The Creative Review Blog have a sneak preview of some of the excellent work that’s made it into the Magazine’s 2008 Annual.

I particularly liked these posters for London super-club Fabric, created by Village Green (can’t find a link for them unfortunately).





When Fabric first opened their posters and flyers were of a really high standard, and although the production values have remained consistently high, they never really achieved the heights of the collages created by Love in the club’s early days. Great then to see the club’s design work back to it’s slightly disturbing best with these unusually sinister characters created by Village Green’s Tom Darracott.

Tom Waits puts his phenomenal bullshitting skills to work, promoting his latest tour with this hilarious fake press conference. This is a great example of clever, cost effective online promotion. The artist’s popularity and personality combine to create a piece of content which is more effective than anything most marketing types would typically create. For more info and a full list of dates, check out the original article at Wired Listening Post.

This poster for Spoon by Texas based F2-Design is printed with actual 45rpm records, making each one unique.



I'm also loving this one for New York Dolls in Chicago:



There’s loads more great posters at the F2-Design site, and if you’re quick you can snap up some of the remaining limited editions.

Sounds like a band, but The Small Stakes is in fact the name of Jason Munn’s Oakland California based independent design studio. Jason turns out a mean poster, as evidenced by his work below for bands like Broken Social Scene and The Postal Service.



There are loads more fantastic posters for sale in The Small Stakes shop.

I know it’s nearly summer when it’s once again it’s time to create an e-flyer for my favourite client Sancho Panza’s yearly series of boat parties. This year I decided to do something a little bit different so instead of creating the usual interactive extravaganza, I made a poster.



It's accompanied by a simple e-flyer where punters are offered a free PDF they can print themselves. They also have the option to order a high-quality print from zazzle.com. Zazzle is a print on demand service based in the US which allows you to configure your poster with a number of options including paper stock and print size. Unfortunately there’s no equivalent to this service in the UK right now so if you want one and you're not in the US you’ll have to grapple with the not-too-difficult task of paying with a credit card in US Dollars.

Scott Hansen turned up this quirky cover for Robert Fripp & Brian Eno’s excellently titled 1973 release, “No Pussyfooting” (a reference to the quick and spontaneous way the record was created). The music involved passing Robert Fripp’s electric guitar through an analogue tape loop developed by Eno, resulting in a deeply layered piece of what would later become known as ambient music. The visual concept of infinitely repeating mirrors perfectly illustrates the qualities of the music in a simple and striking way – design and art direction at it’s purest.

Nice website for Seattle band Death Cab For Cutie who also have the best band name, ever. A nice balance of Flash, typography, good design and layout, minus 10 points for the silly splash page. We did the 90s already remember? Site by Mathematics.