For some time now, I have been on the lookout for examples of Japanese street art. The uncanny means by which Japan adapts Western culture, reprocesses it and then spins it out as something altogether hyperreal, combined with the ever-prevalent superflat movement suggested that there must exist something extraordinary in the darker corners of the Tokyo streets.
So it was great to read PingMag’s recent piece on The Ghetto, a former love hotel in Shin-Okubo that has been converted into a skater shop/graffiti space. The article also provided links to …

Searching for examples of info graphics from the New York Times, I found this great collection of work by Megan Jaegerman (on Tufte’s site no less). Also worth checking out: Matthew Ericson, the Deputy Graphics Director at the NY Times, recently gave the keynote at an info graphics conference in California. You can download the slides (pdf) for this presentation titled “Visualizing Data for the Masses: Information Graphics at The New York Times”. (all of this via: db79.com)

“The water footprint of a person, company or nation is defined as the total volume of freshwater that is used to produce the commodities, goods and services consumed by the person, company or nation.”
Designer Timm Kekeritz creates something tangible (and beautiful) through his poster design for The Virtual Water Project.

Not since Rob Feenie took down Masaharu Morimoto in Kitchen Stadium to become Canada’s Iron Chef has one of our local darlings entered a battle of such epic proportions.
Today, center court at Coudal.com’s Layer Tennis:
Bantjes vs. Vit

The Steal Your Face logo by Bob Thomas and the infamous LSD chemist Augustus Owsley Stanley.
From Rolling Stone’s 40th Anniversary Summer of Love Special Edition (July 12 – 26 2007), Robert Greenfield* writes:
“While driving to work one day in his MG, Owsley saw an orange and blue logo with a white bar across it on a building. He thought it would look cool if the logo was red and blue with a white lightning bolt through it, so he had someone spray-paint a basic version of it on the Dead’s …

From Visual Complexity:
“Using information design principles and graphical techniques, the 85+ recorded covers of Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” is mapped in relation to the original recordings by the band.”
The requisite soundtrack…
…and the trailer for Anton Corbijn’s Control.

My friend West keenly observes that it is a rare case to see a street kid downtown that doesn’t bare some form of the Misfits skull, which is how the logo came to be the 8th addition in our ongoing series Great Counterculture Logos. As for its own origins, the image was adapted by Glenn Danzig from The Crimson Ghost, a 1946 movie serial about a cloaked villain’s attempts to obtain a counter atomic device known as Cyclotrode X.

The Revelation Records logo by…well, a few different people actually. Jordan Cooper explains:
We used stars on the first few releases as a background which was Ray‘s idea. He liked how Dangerhouse had black and yellow bars as their background on the labels so he wanted us to have something to identify Rev with like that. We got a Letraset sheet of stars and used it on the first three records we put out. The fourth record was going to be the Gorilla Biscuits 7″ and their friend (who would later …

The Public Image Ltd logo by Dennis Morris and John Lydon.

A great collection of punk rock flyers from the early 80′s to the present.