When I was a teenager I used to record songs from the radio on cassette tapes. I patiently listened to the radio until a specific song came on, at which point I ran to my stereo and pressed the play and record button simultaneously. A couple of seconds late every time. Later I’d torrent Japanese pop records on Napster. I learned about bitrates, open ports and file types and figured out which search filters worked best. Though I never knew what file I’d end up with.

I modded my Playstation so I could play a region-locked copy of Winning Eleven, a Japanese soccer game. I screwed open the console and replaced the chip, feeling like a true hacker doing something very illegal. If it worked I'd spent the next hours trying to make sense of Japanese in-game menus.

I've come to realise that NoGood is essentially a throwback my teenage years, the late 90's en early 00's. To physical media, floppy disks and game cartridges. To Casio watches and replaceable batteries and Playstations. To messing around with hardware and sometimes breaking it. To the beginnings of the internet when it was new and exciting. And weird.

The book’s design, layout and production should somehow reflect this.

I gave this introduction to both printers last week when they asked what my book will be about. I’m not sure if they understood exactly what I was talking about. Especially when it came to open protocols and decentralised networks. They showed me a lot of examples and beautifully designed books all the same, which in turn sparked a lot of new ideas.

Some of them, like cardboard sleeves and Pantone colors, are relatively expensive to produce and will probably be scrapped. Others, like using a variety of paper stock and weights, barely move the price.

One idea that I had from the start has remained. I want to split up the book in distinctive sections, each with a different theme and printed on different paper. Here’s what I came up with so far.

Context This section is all about providing context about the bitcoin community. It will feature an introduction of NoGood (written by yours truly) followed by various articles by people from the space whose work I admire. I go more in depth in my previous post.

Work The NoGood portfolio containing all of the work I've produced in the last five years, made up of commercial projects as well as illustrations I made as part of the NoGood universe.

Process The third section is a sketchbook showcasing my process and snippets from various stages of my illustration process.

Items The final section is a catalogue of all physical products I’ve created, such as t-shirts, stickers, prints and zines.

Going to bookstores has become an obsession. I've found that books about cooking and photography provide a lot of inspiration. I'll start creating the first rough designs in the upcoming weeks and I'm also still asking around to see if people can share written content for the book.

Keep you posted.

Thomas nogood.studio

The NoGood art book announcement NoGood book update – Week 01 – Humble beginnings

The NoGood art book is available as a pre-order on Geyser.