Design Excellence Compiled Week 2: 07/04 - 07/11

I had a teacher in college who said that a great ad was something you could describe to a friend at a bar and elicit the same response as the ad itself. This teacher was not Paul Sahre, but Paul designed this book cover for Killing the Buddha - A Heretic's Bible.
A friend told me about it before I ever saw it. It gave me chills then and so it did when I finally saw it myself.
The book is a collection of 13 reinterpretations of bible stories by 13 different writers. They were given "a solo, a single book from the Bible to be remade, revealed, replaced, inverted, perverted, or born again, however the spirit so led them."
The solution for the cover is genius. Paul Sahre is one of the rare individuals who works hard at, and has the talent to, achieve conceptual profundity while maintaining aesthetic excellence.









Christian Helms is really good.
I know him personally and I know he's really good, but if you look at any of his work, you'll know it too (link at left).
I was looking through a Communication Arts annual at Barnes & Noble one day, depressed about being under the fluorescence at B&N, and depressed about the state of design. It happens. Sometimes everything is bad.

Then I came to this poster, read the line, swooned, read the credits, closed the annual, and walked out of B&N.
And THAT'S the power of good design. It makes you FEEL good.