It snowed and snowed and snowed. And in Milan we’re not used to it. 20 cm of white and soft snow covering streets and cars, traffic lights as christmas lights and nobody around me. The best snowfall ever: 1985. Many legends around it:

Mom: 1,50 m

Dad: 90 cm

I just remember myself on the top of a big big snowman and all the children laughing and running and no car around. Just beautiful.

I was wondering about snowflakes: their form, their structure, their beauty. And I like a lot christmas decoration made by paper snowflakes, cotton snowflakes, snowflakes-to-eat. And I love this snowflakes-curtain!

Found via Ohdeedoh.

Looking around about Christmas trees, tales, photos… I found the Flickr page by Pipnstuff, with a great selection of retro books:

So cute!

I love this song.

And I love the art work around The Decemberists made by Carson Ellis. She’s really evocative and sweet and nostalgic and, how can I say… well, see it by yourself:

Here her web, visit it, read it, explore it. I absolutely love her style. She’s quite eclectic and I choose the illustrations that I personally like the most. I would like  to see one of her books some day…

Sometimes you find out things unexpected but exactly when you need them. Well, I know it’s not the big big problem of your life (I hope for you) but since I’ve been living in my new micro flat I can’t find a good curtain for my shower. And I definitely don’t want to buy again the one by Ikea with tiny little aliens… So while I was reading some new stuff on the italian www.designerblog.it, I found this!

It’s fantastic and it’s like a children’s play… You can choose your own color (blue, green or black), make what you want and then use it. The material is eco-friendly (nothing less than Grain behind this idea…) and the curtain is perfect and recyclable. 1% of the 33 dollars of this curtain will go to 1% for the planet.

Oh, want some inspiration? Let’s go here!

Pop-up books had been always a problem for me. When I was a child I received many of them but they were quite “ugly” regarding the illustrations and the composition and sometimes they didn’t work well. It’s true that when you’re eight years old you haven’t a delicate way to take and play with things but too many times my pop-up book ended its life too early.

I confess that I’m not so in love with the pop-ups but during the last years I found out another school of artists, engineers, architects and graphic designers who dedicate their life to this kind of books. I really had been surprised to see the way of playing with papers and pages of these people.

The concept itself is that the story is coming out the pages. I think I understood that there are two basic points of view on books: on one side, they try to attract you with the Mary-Poppins-effect, and you find yourself walking into them; on the other side they try to enter into your own life. And these two way are not opposite but complementary, as I think they’re the roots for every good written and illustrated book. And with pop-up books this is maybe more evident.

Let’s take the last new entry in my house: Popville by Anouck Boisrobert and Louis Rigaud, published in France by the fantastic Helium, in Italy by Corraini and in Spain by Kókinos (and there should be more editions which I didn’t find out).

When you start opening the book, you firstly see a church. This is the first cultural interesting point: why a church? Well, this is like a little story of urbanism…

The point is that on the following page you find out that some houses had been built around that building, and after that more and more until you can find an entire city. Through every page traffic rises, houses are built, the city hall, the fabrics and the streets take the territory and change it forever.

The work around the structure, the rise and development of a town and the graphic study are fantastic. Few colours, few geometric lines and simple and simplified buildings that you can identify. And at the very end of the book, the space of the two pages in not enough to contain the town, and you have to open the flaps and look at it.

At the end a comment, a short two-pages story written by Joy Sorman explains us and imagines one the possible origins of this town, the movement around it, the decision of some men and women to live in a place and build their own life there. I don’t know if it’s really a good choice to put the text at the end. I find it a little pointless.

Two things that make me think between others: there is always a center, and this is a consideration about life, too. And trees totally disappear.

I was wandering if somebody could have ever created something like this… I usually dream a lot, and sometimes when I wake up it’s like I’ve just run for miles. Or lived another entire life.

Sun been down for days
A pretty flower in a vase
A slipper by the fireplace
A cello lying in it’s case

Soon she’s down the stairs
Her morning elegance she wears
The sound of water makes her dream
Awoken by a cloud of steam
She pours a daydream in a cup
A spoon of sugar sweetens up

And She fights for her life
As she puts on her coat
And she fights for her life on the train
She looks at the rain
As it pours
And she fights for her life
As she goes in a store
With a thought she has caught
By a thread
She pays for the bread
And She goes…
Nobody knows

Sun been down for days
A winter melody she plays
The thunder makes her contemplate
She hears a noise behind the gate
Perhaps a letter with a dove
Perhaps a stranger she could love

And She fights for her life
As she puts on her coat
And she fights for her life on the train
She looks at the rain
As it pours
And she fights for her life
As she goes in a store
With a thought she has caught
By a thread
She pays for the bread
And She goes…
Nobody knows

And She fights for her life
As she puts on her coat
And she fights for her life on the train
She looks at the rain
As it pours
And she fights for her life
Where people are pleasently strange
And counting the change
And She goes…
Nobody knows

Hi everybody,

first of all I’d like to thank you for all your emails and messages. I know I’ve been totally absent during these last months but many things changed in my life – and many are still changing.

First: I left Barcelona. The job wasn’t going well and I needed new air, I needed to start again. So I decided to come back home and here I am, living in Milan.

I’ve been looking for a job as an agent or editor and I have been lucky! Now I’m working, even if I’m only a maternity cover, for a literary agency. I share a new flat with two great girls and I’m still working with children’s books. It has not been simple, and sometimes I felt tired of looking and I only could see a black blot in my future, but I can say that now things are going better, even if in six or eight months I’ll have to find another work…

BUT I do not want to think about it now, I only want to “eat” everything is happening and I’ll start again sharing with you my books and interesting news. I’m also thinking in opening an Italian blog, specifically about what is happening in my country…. I don’t know, maybe!

Well, during the next days I promise I will post something…

See you!

Valentina

I’m not used to speak about new technologies in printing, it’s not my field and I’m not an expert. But today I read something which astonished me.

Watch this:

This machine can give you the choice between 400000 titles (they will bcome one million….) and it can print your book in five minutes. It can be used as a new print-on-demand machine or, and this is the most interesting point, it can be a new way to have rarities and old titles always ready. Can you imagine going to a bookshop and ask to print you an old title that is out of catalogue? How this will affect the life of the publishing houses? Which consequences shall we expect?

It’s also important that the inventor is the publisher Jason Epstein, who is following his own research about the cheap and “futurable” book. For the moment this machine can be found in USA, Australia, Canada and in the Library of Alessandria. Somebody told that this is the best invention since Gutenberg.

I will follow this matter carefully…

Some months ago, I was surprised by the video of the book “ABC3D”, posted on youtube to present the book by Marion Bataille, a French graphic designer who dedicated her talent to make an alphabet-pop up book that became one of the most popular (you can see the video here).

Today I would like to show another illustrated book, “Bruits“, published in France by Thierry Magnier, where the main character, Louis, with his like-a-ear head, is trying to escape from the confusion and noise of the city, discovering new sounds all over the world and finally losing himself in a discoteque full of music and friends.

 At first sight, I was attracted by the collage style and the use of graphic elements in the cover. Marion simply evokes the presence of sounds by using the circles, influences by comic but not only.

The enormous head of Louis seems to be simply big but we can easly understand that is a great ear, which means an extra ability to listen to what is happening around. The equivalence is immediate: with the big ear he can listend to every sound and every sound is stronger than usual.

Marion plays with letters and sizes through all the book, and also colors become a part of the expression of sounds in fonts. And following this, objects are built by their own noise, that means that the same noise is what makes objects (buildings, cars, bikes etc…) real. The text, the few words we can find, is simply a plus, but it isn’t the main part of the book. This is a complete visual and graphic story, with clear influences from cinema, graphic design and artistic experiments as we can see for example in Dadaism and old cartoons and comics. 

As Marion had been working for different newspapers and publishing houses, it’s clear that she’s calling to her own experience and technical baggage to make this interesting book. And as you can see in these pages, there shouldn’t be another font for the cow than this one, used for milk boxes, and the 80’s body type of the last pages is perfect to build the the ground, the walls and the sounds of a disco. 

It’s really interesting this work on fonts, illustrations and sounds. And don’t lose the end page! It’s a good eye exercise…

He is incredible!! I love his photos… He’s like a painter, but with the camara. He builds, composes spaces and puts characters there, he minds the little details that make things so special. I hope I’ll see his works soon here in Italy.

Meanwhile, I discovered Ovation TV and I’m so surprised about it. Creators from all over the world speaking about art (every kind of art!)… I didn’t know about the existence of this channel (ups..) and now I’m quite addicted. 

You can see videos, read about performances and more by clikking here, but you can also find Ovation Tv on Youtube.