For her 365-day project, illustrator Lisa Congdon certainly picked a unique task. She has decided to put together a collection of one theme a day, ranging from pencils to foreign books, thread to postcards, baggage tags to lichen. And all of it is laid out beautifully — so beautifully, in fact, that she will be publishing a book on the project later this year. PRE-ORDER IT HERE.

Frankly, it is at least slightly crazy, but they really just are such wonderful mini-curations. How can you argue with these pristine displays? White backdrops and everything!

Here’s what she has to say about the project:

“Since I was a young girl, I have been obsessed both with collecting and with arranging, organizing and displaying my collections. This is my attempt to document my collections, both the real and the imagined. Some of my collections are so large that I will need to photograph them separately over several days. I will likely not attempt to photograph collections in which the individual pieces are large in size or awkward in shape (i.e. my art collection or vintage enamel dishware collection). The only rule is that I must photograph or draw a whole or part of a collection each day for 365 days and post the result here on this blog.”

After a quick skim of the site, here are my favorite of the goodies (as I’m wondering to herself… just how big is her house?!!!):

Vintage religious ephemera and prayer cards

Erasers

Chopsticks

Baby doll hands

Vintage food stamps

Congdon will have a show at Assemble Gallery in Seattle in February 2011.

UK collective Peepshow have re-done their website, and in honor of it, we’re going to feature a piece of work for each of their members. Hoorah!

The Beginning of the End for Illustrative ’09, by Luke Best

Barefootin’ for Howies, by Jenny Bowers.

After The Storm for The Telegraph by Miles Donovan.

Wallpaper Arts Fair Calendar with photography by John Short and design by Chrissi Macdonald.

Per Se for Constructivists by Marie O’ Connor.

King Of Beasts by Andrew Rae.

Is It Worth It? for Telegraph Magazine by Lucy Vigrass.

Devil’s Dandruff for Duckworth by Elliot Thoburn.

A+B=C by Spencer Wilson.

Yesterday, someone clued me into Broken Picture Telephone, and I think it’s now my new favorite website. Remember playing Telephone as a kid? Remember how convoluted simple ideas got? Now imagine Telephone in visual form. Now imagine Telephone in visual DIGITAL form, and you have Broken Picture Telephone. Nothing short of genius. See an example below that made me literally laugh out loud. Many more gems where this came from. Go sign up and play!

www.brokenpicturetelephone.com

Just stumbled across this really awesome zine. Printed in black and white and accented by one color, it’s a zine that features illustrations from low-key artists centered around a central term. For the limited edition zine above, artists created pieces around the sentence, “Don’t worry about the smiles; they’re normal.” Click here to purchase a copy or here to view the spreads on Flickr! Awesome!

testeverythingzine.wordpress.com/store/
www.flickr.com/photos/testeverything

Talk about an awesome idea for a website, and a perfect thing art/music hybrid project for Redefine to cover: PAINTMYALBUM.NET!

Diarmuid and Anthony, who have a passion (if one can call it that) for redoing classic album covers using Microsoft Paint, are now challenging you to help them reach their goal of redoing 2,000 covers by December 23rd, 2009. The album covers range from completely ridiculous (such as Michael Jackson’s Bad, above) to fairly impressive (such as a rendition of a Flight of the Concords’ disc). Art styles of all types are absolutely welcome, and this duo has their eyes on the prize. Be a good person. Help them fulfill their completely juvenile yet fantastic dream.

Send your album covers to paintmyalbum@gmail.com!

www.paintmyalbum.net

Sculptor Jeff Schomberg, Burning Man veteran and art car builder, has a simple, colorful website that cuts the crap and gets straight to the art. His unique style incorporates steel, stone, and found objects to create pieces that are often fun and sometimes reminiscent of nature.

www.jeffschomberg.com