February '25

Monthly design roundup for February 2025.

Feb 28, 2025

Hi everyone! This email almost wasn’t sent out on time because I forgot how short February is… I thought I had a couple of extra days but turns out I did not. So hello! I’m back again with my silly newsletter, here to share some art, movies, and music with you.

DESIGN

I somehow completely missed sharing this in last month’s newsletter, but I designed a poster for CAKE! Inspired by retro shoe ads, arcade floor carpets and light up dance floors. This is exactly what I see in my brain when I listen to them, so I wanted to bring it to life. Drawing still feels very out of my comfort zone and very tedious so this has probably been one of my most ambitious proposals, but I’m so happy with how it turned out. I will have APs for sale of this in the upcoming months!

This month I designed some merch for Caroline Kingsbury that will be going on tour with her for the next few months! Caroline was one of the first musicians to commission me for design work back when I started designing in 2020, we’ve worked on merch and gig posters together before so it’s great to continue to create together. Caroline and I are on the same 80s New Wave colorful maximalist wavelength, so she completely understands my art style and let me have free reign over how the designs would turn out.

The photoshoot images she provided already had great graphic styling to work with, so leaning into the airbrushed 80s portrait style already felt effortless. I really wanted the graphic elements to be angular, geometric, cut and paste—imitating a mixture of Pater Sato meets Barney Bubbles meets Buzzcocks.

Original image provided by Caroline used to make the shirt design

I also worked on a crewneck design, but I’ll reveal that at a later date when I have the physical merch items to show you!

MOVIES

In February I watched a lot of movies and some documentaries, here are a few!

Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person ☆☆☆☆☆
Couldn’t find a GIF for this one… this movie came by way of endorsement but also it’s been on my watchlist via Shudder. I’m a big fan of awkward and quirky coming of age stories, and what better way to grab my attention than also throwing in horror elements. This story follows a young vampire, Sasha, who has one problem— she loves drinking blood but hates killing people to do it. She has what her family doesn’t have: empathy. When she sees Pauls standing on the roof of a building looking to jump off and end his life, the two form an unlikely bond that may fix both of their problems. Sasha also can’t eat human food (of course not she’s a vampire) but there’s a scene where she sees people eating poutine (Canadian dish made of fries, gravy and cheese curds for those who aren’t familiar) and is in physical and emotional despair because she can’t eat it and honestly I relate, I’d be upset too if I couldn’t eat poutine.

Brain Damage ☆☆☆☆
Watched another Frank Henenlotter gore fest masterpiece… I really enjoyed Basket Case and Frankenhooker, so now of course we’ve got this movie about a parasite that attaches to some guys brain that makes him crave this euphoric pleasure that comes with the parasite controlling his brain…. yeah. I’ve seen so many horror movies at this point nothing really gets to me, but parts of this movie were soooo gross. Henenlotter and Stuart Gordon are kinda the kings of body horror goo…. very 80s, very silly, there’s a very sick Suicide poster on the wall of Brian’s room.

Flow ☆☆☆☆☆
I heard there was a capybara in this so I locked in. If you don’t know anything about Flow but keep seeing this black cat everywhere and want to know more, all you really need to know is it’s about a cat that gets displaced by a huge flood and finds community with other unlikely animals who were also displaced. Was waiting for it to come to streaming and as soon as it was on Max I got to see it and I crieddddd…… Everything I’ve learned about this movie has made me appreciate it more, Gints Zilbalodis using real animal voices for each of the animals made the behavior and mannerisms of them feel real. Knowing they tickled capybaras for their voices but their sounds didn’t match the chill vibe of the character so they gave the role to a baby camel instead is incredible lol…. Anyway so yeah I got emotional over this one. Immediate thought was that this movie feels like it serves as a warning to us, that if we don’t take care of this planet, everything we love about it’s beauty will one day be washed away and destroyed, leaving behind the most vulnerable creatures who won’t know how to survive in this new life.

Other movies I watched and want to write quick blurbs on but don’t want to pull GIFS for:

DIDI ☆☆☆☆
Extremely accurate coming of age story about middle school emo kids circa 2008 who love early Youtube and emo music, SPECIFICALLY Paramore (Riot! era)…. feeling very seen by all the Glamour Kills posters and name dropping Hayley Williams.

Also rewatched all of the Final Destination movies, which confirmed to me that I love the concept of the franchise but they’re all kind of awful… however if you lean into it, it can be fun. My favorites are definitely Final Destination 3 (iconic tanning bed scene) and Final Destination 5 (crazy kills in this one, the gymnastics one??).

No Other Land ☆☆☆☆☆
ESSENTIAL viewing for understanding the occupation of Palestine and the devastation it causes. This is a documentary so there’s real footage showing the destruction of Masafer Yatta in the West Bank as it’s being occupied and taken over by Israeli soldiers. Hard but necessary watch, especially for anyone trying to expand their knowledge and understanding of why it’s crucial to fight for a free Palestine.

MUSIC

Could’ve put this in the movie section BUT it’s more music related… I got to see a premiere of the new documentary for electronic body music called Electronic Body Movie, it’s the first documentary about the genre featuring interviews from it’s essential bands— Front 242, DAF, The Neon Judgement, Liaisons Dangereuses, and more. The interviews are also recent, so it’s members of these bands recounting their first experiences with making music in this genre, their first shows, cover artwork, and political influences shaping the movement.

An interesting parallel they brought up was disco music, specifically Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love”, which was referenced a lot in the doc. Multiple people said that song and disco in general have close ties to EBM and the movement’s sound, the latter just fronting more of a heavier synth bass line. I have a playlist of EBM/industrial/adjacent sounds, and I was just going to share someone else’s expansive EBM playlist for you but there’s no Liaisons Dangereuses on theirs and I really like that group…. so I’m linking mine. I brought it out of the shadows and cleaned it up a bit, adding both older and newer groups. As mentioned in the documentary, it’s hard to know where one genre begins and ends— there will always be bands that are the foundation of the genre, but everything is in flux.

Albums I listened to this month:
Attempted Martyr — Prostitute
Never Exhale — DITZ
Belaya Polosa — Molchat Doma
Phonetics On and On — Horsegirl
S/T — Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory
Snakeskin — Cutouts