Indie Brands delves into the world of independent brands. The book shows the creative people behind the brand, the visual eye candy they create, the space they work in and the inspiring items they surround themselves with. The brands literally come from all over the world and vary in size – from one-man brands to medium-sized corporations. And they all sell different products. But as true indie brands they share three important characteristics: they’re independent, they have a story worth sharing and they all understand the magic of marketing.

[Indie Brands The Book]

Star Wars: The Blueprints is limited to 5,000 hand-numbered English language copies, with the first 125 copies signed by the three surviving Academy-Award winners for Best Art Direction (Star Wars, 1978): art director Norman Reynolds; art director Les Dilley; and set dresser Roger Christian

[Star Wars The Blueprints]

Brian Vanden Brink is one of America’s most sought-after architectural photographers. He is also drawn to the mystery and unexpected beauty found in abandoned architecture. Here Vanden Brink captures and illuminates in stunning black and white images abandoned structures such as mills, bridges, grain elevators, churches, and storefronts-structures that once were important and useful.

[Ruin Photographs of a Vanishing America]

[Modernist Cuisine The Art and Science of Cooking]

Everything you need to know to assess, understand, and improve a hangover is here: dozens of comforting recipes, very clever graphic tests for analyzing your state of mind, and quizzes for tracking your progress.

[The Hungoevr Cookbook]

Everybody’s favorite notebook, Moleskine, has announced a new kind of social ecommerce platform that allows fans and consumers to purchase one-of-a-kind, customized notebooks, journals and planners directly from artists.

More than just another online store, the Moleskine Artist Marketplace is a centralized hub for sharing work, discovering new work, trading tips, and purchasing notebooks from favorite artists. Artistic techniques and mediums including embroidery, origami, oil paint, photography, even taxidermy are on display.

“[Moleskine notebooks] give me inspiration to create something new and unpredictable,” said Stella Sbilenca, an Italian illustrator who likes combining notebooks with cut and paste wizardry.

Brad Fisher is a mixed-media portrait artist who uses plain Moleskine notebooks to sketch his compositions. The new platform, he says, “provides an honest marriage between creativity and commerce.”

the artists at work, and their work

The Moleskine Artist Marketplace

It’s practical magic. The powder coated steel floating bookshelf becomes invisible behind a stack of books. Mounting hardware included.

[Conceal Book Shelf]

From the streets of New York to the walls of its most prominent galleries, young graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) was catapulted to international fame in his early 20s and died of a drug-overdose at 27. The subject of a feature film by fellow artist Julian Schnabel, Basquiat is one of the most admired artists to emerge from the 1980s art boom. This book explores his short but prolific career.

[Basquiat by Leonhard Emmerling]

This revised and expanded second edition is extensively illustrated and includes a DVD featuring eighty-seven video clips and twenty audio tracks by over one hundred hackers, benders, musicians, artists, and inventors from around the world, as well as thirteen video tutorials demonstrating projects in the book. Further enhancements include additional projects, photographs, diagrams, and illustrations.

[Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking]

Traumgedanken. The word means “Thoughts on dreams.” It’s also the title of a book. Not just any book. It’s a book with hyperlinks. You know what hyperlinks are: they are those underlined or highlighted words on web pages that you can click on, that will take you to other web pages. Except Traumgedanken is not a web page; it’s a physical book.

The book is the dream-child of Maria Fischer, a graphic designer from Augsburg, Germany, and is the Grand Prize winner of the Bavarian State Award for Young Designers 2010. The hyperlinks are delicately colored threads, stitched through the book, that connect pages to other pages, words to other words. The threads make visible the confusion and fragility of dreams; they turn the book into not just a book about dreams, but a corporeal analog of a dream — or in the author’s own words, it’s “a model of a dream about dreaming.”

[Maria Fischer's Traumgedanken]

If your dreams are confused, then even this description of the book may sound dreamlike to you. The reality of this dream-book, though, is very concrete: an exquisite, robust object of white pages upon which colored threads are set off against spare black text. On some pages, the threads take on the character of illustrations, drawing their shapes from key words on opposite pages. There are even five pages on which a significant excerpt from an opposite page is stitched into the paper — but the words are not actually legible, as they exist inside the fold of the paper. Thus, Traumgedanken embodies mystery, the quality of the dream state in which aspects of the experience make their presence felt, yet remain unseen.

threads make dreamlike connections