Detail from the inside cover of Spiritualized’s new album, Songs in A&E. Concept, design, direction: Farrow/Spaceman. Photography: John Ross

Spiritualized’s Jason Pierce cut several minutes off his album Ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space just so that the running time looked better typographically on the packaging. His partnership with designer Mark Farrow has produced some of the finest sleeve design of recent times. CR interviewed the pair of them on the eve of the release of Spiritualized’s new album

Borders bookshop has a “Real Lives” section. Waterstones ups the ante with “Painful Lives”. Amazon’s catch-all is the more enigmatic “True Endurance and Survival”. But earlier this week I found myself in the “Tragic Life Stories” aisle of WHSmiths. After taking in that, yes, a whole section of shelving had actually been given over to this subject, it struck me that while each book pertained to be a traumatic tale of an individual, they were marketed in such a way as to look entirely the same. Unlike the covers within the nearby Crime section, where even the most conventional might feature a gun, a knife, or something vaguely noir-ish; within Tragic Life Stories there is, apparently, no need to differentiate details. Each one is a tragic tale; each one has the same cover: a child’s face and a scrawled, handwritten title.

Land Design Studio has worked with Studio Simple to create Station Masters – a new interactive digital art gallery experience in the Eurostar departure lounge at St Pancras International in London…

Sleeve for Sebastien Tellier’s album, Sexuality, artwork by Manu Cassu. Layout by Olivia Jourde

Here at CR towers we’ve recently received some record sleeve designs that transported us back to the early eighties…

Cover of Dante’s Inferno by Nicole Peterson

Nicole Peterson, a recent graphic design graduate from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, designed these book covers for Dante’s Divine Comedy. “I wanted to create a set of covers that didn’t use images from the [Hieronymus] Bosch Hell painting, or any images of Dante and Virgil that are normally found on covers for the Divine Comedy,” writes Peterson on her Flickr page. “I was inspired by Dante’s use of mathematics and architecture in describing Hell, Heaven and Purgatory [and] employed simple geometric shapes and color to represent these places, while still keeping the design simple and allowing the reader to use their imagination when reading these vivid poems.” Click through to see how the design was carried through to Purgatory and Paradise…

Ha – only joking. While Banksy is a relative newcomer to the graffiti scene, Blek le Rat has been stencilling, pasting and daubing his way around the world for nearly thirty years. But the perception of Banksy as the pioneer of street art is certainly the one favoured by the media and the art world. As a result, Banksy’s artistic reputation – no doubt helped by his anonymity – has been elevated to near mythical status. While Blek’s reputation, at least beyond the world of street art, is far less well known, a new book of his work looks certain to bring his art to a wider audience and throw up a few more questions on just how influential he’s been.