Poster I designed recently for English tutoring service here in NYC

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

Is this font DIN?

A book cover in a very appropriate blue and white

'Stylish' Spread Redesign

Do you guys prefer the bottom edge of the text blocks to be more regular on the bottom? And how about the grey box behind the figure grounding it?

50 Stylish Feature - Turned 'Broadside'

DNR Magazine

A men's wear magazine I just learned of today:

DNR Magazine
http://www.dnrnews.com/

Sorry, I can't make it to class tonight because of work, but see you next week!

Feature Intro Variations

I think I am settled on the one above. Again, I have the faint 45 degree stripe pattern in the back.

…Although I think the relationship between the two photos in this one is more interesting…

I want to cry. My work is really sucking…

Still flogging this dead horse…

Reversing out white on body of 45 degree stripes…(you'll see this better for yourself in class, basically it looks like the white of the paper cut through the pattern in two circle shapes, very subtle). I think I'm settling with this one.

Thought there was too much white everywhere–so I decided to add some color:

(thicker stripe width below, but I prefer thinner)

New Dept Variation

Basically changed the layout of the right-hand page based on our critique.

Department Spread Variation

Carol-Anne: Yes, I do have a demanding 9-6 job…and I also freelance outside of work and sleep very little.

So, maybe this looks a little over designed and not as effortless as it should look…

Did you know?

INTERNATIONAL TYPEFACE CORPORATION was partly founded by HERB LUBALIN.

"ITC's revival designs frequently follow a formulary of increased x-height, multiple weights from light to ultra bold and multiple widths. While the dramatically higher x-height increased legibility in smaller point sizes, in normal text sizes the extreme height of the lowercase characters imparted a commercial, subjective voice to texts. In recent years several new revivals have been praised for showing more historical accuracy, and for not increasing the x-height to the dramatic heights of earlier ITC typeface revivals."

No wonder why I don't like a lot of their revivals…I don't like those tall clumsy x-heights!

Dept 1 Spread

Dept Reworked (Single Page)

You can't really see the 50% Cyan, 45 degree rule pattern behind my AB rubric on my screen because of the gamma…check it out in class…more to come.

Recent Editorial Inspiration: Homme Arena Mag

DEPARTMENT IN PROGRESS

I'm reacting to what Gabriella made note of during the last class, that we have too much copy, and lack of compelling imagery.

This is a work in progress…(duh), preliminary, but more changes tonight…

Thinking of a side bar or service material on the side--but not a helpy/advicey sort of thing that GQ and Men's Health would add? I'd like to think my readers are more in the know?

A DISSECTION OF DETAILS MAGAZINE

More on focusing the editorial mission of my project:

"Strictly speaking, Details is not really a fashion magazine.

After all, who dares to call itself a mens’ fashion magazine, given that the fashion market for men is so limited? The best performing men’s magazines are those that deal with current affairs, business, automobiles and sports. Fashion is often treated as a side-dish in men’s mags, like in Men’s Health. Even Men’s Vogue steers clear of men’s fashion issues, preferring pages that are not fashion-driven, but personality or celebrity-driven. Some mags don’t even bother to market themselves as men’s fashion but for the benefit of earning ad dollars from both menswear and womenswear brands, they make it known that they do men’s fashion, e.g. i-D and Surface. So far, Ac.Stet can only count upon “T” The New York Times Style Magazine as doing men’s fashion really really well, but even so, the Men’s Style edition comes out half-yearly."

"Having said that, Ac.Stet must say that the layout and order of the fashion pages in Details are a study in how a men’s mag should be put together. To the uneducated eye, the mish-mash of the fashion pages – some here, some there, but never grouped together the way most men’s magazines do it for the sake of this strange concept called “organization” and “categorization” – seemed haphazard and all-over-the-place.

But, to those in the know, such pagination is a brilliant exercise in educating men – especially those who either don’t understand fashion or has no patience for it – about the ways of fashion.

This is how Details orders its fashion features:

It usually begins with the style column in “Know + Tell” section starting on Page 66, following that are feature-feature-feature, and then another story on style (the badly written “Lose The Peter Pan Haircut”) on Page 112, and then sandwiched by feature-feature-feature, next comes “The New American Bespoke” on Page 122, again feature-feature, and then more fashion product spreads in “The Details” Page 147, story-story-story, and then even more product spreads in “The Best Suits In The World” Page 170, and then again cover-story-story-story, and then like a jack-in-the-box, more fashion spreads in “How To Wear A Vest” on Page 184, and “Outsider” following that.

This way, like coaxing a wayward child to eat his green veggies, you mix it up with his favorite foods so that he laps up the whole damn bowl. Fashion information gets absorbed into the system one way or another. See? Simple but brilliant. But not many magazine editors get it.

Speaking of fashion stories, the “The New American Bespoke” feature on bespoke and made-to-measure (MTM) clothing is one of the finest articles on tailoring Ac.Stet has ever come across."

from blogger Acrylic Stetson

Amazing Uses of Color and Contrast

ARCHER PAIRINGS

Like wine and cheese, man…

ON THE HUNT: NEW FONT WISHLIST…

An alternative for my subheads for my template, instead of Stymie. This is apparently a newly drawn typeface, from Hoefler Frere-Jones

PROBLEM SOLVED…

Those geeks on Typophile are freakin' fast…I blogged about it there, and they answered, 3 mins, tops.
Fuck—the L is really getting me all hot and bothered…Show's how even the smallest tweaking of an old typeface can have amazing results…(obviously the findfont samples are not as nicely kerned as samples in the older post)

DOES ANYONE RECOGNIZE THIS FONT?

Kind of similiar to the font used for abc's Lost, no?



arghhh…I must know!!!! I love the L in the above pic, it looks like it's half the width of the S, and it is SO open.

I've grown to HATE setting type in Futura, but it looks really banging here.
It's amazing the sort of mood that is set just with type, absence of color, and lighting in this case (blurring, transformation if you count the entire titling sequence and not just this frame).

Futura=Sort of Bauhaus Modernist=Calculated=Sterile=Santized=Empirical=Mechanical=Cold=Mysterious?