Supermundane is the cunning alias of unprepossessing East Londoner Rob Lowe. Cunning, because he is actually a super-brilliant artist, designer, illustrator, art director, typographer, writer and any of the other myriad of titles which can be squeezed under the ‘creative’ umbrella. I stumbled upon his designs hovering silently in a corner of the world wide web and was immediately intrigued.
Solid curving lines emerge from white backgrounds, sweeping across pages with a lightness that can only be hand drawn. The simplicity of the designs (often two-toned un-textured colours) belies their impact. The Big Chill has already adopted his faux-innocent doodles as its illustrations of choice, Design Week featured them on its front cover and Rough Trade printed them onto the front of its t-shirts. As you have probably guessed by now, I am a little behind the times in my ‘discovery’. However, that did not put me off delving deeper into his multi-faceted portfolio.
This led to the discovery that he has turned his hands to magazine publishing, specifically, to art directing quirky little food magazine Fire and Knives.* My joy was complete. Released into the market place four times a year it provides a perfectly formed introduction into the world of alternative food writing. See a taster below.
*Here I will add a disclaimer that an entire era of crap-chat gossip ‘mags’ have completely passed me by, their seemingly mass appeal is lost on me, along with the idea that marmite is a tasty thing to put on toast and MacDonald's provide (notice I don’t say ‘cook’) food which is actually edible (I might make exception to this if it is the middle of the night and you are stranded by a night bus, but only if the person behind the counter looks relatively hygienic). Hence my unashamed excitement at the discovery of Fire and Knives.
