Typographer and illustrator Marian Bantjes has created a beautiful project for our Monograph series on all the people - and things - she loves…

Gravenhurst’s Nightwatchman’s Blues / Farewell, Farewell – limited edition (1300 only) double A-side, double 7″ pack, in handprinted, numbered, fold-out poster created by Thomas Hicks

CR readers may recognise the name of director Thomas Hicks - he was one of our second Warp Records competition winners (CR June 2005) in which he won the opportunity to direct a film to a track by Gravenhurst entitled I Turn My Face To The Forest Floor. Now, three years later, it gives us an enormous sense of well being to hear that he’s still working with Gravenhurst – and to see this, their latest collaboration…

Cover of UNKLE’s latest release: End Titles… Stories For Film, which features imagery by Robert Del Naja

It’s been a while since we’ve rounded up a few of our favourite music packages in a blog post – so here are a few that have caught our collective eye in the last few weeks…

Faber Finds is a recently launched service offered by publisher Faber and Faber that utilises digital print technology and affordability to make out-of-print books available once more. Basically, a book is only printed when someone orders it - and, thanks to some clever gener­ative programming by Universal Everything collaborator Karsten Schmidt (undertaken through his own studio, postspectacular.com), each cover printed promises to be totally unique. Various decorative elements designed by Marian Bantjes are arranged by the programme into a decorative border around the book’s title and author. The latter appear in a bespoke font, b-hmmnd, designed by Build’s Michael Place…

“Glory to the great October!” A Russian poster commemorating the 1917 Revolution,
from Steven Heller’s new book, Iron Fists: Branding the 20th-Century Totalitarian State

In Iron Fists, an illustrated survey of totalitarian visual propaganda, Steven Heller offers an insight into the visual representations of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Communist USSR and China. Heller’s argument centres around the idea that totalitarian imagery is based on the potential of brand devotion. “Like any corporate identity campaign,” he writes, “the totalitarian regime demands the brand loyalty of its subjects.”
In his new book, Heller discusses how posters, magazines and advertisements were used within the visual systems of these dictatorships, alongside more formalistic elements such as typefaces and colour palettes…

A poster for Barack Obama’s speech in Berlin yesterday. But was
there substance beneath this well-honed visual styling?

Standing amidst a crowd of 200,000 Berliners yesterday, writes CR contributor Daniel West, Barack Obama was Jean Baudrillard’s messiah. As his sermon boomed over the Tiergarten, our presence was explained: this was a pilgrimage to postmodernism, not politics. We came to snatch a tiptoe glimpse of the man who has dominated our inboxes, TVs and newspapers. A man whose logos and slogans and soundbites have so comprehensively flooded our collective consciousness. We came to witness reality. But Obama’s performance was not a speech, it was a simulacrum…