posted on Feb 11, 2008 - View this thread

Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas, the Black Panther Party's Minister of Culture from 1967 to 1979. Douglas is still alive and making posters for the cause, in this case the San Francisco 8, who were arrested earlier this year for the murder of a police officer in 1971 -- despite the fact that evidence was thrown out of federal court in 1976 because "officers stripped the men, blindfolded them, beat them and covered them in blankets soaked in boiling water," and "used electric prods on their genitals." The SF Weekly published a detailed 5-page story about the case in November 2006.
posted on Dec 14, 2007 - View this thread

The Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae A collection of over 900 zoomable print engravings, organized around the work of Antonio Lafreri and other Italian publishers, whose documentation of Roman ruins and statues helped fuel the Renaissance. The itineraries are a good place to start for detailed discussion, or just browse away. [via the wonderful Bouphonia]
posted on Dec 10, 2007 - View this thread

Viñetas is a prolific blog from Spain focusing on illustration, vintage comics (sometimes wordless), advertising, humor magazines and other beautiful ephemera, curated by the editor-in-chief of a Spanish comics company. [via Journalista]
posted on Sep 21, 2007 - View this thread

Just some fun odd cartoons about parenting, weddings, stupid vasectomy laws, parenting, pronghorn antelope and parenting.
posted on May 5, 2007 - View this thread

Gems of Penmanship, Penman's Leisure Hour, Ninety-five Lessons in Ornamental Penmanship, The Champion Method of Practical Business Writing and other Rare Books on Calligraphy and Penmanship from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Lots of neat tidbits. [via mlarson.org]
posted on Feb 24, 2007 - View this thread

Very odd illustrations from caricaturist J.J. Grandville's 1868 book L'Exposition de l'Avenir. More oddities from 1829's Les Métamorphoses Du Jour (some in color here), and lots of delightful garden scenes from his 1847 classic Les Fleurs Animees (vol 1, vol 2). Some consider Grandville one of the earliest proto-surrealists. [more Grandville links in this great post at BibliOdyssey]
posted on Feb 19, 2007 - View this thread

Beautiful early Zionist propaganda posters, courtesy of the Swann Galleries. The first 73 items in this large batch of vintage posters up for auction are related to Israel, Jews or anti-Semitism. [via Paperholic]
posted on Feb 6, 2007 - View this thread

The Rålamb Costume Book. Illustrations of Turkish officials, various important occupations and just plain folks, obtained by Claes Rålamb, Swedish ambassador to the Ottoman Court, in 1657. More about Rålamb and Sultan Mehmet IV.
posted on Feb 4, 2007 - View this thread

The girls, a probably-nsfw series of near-abstract shapes from Australian illustrator Sarah Bishop. [via Jahsonic]
posted on Jan 22, 2007 - View this thread

12 months of George Petty pinups. And 16 more. Hell, have 5 pages worth. More about the Petty Girl, an advertising and pop culture icon with an often unfinished look who made her first appearance in Esquire in 1933 and whose elegant line quickly became famous. [via Bibi's Box, which has lots more Petty and pinup links] [warning: busty pinup girls]
posted on Jan 18, 2007 - View this thread

A year-by-year archive, from 1930 to the present, of every poignant, creepy, tacky, tragic, goofy, beautiful and, yes, kinda slutty cover of the magazine that started out as Astounding Stories of Super Science and became Analog, with lots of changes in between. [via the horse's neck]
posted on Nov 11, 2006 - View this thread

Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie [via]
posted on Nov 6, 2006 - View this thread

Art Deco blog From Lisbon, gatochy celebrates the Jazz Age (and Art Nouveau on Wednesdays). See also Beautiful Century and her flickr sets, which are full of fun.
posted on Oct 26, 2006 - View this thread

Candy. Bureaucracy. Memory. The Daily Collage Project, from Dilar Pereira in Portugal. [via]
posted on Oct 4, 2006 - View this thread

Beautiful, occasionally abstract, old German zoological wall charts. [via]
posted on Oct 3, 2006 - View this thread

Printmaker. Painter. Adventurer. Advertiser. One of the most popular graphic artists of the 20th century, he created the Random House logo for his pals Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer and illustrated their first book. His illustrations for another, Moby Dick, are widely credited with resurrecting that novel for modern audiences. His own first book was favorably compared to Whitman's Leaves of Grass and for a time his bookplates were everywhere, but he "virtually vanished from the museum and gallery circuits by the late 1940s" due to his outspoken support for Stalinism. When the State Department refused to grant him a passport because of his political views, he took his case to the Supreme Court and won, establishing that the right to travel cannot be denied to American citizens. Happy birthday, Rockwell Kent.
posted on Jun 21, 2006 - View this thread

Weathering the Weather: The Origins of Atmospheric Science A "glorious selection" of strikingly beautiful pages from classic publications about meteorology. [via plep].
posted on Mar 23, 2005 - View this thread

Curious George Escapes the Nazis. A true story from a neat little exhibit about the life and work of H.A. and Margret Rey, German Jews who fled Paris on bicycle (with the unpublished Curious George manuscript as one of their few possessions) hours before the Nazis arrived. Lots of info, including Curious George's first appearance, Hans' famous book on astronomy, notes on the couple's lesser-known work and more.
posted on Jan 7, 2005 - View this thread

Meet J. C. Leyendecker, the Golden Boy of American Illustration. He helped codify the modern image of Santa Claus. His Baby New Year covers for the Saturday Evening Post invented a pop culture icon. He was "the most out front closeted gay man of the twentieth century" - a hugely popular artist whose work was often clearly homoerotic. The young Norman Rockwell used to stalk him and once said, "Leyendecker was my god." In 1905, he created advertising's first male sex symbol, the Arrow Shirt Man, which "defined the ideal American male" for decades, got more fan mail than Valentino and inspired a 1923 Broadway play. A detailed, opinionated biography and 14 pages of gorgeous Post covers.
posted on Dec 21, 2002 - View this thread

The Umbrella Sail at Last a Reality! Technofetishists will love this fabulous collection of Popular Mechanics covers going back to 1902. Who'd have thought a weaving machine could be so beautiful? Futuristic cityscapes, bizarre weapons, new-fangled sports and surprisingly delicate and artful scenes are just a few of the pleasures in the year-by-year archive. The mag's male-dominated world can get kind of, um, gay, but it's hard to imagine a better display of the joys and fears (especially the fears) of our monkey fascination with technology.
posted on Jun 17, 2002 - View this thread

Buddhist mandalas? Abstract doodles? Alien snow crystals? Nope. Just some amazing scientific art from Art Forms in Nature, published between 1899 and 1904 by zoologist Ernst Haeckel. Lots more early biological art at this scientist's public domain archive. Unfortunately, Haeckel also helped provide the philosophical foundation for Nazism. Hey, no one's perfect.
posted on May 24, 2002 - View this thread