Manual Typewriter Manual

Ahh Summer!

From Illustrator Sandrine Estrade Boulet

Where Ideas Come From

Thinking Is Fun from Davis Silis on Vimeo.

un mystère petite machine

Le Typewriter from Kyle Reiter on Vimeo.

A little typewriter noir!

Seattle Central Creative Academy Class of 2010

The ink is dry on the portfolios and the websites launched. And this 2010 class of design graduates are about to venture off into the design wilderness to launch their own careers. They come prepared with maps, field guides and fancy old and new technology skills. They will be greatly missed! Hire them, won't you?

Scholarship Winners!

It was with great pleasure to announce to 3 of my design students last week, that they took top honors at the Bookbuilders West judging of their book design projects. Thank you Bookbuilders! Mykhaylo Sinenko received an honorable mention for his portrayal of a comedic Russian novel, called Heart of a Dog. Jee Lee received the very prestigious Steve Renick Award for her sweet rendition of The House on Mango Street. This memorial award, is named after a beloved art director from University of California Press and it is always presented to a student who shows particularly strong typographic etiquette and portrays the author's words in a thoughtful manner. These two students will receive a scholarship of $500 each. The top grand prize of $1000 was awarded to Aaron Bloom for Jules Verne's 20,000 Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. There will be an award ceremony in the honor of all 7 award winners from Bookbuilders West held in San Francisco the night of June 23rd. This is the 4th year in a row my book design students have received the top honors for these scholarship awards, and I am thrilled for them all. And by no means can I take full credit, as I am just concentrating on the typography, overall design and layout. Teachers, Chris Sullivan and Claire Cowie have each contributed countless hours of instruction with InDesign, Pre-Press and Illustration, and guest lecturer, Bonnie Thompson Norman has patiently signed on to teach them a one day bookbinding workshop each year as well. But it is these students who are the real stars. Their passion and hard work is it's own reward. See for yourself...

Typewriter Tweets

Over at Change|Order comes more manual typewriter tweets. Is there an app for White-Out?

You Just Can't Make This Shit Up

Fake Science sadly gets it right.

Stick it to the Man

While on the topic of invoices this week, let me call attention to Jessica Hische's perfect antedote to annoying clients – the Day-Ruining Invoice. Available here as a 2 color letterpressed notepad in tear-off sheets. $25/pad.

Fair Use

Permission is granted.

Marge Goes Euro

This wonderful example of Cartozoology (the detection of living creatures in maps) is from Mickey Hulse and first posted over at Strange Maps. You can see his original map over at Google Maps and zoom in to see that Marge's eye is actually Paris, the Pyrenees are actually her distinctive red baubles around her neck, and her mouth is the Loire River.

Color Demystified

360° Color: A Peek Inside Pantone from Base on Vimeo.

Duet For Two Pens

Designer and illustrator, Jeanne Verdoux of Brooklyn NY, arrived at this stunning illustration for a review of the book, "Why Translation Matters" in the NYT Book Review recently. The words are knitted from a yarn ball of French text into a cloth of English. This is a great example of text used as a typographical analogy.

Got Game?

One of the most trying tasks as a young designer is to develop a look and name for your own design services. Do you use your own name or make up an identity? Do you spell it in all caps or lower case or some composite of each? Or do you just use a glyph like Prince or whatever-his-name-is-now? Then you have to consider; is the domain name available? That done – what about a trademark search? Who knew this would be so much work? And this is before you even sit down to do any design work.

This is your singular moment to express your design skills in just one simple business card. Not to put too sharp a point on it, but it IS the DNA of your entire design career. It speaks volumes about you and your work. If you cannot simply express what it is you do well, why would anyone else trust you can do it for their business? The key is learning to edit your own work. With experience comes more confidence to discard those ideas that aren't working. So you have to learn to discern the difference between the good and the great. Learn to abandon your better ideas in order to arrive at the very best solution. Design is work and requires perseverance and determination. And those that learn how to reject and revise early on, will likely excel. In the words of Don Draper on Mad Men, "I want you to show me more work I can reject!".

The Design Pricing Formula

David Airey, designer and design author from Edinburgh, offers up this pricing formula and explains why one size doesn't fit all.

Commas Are Our Friends

A long complicated sentence should force itself upon you, make you know yourself knowing it and the comma, well at the most a comma is a poor period that it lets you stop and take a breath but if you want to take a breath you ought to know yourself that you want to take a breath.

GERTRUDE STEIN
From Poetry and Grammer, 1935
via Bobulate

Advice To Writers

Even if it keeps you up all night,
wash down the walls and scrub the floor
of your study before composing a syllable.

Clean the place as if the Pope were on his way.
Spotlessness is the niece of inspiration.

The more you clean, the more brilliant
your writing will be, so do not hesitate to take
to the open fields to scour the undersides
of rocks or swab in the dark forest
upper branches, nests full of eggs.

When you find your way back home
and stow the sponges and brushes under the sink,
you will behold in the light of dawn
the immaculate altar of your desk,
a clean surface in the middle of a clean world.

From a small vase, sparkling blue, lift
a yellow pencil, the sharpest of the bouquet,
and cover pages with tiny sentences
like long rows of devoted ants
that followed you in from the woods.

BILLY COLLINS
via Bobulate

Saul Bass On Making Money vs Quality

The Write Stuff

Time to get down to business this quarter and begin some letter writing of the other kind. From letterforms to form letters...and email ettiquette. L8R

World's Best App

Irritable Vowels

These wonderful t-shirts from Jennifer Daniel can be ordered here.

xType xHibit Redux

The month of April marks the 2nd Annual Student xType Culture Show at the school's Hunter Art Gallery. This show features the work of 48 students and their experiments creating alphabets which are fantastical, found, illustrated, photographed, videoed, animated, 3D, baked, stamped, stenciled, sketched on pavement, burned in grass, and imagined. The rules of play were to construct an experimental display font of 26 letters out of any media (with the exception of flammable, toxic or xRated, but this edict was even ignored), and they were bound only by time, money, materials and their imagination. After enduring a previous quarter of intensive book design where micro-typography conventions were the order – this was a big paradigm shift. I confronted them with new objectives; be playful, be expressive and examine what it means to create a font without any fundamental notions of legibility, readability, function or aesthetics. By challenging them to avoid these traditional typographic principles – where the function of type and reading are impaired – it made for some very surprising and creative results. It allowed the students to view the alphabet (whether real or imagined) in an entirely new context and challenged some of their own preconceptions. They were compelled to often carefully examine each letterform and in some cases deconstruct them into vaguely pixelated shapes. These playful typographic experimentations take flight in all directions and their results continue to impress and amaze me. I am happy to provide a sneak preview of some of their alphabets here. The show opens on Thursday, April 8th at the Hunter Art Gallery in the school's atrium from 5 to 8pm. The gallery is open M-F, 9:30am–3:30pm and also T and W evenings from 5-7pm. 1701 Broadway on Capitol Hill in Seattle.

Sand Serif, the elaborate video above, created with sand on top of a light table in a darkened room, is the work of two multi-cultural and multi-talented students, Mykhaylo Sinenko, originally from the Ukraine and Priyanka Basu from India. It is beautifully choreographed, and with over 7 hours of video editing alone–is a marvel to watch.

The Leitura Paper Swashes film below, is a stunningly beautiful stop action video created by Chloe Scheffe. She brings Leitura Swashes to life with cut paper, fishing line and tape.


Leitura Paper Swashes from Chloe Scheffe on Vimeo.




Populations, above, by Erin Kendig is an interactive demographic of the population of 26 letters on page 167 of The Great Gatsby. Erin presumes that letters are a metaphor for humans as they have feet, legs, arms and she goes on to illustrate how they each populate the randomly chosen page 167. Give it a whirl here.

The following works are Fleuras, by Donna Belnavis, a font produced with forsythia flowering branches; Enlightened Letters, by Jee Lee, a paper engineered pop-up book structure electrically lit by an LED bulb. I hope to get a video of this book up here soon; GemType, by Wyatt Carroll, a font designed with amethyst crystals in Photoshop; Boundaries, by Ross Coyne, a tunnel book structure of a stencil-cut alphabet; and Egg Fancy, by Chieu Van, a font with each letter illustrated on an egg in the tradition of Ukrainian egg dyeing, using wax resist and colorful dyes.

Going Rogue

Going Rogue - An Experimental Typeface from Ryan Ogborn on Vimeo.

For someone who has serious contempt for firearms, I find it ironic that my last 3 posts all have a gun-related theme. This one comes from my student, Ryan Ogborn, who took to a shooting gallery to "design" his experimental font this quarter. He claims it is inspired by the font, Bernhardt Medium and Sarah Palin. I admit I was very reluctant to give him my blessing on this production, but I think it is quite mavericky–and in that case–experimental. I'm rather offended however when I see the bullet-riddled face of Bernhardt, (Cheney could have done better), but sometimes one has to take a hit for art's sake. Frankly, I think Ryan scored a big hit with his Palin-inspired tribute. However the winking emoticon on his poster (click to enlarge) got a big zero.

Misinformation Graphics

Ok, I don't mean to get all political, but this creepy infographic steps on the toes of free speech. It appeared recently on Sarah Palin's Facebook page and lists 20 Democrats who voted to approve the Health Care Reform Package, and who were elected in previously Republican districts. Their locations are identified on the map with crosshairs – a rather crass metaphor to take up arms to defeat these Democrats in the November elections. In recent days, a number of these targeted politicians have received death threats and even had bricks thrown in their office windows. After the health bill was signed on Tuesday, Sarah shouted a plea to her Palin posse on Twitter, "Dont retreat, RELOAD!". Palin's scare tactics and her inflammatory firearms rhetoric are a shout-out to her base to take aim at these politicians and target their election campaigns. I am all for dissent and free political speech, but I find this sort of discourse and infographic offensive and irresponsible. Sarah is not going rogue – she's going ballistic. And as designers, I think we all have a responsibility to be very careful about what messages and information we promote in the name of free speech. Our actions may come at a very high cost.

Designers Don't Let Friends Use Powerpoint

From information designer, Mark Goetz, comes this satirical take on firearms and Powerpoint. It's IRONY folks – not reality! No kittens were harmed in the making of this infographic.