I was completely blown away by Evelin Kasikov’s CMYK handprinted Alphabet.
All that embroidery would make my head spin.
Here’s how she describes her project:
This is my first fully CMYK-embroidered alphabet. My intention was to create stitched letterforms considering typographic characteristics: legibility, coherence, weight and contrast. I wanted to avoid manipulating existing character sets – this is not halftoned Gill Sans or Helvetica. I began by setting up a 4-layer halftone grid with 10 crosses per x-height. The screen for each colour is set at a different angle: Cyan 105˚, Magenta 75˚, Yellow 90˚ and Black 45˚. The challenge was to construct a coherent character set upon this grid. Each letter consists of four layers, Cyan being printed first and Black last. The equal blend of stitched CMYK colours results in handmade Registration Black.
Sadly her site doesn’t allow comments, so you can’t tell her how awesome you think it is.
But she has a lot of other awesome projects up that you should go check out!
Stumptown Comics Fest is an independent comic convention in Portland that draws over 3,000 attendees yearly. I’ve been going to this show for 7 years straight, and I’ve had the privilege of seeing it grow from a wee thing into a huge and robust convention. To be perfectly honest, it’s my favorite comics show of all, which is why I was so thrilled when I was asked to be the Art Director.
My job was to ensure that all visual materials produced for the event by different artists worked together to create a cohesive look for the event. In addition to art direction, I did branding and designed all the print collateral. I created a logo and style guide, designed a 34-page program, flyers, badges, t-shirts, and an 18×24″ poster.
As Art Director, I wanted to create a unified look for all the festival’s collateral. Even though the Festival is now in its 10th year, until I came on board, it had never had a logo or style guide. My goal was to get all the festival-related materials to be tight and visually harmonious.
I was invited to art direct the festival by Kaebel Hashitani, the festival director. I’ve known Kaebel for a few years, but I really got to know him well when I put together my show, “Date Lines” at the gallery he co-runs with Merrick Monroe.
For the branding, I wanted to create a logo that could be used in different ways. I ended up creating a major brandmark, the tree stump with a stylized Portland skyline. The tree stump can also be removed, and the text inside of that can stand on its own as a secondary brandmark. The T-shirt, event booklet and postcard feature the stump logo, while the badges, which are pretty small and feature full-bleed illustrations, look better with the simpler version of the logo.
In designing the badges, postcards and other collateral, I got to collaborate with two wonderful artists, Mike Russell, and Bill Mudron. Initially, Bill was supposed to do the poster and Mike was supposed to do the badges, but because they’ve collaborated in the past, I thought it would be good for them each to work on both. The result was spectacular.
For the poster, Bill created the artist’s desk, hands and a border. Mike drew the scenes inside the comic panels. In the top panel, Mike riffed on my logo and did an illustrated version of it. I ended up modifying my vector logo slightly to match the geography on top of the stump in Mike’s illustration, because he’s a native Portlander and I’m not. In fact, I was the only remote member of the entire staff, so we ended up doing a lot of collaboration over Skype, phone and email.
The collateral list was pretty huge: postcards, a poster, program, badges, and the t-shirt. This was the first time that the t-shirts ever sold out completely! The booklet was a big effort as well, because I had to design a color-coded event schedule and a map for the exhibition hall. A huge shout-out to Mary at Brown Printing for getting everything printed beautifully and on time!
I’ve been asked back to Art Direct for 2014, and I’m really looking forward to pulling it all together again next year!
I’m in love with this video by Ill studio, originally created for “The Big Idea” exhibition, in Los Angeles in 2011. I’m a sucker for typographic animation, and this one is done exceptionally well. Also, it walks the line between retro and modern in a way that feels super fresh. Watch it in motion below!
My band, This Can’t End Well, is playing at Viracocha in the mission this evening.
Please come out! If you can, kindly RSVP on the Facebook Event.
Not Waving But Drowning – a junkyard cabaret from Brooklyn – is converging on Viracocha to deliver joyful indie rock spiked with shipwrecked shanties and Appalachian reels.
NWBD will be joined by Burlington Vermont’s own Kris Gruen, whose songs soften the world’s sharp edges like a glass of exceptionally fine bourbon, as well as San Francisco’s own string-informed experimental indie This Can’t End Well.
8pm – Kris Gruen – www.krisgruen.com
9pm – Not Waving But Drowning – www.wavingdrowning.com
10pm – This Can’t End Well – www.thiscantendwell.com
You don’t want to miss this show. I will neither confirm or deny that we are doing a Hall & Oates cover.
Viracocha
998 Valencia Street, San Francisco, California
8PM
I just launched a new site for Curbside Creamery, an Oakland-based ice cream maker. The concept of Curbside Creamery is to sell artisan ice cream sandwiches, in traditional and vegan varieties, from a vending trike. For this project I developed a website, hand lettered a logo, established a style guide and designed several brand marks.
For branding, I created a custom hand-lettered logo and a silhouette graphic of the vending trike to serve as an additional brand mark. My inspirations for the logo included old-school sign painting. Specifically, for this project I was drawn to beach boardwalk signage from the fifties and sixties, such as this sign for Dolle’s Salt Water Taffy in Maryland. Here is a moodboard I put together showing my typeface inspirations. The end result ended up looking less scripty than many of the following:
The trike brand mark is based on a photo of the actual trike that Curbside’s proprietor, Tori Wentworth, had just ordered. I started out by doing a raster sketch in Photoshop, and then vectorized it in Illustrator. The trike drawing needed to be realistic enough to represent Tori’s actual vehicle, but abstracted enough to make a good stencil drawing, vinyl cut-out, stationery header, business card graphic, etc. Finding that balance was a challenge, but I’m stoked with the result!
The concept behind the website was to have a beautiful, minimalist theme. I was lucky to have some photos, shot by Tori on film, to use for the full-screen responsive slider. The slider script was modified to add a subtle animation effect to change the color of the word “creamery” depending on which photo is being displayed. This was added to make the logo pop against all the images, because otherwise it would’ve gotten lost on certain backgrounds. The website has a CMS that will enable Tori to make changes at any time. This was important because Curbside Creamery’s flavors will change in the future.
