Just taken delivery of this utterly brilliant limited-edition poster by Rob Ball, creative director of the Partners by day, Super Illustrator Guy by night.

It features Rob’s interpretations of 50 bad-ass baddies from the movies, and comes complete with a niftily designed key, so you can tell who’s who and what film they appeared in. Each face is beautifully observed and rendered, and the printing detail is so good, you’d swear you’re looking at the real thing.

Last year, I commissioned Rob to draw the chimps for totalcontent’s typewriting monkey posters, and he tells me, this has reawakened his inner illustrator. Off to the framers tomorrow. Rob’s baddies will rub shoulders in the studio with a couple of Barnbrooks, a Peter Grundy and a Mark Denton.

You can round up some of your own villains by ordering a poster from here. But hurry, he’s only printed 50 of the blighters. Click on the image for a closer look.

More years ago than I care to remember, I was between jobs and — through a friend of a friend — ended up working a few weeks on that most eminent publication ‘A Taste of Safeway’ magazine. This, I can assure you, was purely a temporary wolf-from-door measure.

The gig’s highlight was probably interviewing professional Scouser and sexpert Margi Clarke about what she had stashed in her fridge (pasta ready meals, Cadbury’s Creme Eggs and a bottle of Jacob’s Crack [sic], for the record). She may have thought I was “dead posh”, but we got on pretty well, particularly after I mentioned I was a great admirer of her husband, punk artist Jamie Reid.

However, this was also around the time ‘A Taste of Safeway’ was putting its Christmas issue to bed, and I was also roped in to doing a spot of (free) modelling, playing the part of a busy dad, getting some shopping together for his family.

Imagine my stinging embarrassment a couple of months later when I was at an über-cool design agency touting for some copywriting work. Right there on one of the Vitra desks was said publication, open on the offending spread showing me laden down with seemingly half a Safeway store, a colander and a teddy bear. Hold that pose and smile please.

By way of explanation, this is part of Nick Asbury’s Creative Amnesty for Creative Review — jobs/projects you’d rather not own up to.

Parp, parp. I’m the kind of person who just about knows one end of a car from the other. You certainly wouldn’t catch me waxing lyrical about alloy wheels or torque. Or watching Top Gear.



























That’s why I’d given the Heritage Motor Centre at Gaydon a wide berth, despite it being a mere 10-minute ride from the totalcontent studio. However, they’d recently laid on a one-off exhibition called ‘Science Fiction at the Movies’, which promised plenty of Star Wars and Dr Who relics — the kind of thing my boys are deeply into. And we had friends coming for the weekend, so it seemed an ideal opportunity to check the place out.






















Parked in the middle of a former RAF base, in the middle of nowhere, the imposing circular building looks like a covert high-security government headquarters. You might expect to find all kinds of Roswell-like experiments going on in there, but actually it’s packed with over 200 significant British cars — from decidedly the humble, to land-speed record breakers and James Bond stalwarts. But it’s not at all fetishistic or petrol-heady. In fact, the place offers more of a social and cultural history, the outer perimeter representing a road travelling through time, with the earliest cars at one end, gradually making way for more contemporary fare.


















For me — apart from the astonishing FAB 1, Lady Penelope’s pearly-pink wheels from the 2004 live-action Thunderbird’s movie — the great revelation was the trove of retro type and ephemera. The place was chock full of posters, ads, signage, logos and hand-rendered typography. I found myself slavishly photographing walls, grilles and odd bits of lettering, and reminding myself not to be so closed-minded in future. Particularly loved a poster for Dunhills’ Bobby Finders, glasses-cum-binoculars which promised to “spot a policeman at half a mile even if disguised as a respectable man”.





















Cars, whether we like it or not, are a telling symbol of progress and popular culture. With headlights on full beam, Gaydon took us on a nostalgic and occasionally quirky tour of Britishness through the ages. I’ll be jumping into my car with a better camera for a return visit soon.


A recent poster we worked on for GAP through ycn passed the ultimate test and now hangs proudly on our studio wall. It was a lovely customer giveaway marking a hugely ambitious 3D paper installation in GAP’s Milan superstore, created specially for Milan Furniture Week, which you can read all about here.

totalcontent
 were asked to come up with no more than 50 words to express the sights, sounds and smells of city life. These were then beautifully hand-lettered and illustrated by Jamie Brown, and sit on one side of a poster explaining the genesis and development of the paper sculpture project.

It’s our second collaboration with ycn, whose quirkiness, imaginative flair and tireless championing of illustration we love.