Way too convenient that these two things happen in the same post, not to mention in the same site. Some great finds. I’ve had a similar idea of documenting some typography back home near Detroit using Polaroids.
It’s been a full week since moving to Chicago and with some minor adjustments to city life, I feel I’ve adapted relatively quick. I also have to give credit to my gracious host family for being overly helpful and accommodating. Life on the campaign has been busy as I expected, 12 hour days during the week, 8 hours on Saturday, and a few today on Sunday. In my prior job, I experienced episodes of long hours, so I wasn’t completely blind-sided coming into this position.
With the bit of extra time I had today, I walked down to the Threadless Store. I’ve bought a couple shirts a few years ago, but hadn’t kept up with them for a while; and now that I’m about a mile away, I’d figure I’d check it out for myself. It was a bit smaller than I imagined, but still a pretty awesome. What impressed me was the way they used computer screens, rather than the mannequins, to display the shirt/design with different images of the shirt on different people . The bottom level is the actual shop, and the upstairs has a small gallery which is showcasing some super rad typo-illustrative work from Si Scott.
I just want to share some exciting news with all of you. I will be moving to Chicago for the next few months since accepting a design position with the Barack Obama campaign. I’m going to be really really busy, but I’ll try and post when I have the time and maybe try and update all of you on the craziness. I just wanted to thank all you who I’ve had the priveledge of working with here in Michigan, and to all of people who check out this blog. Take care!
I must first off apologize for the downtime on the blog for the past week. The past couple weeks have been a little hectic with quitting my job (more on this in a later post) and then leaving for Ireland the day after for vacation. As a result, I was able to enjoy a trip with a renewed appreciation for the unpredictability life sometimes has in store for us.
I was going to try and explain the scenery I took in, but I’m sure these pictures are much more telling.
When my grandfather was younger, he drew a lot of cartoons and did a bit of sketching. This is one of many drawing books I found while sifting through some of his massive collection of well, everything. See, my grandpa is not the type to throw things away, and himself having been an artist and a draftsman, has amassed and collected a great deal of art supplies including plenty of old drawing books. This one I’ve had for a few years now because it has some interesting graphical elements to it as well as a chapter dedicated to typography and hand-lettering (not to mention at least a dozen font samples). It’s copyright is 1944, by Knickerbocker Publishing, New York, NY.
The first thing that caught my eye was this beautiful diagram of the color wheel that is on the inside cover. Instead of just using a flat circle, it’s been pulled apart into a multi-level object on a slight perspective. Just the space and the form it implies is just fantastic.
Another gem that was taken from this book was this font sample. It doesn’t have a title to it, but I instantly fell in love with it and used it in the Penny Stamps poster I did for the University of Michigan.
As I’m sure many of you know, the economy here in Michigan and especially in Detroit has been suffering for years now. As a result, the Governor has enacted a “Creative Initiative” to help grow and sustain a new creative community here by offering incentives to creative companies across the country to consider Michigan as a place to start their business. The companies that are being targeted range from interior design, architecture, graphic design as well as television and film. And things seem to be working since Clint Eastwood began filming for his new movie ‘Gran Torino’ in Grosse Point Shores. I’ve noticed myself that the warehouse next to my work was being filled with set equipment, and after some investigation, it was brought to my attention that it’s being turned into a production house. Not sure if its Mr. Eastwood’s, but none the less, a testament that this initiative is really happening.
The film package gives producers 40 cents back for every dollar spent on filming, and and additional 2 percent rebate if the film is shot in certain locations. With this new initiative in place, Detroit will play host to the next Creative Cities Summit in October as well. Another site with some interesting info is Detroit Make It Here, which is trying to branch out and unite the creative sectors that have been in Michigan with the new influx of business coming into the area.
I really hope this will help the creative community here in the near future, and hopefully it will be a much better place for a creative like myself to find a job than it was 3 years ago when I was a college graduate trying to get a foot in the door.
Massive online archive of vintage record covers. The covers for Blue Note, which are outstanding, start here.
Here’s some type illustrations I did a while back. My intention was for these to be a weekly practice of moving off the computer to awaken the possibilities of what some impromptu hand-lettering can achieve.
From their site:
Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.
Visit the site here.
