Live Now: Existential Affirmation by Design

Publishing’s most positive tear sheets, or how a placemat can change your whole outlook on the day.

We were first moved by the contagious positivity behind the Live Now project more than a year ago, when it was a lovely website and growing community of designers and illustrators with a shared commitment to spreading messages of strength and hope. Today we’re thrilled that the movement has taken the form of a book, a kind of collector’s object of optimism.

Live Now gathers 85 of the project’s participants in print form, with a different page for each heartening design. Like another book recently featured on Brain Pickings, Everything Is Going To Be OK, Live Now’s messages exhort the viewer to find the positive in the present moment – something much more attainable when you’re looking at such a beautiful reminder.

'Live Humbly' by Mikey Burton

'Harmony' by Eric Smith

'Friendship' by Emil Kozak

Eric Smith first founded Live Now following a diagnosis of cancer, and what started as a personal project of resilience grew organically into a “movement of happiness.” Today, Smith practices art direction, design, and illustration via his studio, IDRAWALLDAY, and continues to collaborate with a host of creative partners.

The basis of our message is that happiness is here for everyone—that there is a bigger picture for your life, and a will for each one of us. Do the people in your life “feel” your love? Do we inspire happiness in everyone around us? That’s our plan. ~ Eric Smith

'You're Going Places' by Ed Nacional

'Overflowing Optimism' by Chad Kouri

'Break Your Routine' by Mikey Burton

Rip out a life-affirming lesson from Live Now and share it with someone you love. Like the sentiments that inspired them, we guarantee that what you just gave away, you’ll more than gain in spirit.

Kirstin Butler is writing an adaptation of Gogol for the Google era called Dead SULs, but when not working spends far, far too much time on Twitter. She currently lives in Cambridge, MA.

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LE GUN 1,2,3: Bleeding-Edge Illustration from Around the Globe

What flying to Paris has to do with creative entrepreneurship and global provocations.

In 2004, a small group of graduates from London’s Royal College of Art founded art collective LE GUN and quietly started publishing one of the most compelling art and design magazines to come by in decades. Dedicated to celebrating the work of illustrators from around the globe, LE GUN instantly charmed audiences and critics, but its small scale and indie roots made access to it limited and coveted. Now, my friends from Mark Batty Publisher have gathered the first three issues of the magazine in LE GUN 1,2,3 — an impressive, handsome tome that captures LE GUN‘s rich spectrum of creativity and provocative, relentlessly original artwork.

In the book’s introduction, RCA professor Andrzej Klimowski, who advised the founding team, tells the project’s inspired story — a tale of imagination, transformation and creative entrepreneurship.

Many middle-aged people turn to their medicine cabinets for vitamin pills or, more drastically, turn to the knife for cosmetic surgery or the botox injection in a desperate attempt to hold onto their youth. I need only brush shoulders with the artists of LE GUN to be imbued with the elixir of life, which is so vital that it makes my hair stand on end.” ~ Andrzej Klimowski

With 400 pages and weighing in at over 6 pounds, the tome is, without any exaggeration, enormous.

Esoteric and beautiful, LE GUN 1,2,3 is an absolute treat of imagination, artistry and visual eloquence from cover to heavy cover.

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In The Wilds: Illustrating the Charm of the Countryside

An antidote to urbanity by way of bails of hay, or what Irish quasi-postmen have to do with art.

For all its blessings, one of the great tragedies of urban life is that we’ve lost the granularity of nature, the calm of the countryside, the quiet details of the soil after rain or a tree’s cracked bark or the soft glimmer of a summer field. That’s exactly what you’ll find in illustrator Nigel Peake‘s new book, In The Wilds — a lovely collection of hand-drawn illustrations that capture the near-forgotten charm of rural life. With his penchant for obsessive detail and neatness, Peake portrays the wild in a captivatingly structured, patterned way, blending whimsy and order in stunning pen sketches, ink drawings and soft, muted watercolors.

The country is peaceful. It is a place to draw and work and be surrounded by things that we could never make.” ~ Nigel Peake

And Peake should know — he lives in an Irish village with just one road, where he gets a rare outsider’s view of the inside of farm life and is frequently mistaken for the postman.

'Bails of hay collected (end of summer).'

Image courtesy of Nigel Peake via The Morning News

'Pallets stacked in yard'

Image courtesy of Nigel Peake via The Morning News

'The barn structure stands alone, surrounded by discarded and ordered fragments.'

Image courtesy of Nigel Peake via The Morning News

'The fallen scarecrow.'

Image courtesy of Nigel Peake via The Morning News

'Bails wrapped in plastic (for winter).'

Image courtesy of Nigel Peake via The Morning News

Images courtesy of the artist via The Morning News

This book is a record of a quiet place that nearly everyone has visited at some point, and the farmland is part of this—a place where the lanes of farms run along the lake that is beside the hill of trees that is neighbor to open spaces.” ~ Nigel Peake

In The Wilds comes from Princeton Architectural Press, who have a knack for thoughtful visual delights, as you might recall from The Map as Art and FORM+CODE.

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