Spam as hand-lettered art
As Cory posted last month, Linzie Hunter recently created a wonderful series of hand lettering experiments with text taken from spam subject lines. She uploaded them to Flickr, the Drawn! blog posted about them, and yesterday, her Spam One-liners were the subject of a New York Times Magazine article. From the NY Times:
Hunter has been working as an illustrator for about three years (she was a theater stage manager before that), for clients like Adorn magazine and The Guardian. She became interested in lettering and wanted to practice without worrying too much about the meanings of the words, “to free myself up.” So she chose the spam subject lines she found funny enough to keep. Working quickly, with a tablet and stylus attachment that allows her to draw in the computer program Photoshop, she gave each a unique treatment, like a hand-painted sign. Suddenly phrases like “Realise All Your Dreams With Our Help for a Short Time” or even “Local Chicks Who Need Lovin’ on the Side!” redone in bright colors with an almost folk-art feel, became funny, campy or ambiguous.Link to the Spam One-liners series, Link to NY Times article, Link to buy prints (via Drawn!)
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I think I have just been inspired to create some embroidered spam samplers. I currently have nearly 200 spam emails in my gmail, I should go see what's there.
Ms. Hunter's work looks very much like she cribbed from authors/illustrators J.Otto Seibold and Vivian Walsh, creators of "Olive the Other Reindeer"
http://www.jottodotcom.com/
Megstar - if you had a wider familiarity with contemporary illustration at wouldn't be so quick to accuse her of plagiarism. There's a million illustrators whose work might superficially resemble this 'faux naif' hand drawing with flat colour. If you think somebody owns it you're wrong. Also, style is nothing, the idea being communicated is everything. That's what gets illustrators noticed.