EP 39(?): Astral Corgi Ego Death with Holiday Black
EP 39(?): Astral Corgi Ego Death with Holiday Black
We defend the Duchess of Cambridge's right to use Adobe Creative Suite, take a left turn into the royal corgi family tree, park at the pet store for Gentle Giants dog food and meet Ashtar!
On this week’s episode, we’re joined by pop culture / hot springs aficionado Holiday Black, an art director based in Oakland, CA. It was SO MUCH FUN chit-chatting and deep diving into all kinda of bizarredom!! If you have a second go check out their work!
Photoshop: where there’s a Will(iam) There’s a Way(iam) (aka Kate Middleton’s PR team).
We started off talking through the Kate Middleton kerfuffle (we recorded before the Duchess revealed her diagnosis, which rightfully made everyone shut tf up), and how everyone seemed to be entrenched in the swirl of conspiracy theories, so much so that poor Kate had to publicly admit to being a fellow subscriber (or perhaps her PR team) of Adobe Creative Cloud. Respectfully, let the Duchess go ham on the Patch Tool.
Reflecting on the general public’s obsession with retellings of the monarchy, we wound up digging up some dirt on the royal corgis—and boy is it a strange family tree (who’d have thunk).
Gentle Giants: the original Robin from Batman & Robin wants YOU to know that there are chia seeds in this kibble that will make your dog will live FUREVER.
There is a special coveted space deep inside the space of graphic design that few actual designers will ever get to touch, and that space can be found by coming back out the inside of the graphic design wormhole into the realm of the divinely inspired anti-designer. It’s a conceptual zone that some of us either balk at or fawn upon, and in the case of today’s group on the zoom, it was a hard fawn.
Gentle Giants Dog Food is a visual reference floating around on the interwebs that we truly thought was some kind of fictional graphic design fever dream. Or like a joke someone created in a graduate design seminar or something. The packaging violates kind of literally every rule someone might tell you about how to design something—chaotic colors, random fonts, low res images, no hierarchy of information, everything screaming “look at me” all at once—and does so with such inspired abandon that it creates a kind of graphic sublime. As it turns out it was not a mockup, it had been invented—invented to become true.
Burt Ward (weirdly enough, Robin of the original Batman & Robin live action series fame), has tooketh upon himself to promote the longevity of furry friends worldwide (or at least in the United States at your local Target) through his Gentle Giants pet food line. He also incidentally has tooketh upon himself to bless us with the greatest “non-designed” packaging known to grace our millennial eyeballs. All three of us remarked over Burt’s blatant genius penchant for ignoring negative space and unwavering commitment to typographic inconsistency. We salute you, Burt! May your dogs and cats live forever!
What if we treated design as a practice of “touching f***king God?”
Speaking of divine inspiration, we pull apart this very-much-culty cult website, universe-people.com aka heavenly-angels.org aka www.cosmic-people.com. Ashtar Sheran is the assumed “leader” (only assuming as much since its/their profile “image” is positioned in the top left of the website. Not entirely sure how to parse through this site as it is truly something you need to experience on your own. But we’ll put some greatest [visual] hits here for you to get divinely aligned.
O wow it appears we are nearing the Substack email limit. Thanks for listening! Holiday recommends checking out the documentary Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God as a follow-up. Check out their work at holiday.black! Alright, until next time!