Illustrator Ian Stevenson recently showed this video at the 2nd Pictoplasma conference… As well as showcasing various pieces of his work, it also shows him out and about drawing on things and adding his distinctive illustrative humour to various inanimate objects, turning them, in the process, into works of art. We also love the accompanying music, created by Stevenson himself.

Top of the pile this week is this CD pack for Svensk Indie 1988-2006, En Kärleks Historia, a double cd compilation on Nons Records of Swedish indie fare that includes tracks by The Wannadies and The Concretes. The pack has been designed and illustrated beautifully by Edvard Scott…

The winners of the first Radar Festival have been announced, with new director James Healy walking away with the top prize, a place on the directors’ roster at Colonel Blimp.

Don’t Panic - distributors of flyers and posters and other promotional ephemera - are running a poster competition with Warner Brothers to help promote the release of Michel Gondry’s new film The Science of Sleep. The above poster, by Stephen Chan, and those shown below, are just a few of the entries so far, all of which can be viewed on the Don’t Panic website and voted for by the great unwashed. The top twenty designs will be exhibited at The Curzon Cinema in London’s Soho and all entrants will have the chance to watch the film at an exclusive pre-release viewing. 80,000 copies of the winning poster design will be printed and distributed in Don’t Panic packs across the country. There’s still time to enter…

The next issue of Creative Review, guest edited by Mother, deals with ethics and what it means to sell your soul. As part of our research for the issue, we came across the Vatican’s report into the ethics of advertising. It’s one of the best-argued and most thorough investigations into this thorny issue that we have read. The following is an edited extract:

Just before Christmas, a strange image arrived in my email in-box. It was attached to a message entitled “Extreme shrinkage was evident, due to the large amount of fat rendered” – a statement, I think you’ll agree, guaranteed to arouse anyone’s curiosity.

The image consisted of an assortment of geometric shapes on a burgundy background – the overall effect being not dissimilar to a “party shirt” I had in 1983. Over the top of this assemblage was a lengthy message urging me to invest in a “hot stock” listed on the market under the somewhat unfortunate acronym ARSS. Apparently I needed to start watching ARSS (insert joke here) as it was about to embark on a spectacular rise. $$$ were promised. And all this highly valuable information was set in a crude machine typeface with the kind of leading and kerning worthy of David Carson on one of his most, err, inspired days.

According to Ironport, a spam filtering firm, unsolicited junk mail now accounts for more than nine out of every ten email messages sent over the internet. The volume of junk has doubled over the last year, chiefly due to what was sitting in my in-box: image spam, one of the most successful and effective design innovations of recent times.