Phil Warish has a total hard-on for this box cover

BBQ Palm Card I designed in one night

Tweaked cover

I felt the banding looked a little contrast-y, and created a lot of distracting tension that was competing for attention.
I used a Gaussian Blur on the layer that the color bands are on, which are blended onto the photo layer below it.

LGBT resource guide I designed…Just sent to the printer

Love this new Economist cover & Small Format Problem Solving

Also hunting solutions for small formats (i.e. 5" or less)

I got commissioned to design a pocket sized resource guide (I won't say who, but I'll publish a copy here when its ready.)
So armed with a ruler and my phone camera, I headed to the MoMA Design Store in SoHo.

You would be surprised how much TeNeues was able to fit in their New York City Architecture Guide. At a whopping 5" x 5", it uses a modular cube grid:



My estimate is that at least 100-200 words easily fit into these grid; but the point size is incredibly small, and the font is very slender. But the grid is extremely versatile.

It has a great photographers' credit and cross-reference by neighborhood, type of architecture Index that allows you to quickly locate the entry you are interested in. It's a great information system that Tufte would be proud of.


Another great small format book that is pocket size. This one is 4 x 4.
Much simpler layout, no use of columns or complicated grid.
I did like that sometimes the backgrounds were varied - soft egg shell color, or light blue.



Came across this Erik Spiekermann illustration in a design book there that I loved:


Oh right, it was from that gratuitous, Helvetica-worshipping book:


I was actually more interested in what was going on in the page on the right.
Helvetica's great; but enough already.

New book on my wish-list:



Sometimes I question myself about the ethics of taking photos of spreads instead of buying the damn thing. Some people might go as far as saying it's stealing by photography. Well it's probably closer to stealing if you are using a high pixel digital camera (I'll admit to bringing books to snap photos of spreads I'm interested in in a corner.)

Well, I spend a good amount of money as it is on design books and magazines (a good amount.) You can't really buy an entire book for just one spread.

Well, it's better than ripping it out and walking off with it, that my friend said he had seen people done in the '80s (hmm, you can't do small caps in Blogger.)

Kelmscott Press

Founded by William Morris. 

Excerpt from "Modern Typography" (Kinross 1992, 2004) :

"The first and most fundamental was that text should be set with close word spacing…"

"Morris's ideal of a black page, achieved through thickened letterforms, very black ink, and a heavy impression…"

"The second idea was of the 'unity of the book'. The essential unit was a double-page spread: facing pages had to balance and any ornament or illustration had to harmonize with the type. Thus, to take the example so often cited in this connection, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphilli (1499) is said to succeed because its woodcuts are matched in colour to the areas of type against which they are balanced: a view that leads easily to regarding words and images as no more than areas of visual texture"

This kind of reminds me of what Gen talks about when she gives us her 'Astroturf' analogy, which is always in the forefront of my mind now when designing a layout. The book I'm reading, "Modern Typography," although written specifically about the recorded history of type, does foray [inevitably] into the design of 'products' of which type is used in.  It's a great essay; I recommend it.

ROWR - New Book Wishlist

Visited the Cooper-Hewitt museum (located uptown on 92nd) this past President's Day weekend; but discovered that they were IN BETWEEN exhibits. The bookstore was always the highlight of a visit there, can't get enough of those design tomes