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Actual Source Actual Source collaborates with contemporary artists and designers to publish limited edition books, fonts, clothing, furniture and objects.

Actual Source is a multi-format publisher that collaborates with contemporary artists, designers, and writers to release limited edition books, fonts, clothing, furniture, and objects. Recent collaborations include Dinamo, Joel Evey, Jan Horcik, Allan Ludwig, Girlbarf, Raf Rennie, Hassan Rahim, and Catalogue. Actual Source also offers creative services as Number 04, a studio specializing in art di

rection, branding, and creative strategy. The name Actual Source is derived from an exhibition by Number 04 that took place at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art in early 2015.

.benfell ‘s linocut CCTV (now called CAMERA  ) for the sale graphic. 25% OFF use code ASB25
21/11/2025

.benfell ‘s linocut CCTV (now called CAMERA ) for the sale graphic. 25% OFF use code ASB25

Daniel Arnold: You Are What You Doavailable at actualsource.orgArnold’s pursuit of the human moment reveals an artist of...
20/11/2025

Daniel Arnold: You Are What You Do
available at actualsource.org

Arnold’s pursuit of the human moment reveals an artist of emotional range in a city alive with contradiction and complexity.

Loose Joints is proud to present You Are What You Do, a monograph by Daniel Arnold — one of New York’s most renowned and obsessive modern street photographers. Over the past fifteen years, Arnold has become a cult figure in the city’s visual culture, known for his raw, humanistic encounters with its citizens and for collaborations spanning from the Safdie brothers to the Met Gala and beyond.

Rooted in a well-trodden lineage of New York street photography, Arnold’s work channels the chaos, chutzpah, humour and vitality that define the city, yet You Are What You Do reveals something more: a tenderness and empathy that courses through every frame. There are genuine moments of sadness and grief mixed with joy, alongside spontaneous, unscripted scenes of pure street cinema, blended with candid images from fashion shoots and film sets, all sitting effortlessly within Arnold’s generous visual language.

Working from a vast archive, this generous landscape-format monograph distills Arnold’s signature wry, tragicomic style into a spacious and classical book object. From the glamorous heights of high culture to the downtrodden and overlooked, You Are What You Do draws a wide, empathetic circle around New York’s characters and charm.

We’ll Never Stop Living This Way: A Ghostly International Catalogueavailable at actualsource.orgGhostly International ha...
20/11/2025

We’ll Never Stop Living This Way: A Ghostly International Catalogue
available at actualsource.org

Ghostly International has celebrated over 25 years as both a record label and art company, culminating in a unique marriage of sound and image.

Ghostly’s music — like all its artistic pursuits — straddles stylistic divisions, carving out space where sounds and ideas can cavort without inhibition or categorization.

This ethos comes to life in the first book dedicated to all aspects of Ghostly, created with independent publishers Hat & Beard Press.
A limited-edition, 488-page hardcover book, the immense volume delves into the label’s archives and history, featuring exclusive essays by critics Michaelangelo Matos and Philip Sherburne, as well as unseen photos, original interviews, and oral histories with both musical and visual artists from across the roster.

Specs:
484 pages
1 colour screenprint mirror-coated hardcover
wt: 5 lbs
9.25 × 12 in. | 235 × 305 mm
5 colour print CMYK + Pantone 2645C
Bonus bound-in zine

NYC Book Release 📁Hudson Wilder
142 Plymouth Street — Dumbo, BrooklynFriday 11/21/2025 — 7-9pmPls RSVP! : rsvp@hudsonwil...
19/11/2025

NYC Book Release 📁

Hudson Wilder
142 Plymouth Street — Dumbo, Brooklyn
Friday 11/21/2025 — 7-9pm

Pls RSVP! : [email protected]
From Cait: 

“This book spans six years of my collaboration with IBM Research. Their work has included monitoring sea turtle nest hatching, finding ways to eliminate plastic, storing energy more efficiently in batteries. I spent time with engineers and mathematicians who still work everything out with chalk and a chalkboard or go on afternoon walk-and-talks in the hills around Almaden to get out of their heads and into the open air.

A lot of the work was shot labs from the midcentury that feel timeless and simultaneously full of time.

I loved spending days with IBMers whose cluttered offices and stacks of research-texts-as-mousepad solutions were as interesting to dig into as the work they did in their labs. Very grateful and proud to have had the creative freedom I did with this project: to simply shoot what I was curious about. 

Thanks to IBM Research and to Actual Source for being the best partners in bringing a book like this to life. ASb is the best of the best and took so much care in the choreography of the edit and tactility of the materials that make up the physical object. In so much of my inspo for this book, I kept going back to imagery of offices, so I am so pleased to have made something that feels to me like “IBM heritage officecore.” I couldn’t be happier. : ) “

Please come close out the week with us and a beverage at  📚🍷

(I’ll bring a bunch of FLOWERS shirts too for cheap, I love to see em in the streets!)

A Dictionary of Color Combinationsavailable at actualsource.orgThe color combination book that has been used for generat...
19/11/2025

A Dictionary of Color Combinations
available at actualsource.org

The color combination book that has been used for generations. Derived from the original 6-volume book from the 1930s, this book offers 348 different beautiful color combinations.

Back when Japanese culture was absorbing and getting influenced by western culture, Sanzo Wada was quick to recognize the importance of color and laid the foundation down for color research, creating his 6-volume series, “Haishoku Soukan”. There is an index of CYMK Color Codes, lists of where each color was featured, and also has cutout color chips, making it an ideal book for designers who enjoy being inspired by new color combinations.

Ciné-Passionavailable at actualsource.orgDefying the emblematic Hollywood style, these experimental film posters shaped ...
17/11/2025

Ciné-Passion
available at actualsource.org

Defying the emblematic Hollywood style, these experimental film posters shaped both graphic design and film marketing.

In the history of design, the film poster has repeatedly exemplified graphic innovation. Consequently, this 36th volume of Poster Collection spotlights movie posters that defied the Hollywood conventions of canonical motifs and pompous spectacle. The unorthodox visual language of these “other” film posters largely dispenses with star portraits and film stills, favoring a more subtle and poetic visual language that consolidates content into symbols. This avant-garde approach to movie advertisements has existed for as long as there have been moving pictures to promote. 

Ciné-Passion includes such striking examples as the Stenberg brothers’ Constructivist posters; the radical, succinct work of Jan Tschichold; the Polish school of poster art, with exponents such as Henryk Tomaszewski and Roman Cieslewicz; and Cuban designs by Antonio Reboiro and Ñiko.

Ruth van Beek: Dishes For Dollsavailable at actualsource.org‘Dishes for Dolls’ is a sort of spin-off of ‘The Oldest Thin...
17/11/2025

Ruth van Beek: Dishes For Dolls
available at actualsource.org

‘Dishes for Dolls’ is a sort of spin-off of ‘The Oldest Thing’. Based on this previous book, published in 2023 (now out of print), Ruth van Beek created a new selection of images from her archives, focusing on doll dishes. The book is presented as a leporello, with one side featuring a collage composition forming a collection of dishes, and the other side showcasing tablecloths. It’s a new exploration of domestic life and childhood, which the artist examines in light of her family heritage.

12 ills colour & bw, 17 x 27 cm, leporello, no text

ZZ409 Storage Containeravailable at actualsource.orgA container set that includes four boxes of different sizes.The smok...
17/11/2025

ZZ409 Storage Container
available at actualsource.org

A container set that includes four boxes of different sizes.
The smoky blue color is a custom shade designed specifically for this collection.

Logo Beginnings. Logo Modernism. 45th Ed.available at actualsource.orgMany iconic brands—like Rolex, BMW, Louis Vuitton,...
15/11/2025

Logo Beginnings. Logo Modernism. 45th Ed.
available at actualsource.org

Many iconic brands—like Rolex, BMW, Louis Vuitton, and the New York Yankees—use logos designed over 100 years ago. Tracing the origins of the trademark and gathering more than 3,000 logos from the mid-1800s up to 1980, design expert Jens Müller’s exhaustive anthology is a must for anyone fascinated by the evolution of modern corporate identities.

Hardcover, 6.1 x 8.5 in., 2.50 lb, 512 pages

Short Form: 40 Years of Music Videos, Ads, and the Art of Moving Imagesavailable at actualsource.orgShort Form is a thri...
14/11/2025

Short Form: 40 Years of Music Videos, Ads, and the Art of Moving Images
available at actualsource.org

Short Form is a thrilling new publication that seeks to reframe how we see the practice of filmmaking. Focusing on some of the most memorable short-form works across music videos and advertising, this book considers the significance and development of these genres, as explored through forty years of work by one of the UK’s most iconic and influential production companies: Academy Films. 

Told through a rich combination of behind-the-scenes images, storyboards, stills, ephemera, script notes, and more, this book dives into those cult short-form films that have informed and galvanised the cultural landscape of cinema and beyond: films like Jamiroquai’s ‘Virtual Insanity’, Lauryn Hill’s ’Doo W*p (That Thing)’, Radiohead’s ‘Karma Police’, The Verve’s ‘Bittersweet Symphony’, FKA Twigs’ ‘M3LL155X’, and televised commercials for the likes of Guinness, Channel 4, and Levi’s. 

With a foreword by Jonathan Glazer (The Zone of Interest, Under the Skin), the book includes multiple essays by key voices in screen culture investigating the history of these projects, as well as their contemporary role in our current moment of online short film.

FLOATER: Blurring Basketball Linesavailable at actualsource.orgFLOATER: BLURRING BASKETBALL LINES, Chinatown Basketball ...
14/11/2025

FLOATER: Blurring Basketball Lines
available at actualsource.org

FLOATER: BLURRING BASKETBALL LINES, Chinatown Basketball Club’s first book that celebrates CBC past 5 years (2019-2024) unique blend of competitive basketball and aesthetic experimentation, with essays contributed by Herb Tam, Lu Zhang, Reef (Harith Liew), Sean Catangui, Alex Zhang, Chiarina Chen and Dustin Lin.

Through documentation of its graphic production and critical texts, FLOATER offers a collective, de-centered, and Asian approach to re-imagining basketball aesthetics, a space dominated by corporate expressions of aggression, masculinity and elitism. It traces how CBC has cultivated collective creativity over five years of collaborative poster art, graphics, and events—addressing questions such as: Is there an alternative, distinctly Asian (diaspora) way of experiencing basketball? Could there be a basketball aesthetic rooted in Asian (diaspora) that exists outside mainstream basketball culture? 

In anatomy, “floater” refers to tiny specks or shapes that drift across one’s field of vision—never fixed, always in motion. More broadly, the term describes something that remains suspended, either on the surface of water or in the air. In basketball, a floater is a short-range, high-arching shot above the reach of a taller defender. In many senses, floater suggests a suspension of outcomes—full of possibility, hovering just out of reach.

6.25x9in, 287 pages.
The book is made possible with support from TRF.
Designed by Xinyuan Qu. Co-published by Chinatown Basketball Club and linlin Plum.

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