‘Karen succeeds in weaving its humble subject matter into something poetic, profound, absurd and joyful. One issue of this magazine is more interesting than every issue of every other lifestyle magazine in the world put together.’ David Shrigley from The Observer newspaper’s ‘The best-kept arts secrets in Britain’

Issues 1 & 2 are sold out but you can subscribe here if that sounds like your cup of tea.

(Pun very much intended)

A look black at the John Player Special press advertisments of the early 1980’s.

While Silk Cut was changing the face of cigarette advertising with the purple cut campaign, JPS remained firmly old school. The featured campaign relies on an increasingly tenious word play and standard pack shot solution, which now looks truly dated.

In the interveening years our societies attitude to smoking and especially the advertising of the product has changed radically. Smokers or ‘snoutcasts’ have been increasingly margionalised and all tobacco related advertising outlawed. Images extracted from our extensive ephemera archive.

Cheers to ex-Preston student Rupert Cooke for this little ditty…

Should Les Dennis be at the first marker? ha, clinically not funny (©&yb). Open to offers I think.

I know a lot of designers share a fascination of cartography. Here’s an interesting render of a design classic, created a few years ago by the guys at Digital Urban.

Mr Robert Ball is our latest featured Preston profile. Design director at The Partners. Very talented and most humble he is too. Just to keep things interesting we’ve decided to change the format slightly and ask Rob a few questions. See his answers and portfolio here.

Todays texture is synthetic.

This workplace health & safety poster from the 1980’s is extracted from our ephemera archive. It’s quite a big one and hard to beat so we thought we would stick it up.