It’s been a long week. At least for me it has. So I think that calls for a short post containing only a 2 minute long video from CBS. It’s about a former street fighter from London who falls into a coma, only to emerge a “creative genius”. This is a bit different from the norm, but interesting nonetheless.

Enjoy.

There are fewer things better in this world than intelligent, stunning, respectable work. Specifically intelligent, stunning, respectable artwork. I am, and will always be, a sucker for well-thought out and complex work. Anything that’s thought provoking, methodical and full of process absolutely fascinates me. I love seeing smart design, because then it does something much more than just look pretty.

Case in point, cartography. You just can’t have stupid maps, lol. It’s near impossible.

Map making is such a delicate, precise and measured process. It requires an absurd amount of thoughtfulness and planning, tons of patience and boatloads of research. Especially informational maps that put a visual guide to trends, behaviors, patterns and evolutions in our society. Ancient maps are in a league of their own, but modern day maps can be wonderfully creative. Recently I came across a site called Big Think, and they have a featured section about strange maps with Frank Jacobs. Frank is a cartographer who’s studied maps for years, and created some of his own wonderfully strange ones. Many of the maps from Big Think have been published into a book entitled, “Strange Maps” and is available for purchase on Amazon.

Enjoy a selection of Frank’s maps here, and right after the jump.

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So this past weekend I made a solo trip up to Boston just because I hadn’t been up there in a while and I’ve always loved the city. I don’t think I could’ve picked a more perfect weekend to do it. Weather wise it was just absolutely fantastic and I really lucked out. Also, the amount of events up there for the second to last weekend of the summer were just too numerous to count. In my 3 days up there I traveled all over, saw so many places and had a truly fantastic time.

One of the events that I checked out was at the Boston Public Library. They had a vintage poster exhibition called Away We Go and it was dedicated to travel posters commissioned by the Tourism Departments of different countries from around the world. These posters date anywhere between the 1920s-1940s when it was considered the “Golden Age of Travel”. There were somewhere around 28 posters in the displayed collection, with short bios about the artists. But then they had a catalog of over 350 posters from around the world, easily one (or two) for every country. Every single poster was just absolutely gorgeous, and the amount of information provided for each one gave a rich history to the country, as well as to the creators. The exhibition lasts through October 17th and I really, really urge you to go if you’ll be in the area.

The exhibition boasts a Flickr page with all of the show’s posters, as well as a Zazzle page to buy merchandise.

I’ve included photos of only a handful of the posters in this post, but if you’d like to view more, you can check out our Draw Facebook album for larger shots. And you should become our fan as well. Enjoy.

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No, this isn’t a post about that terrible Shyamalan movie from 2 years ago. But it is about some fantastic photos with the same title. A photographer by the name of Matt Henry has some beautiful photos featured on the Behance Network. Never mind the gorgeous American Muscle Cars album, but The Happening set have this curious, simplistic, hot summer feel to all of them. Like Matt just took everyone out in the heat, made them sweat for a couple minutes and then started snapping away.

This style of a campaign would’ve made a much more effective, and honestly a more beautiful, campaign than that lame poster above. Enjoy Matt Henry from England.

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