So, this awesome guy named Chad Mazolla made a page showcasing some of the best Google Web Fonts- in some really nice pairings. He says:

There are over 400 typefaces in the Google web fonts directory. Many of them are awful. But there are also high-quality typefaces that deserve a closer look.

Check it out here!

A new project that I worked on is live! Ka’ana Belize, a hotel in Belize, wanted to create an interactive map that displayed travel times, local attractions, and amenities for their guests.

The site is a single-page with three different maps; World, Region, and Resort. In the World section, flight paths and times are displayed based on which city the user clicks. I’m particularly stoked on the flight path animations in this section! The Region and Resort sections both allow the user to check out different places by clicking points on the map that pop up sliding image galleries.

Art-directed by the incredibly talented Amy Weibel and originally developed by PixelCrayons, the project fell in my lap when Amy brought me in to do QA. After I compiled a bug list, I was asked to fix all the bugs I caught by the client and make some creative tweaks. Additionally, I polished the art assets and added an extra layer of parallax scrolling; the water, map sections and individual land masses move at slightly different speeds, which adds dimension and movement to the map. I also had to make this site cross-browser compatible, and responsive for the iPad.

In a boutique site of this nature, typography is everything. When I inherited the site, the kerning was not yet complete; as you can see in the example above, the spacing between the letters was very uneven. Kerning.js to the rescue! Joshua Gross’ awesome open-source library allowed me to adjust the kerning down to the letter.

Special thanks to Jared who helped me with some JS woes & thanks again to Amy for bringing me in on the project!

Hey guys!
Come visit me at Stumptown Comics Fest in Portland this weekend!

I was the Art Director for the fest this year, so I was responsible for designing all the collateral this year!
I’ll be doing a *huge* post later to talk about all the stuff I made for the fest, but I’ll keep it mostly under wraps right now so you can see it in person if you’re heading there.

The sweet poster above was illustrated by Bill Mudron and Mike Russell, and designed by me.

I’ll be at table I03 so please come say hi, okay?

So, as you guys may know, I am a big fan of letters. I mean the things that make up the alphabet, as opposed to the things you get in the mail. Although I do also like mail, and obviously you can’t write a letter without writing letters.

Point being that I like talking about lettering, typography, etc. and it would be cool to have a spot to feature that stuff. So here’s my first shot.

Balkan Sans is a typeface that represents both Latin and Cyrillic Alphabets. Each character shows a pairing of the Latin letter and it’s Cyrillic equivalent. In the cases where they are the same, the letter is shown once, just at double height.

The applications for a typeface of this nature, with regards to education, are pretty cool!
It can be used to translate Croatian Latin into Serbian Cyrillic, for example.
The uses are even more expansive when using all the available faces:

Balkan Sans and Balkan Sans Stencil consist of four styles – three of them have different alignments (e.g., all uppercase characters are Latin and lowercase characters are Cyrillic) and one style consists of uppercase Cyrillic and lowercase Latin characters.

So you can use it in Latin or Cyrillic as you please, not just in the paired version I mentioned above. To truly understand it’s brilliance, check out the video below.

You can buy Balkan Sans from Typeonine and you can also pick up the handsome poster shown above.

Unrelated, I relaunched my site and accidentally turned comments off. Sorry about that! As of this post it should be turned back on- with the new jetpack integration so you can comment using twitter or facebook as well as the default WordPress.

<3!

Hurray! After months of work, my new website is live!

This new version has been designed to put a greater focus on my portfolio, which now has its own page. I’ll be doing a breakdown of all these new projects on my blog in the coming weeks!

The new site layout has a hefty amount of flat design influence, as well as some parallax scrolling effects that I’m totally stoked on.

The site is fully responsive, meaning that the layout shifts depending on whether the site is viewed on a desktop, tablet or phone. I’ve also switched to Jetpack for comments, which means that you can now comment using your Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Typography on the web is getting more and more dynamic as new web fonts and plugins become available. This site is set in a combination of Brandon Grotesque and Hypatia Sans. I also made use of FitText.js, an excellent plugin that allows designers to make text on their webpages resize in a fluid fashion.

Special thanks to Nadya Lev, Nubby Twiglet, and Tim Riot for their unending support while I put all of this together. Let me know what you guys think of my new look, and be sure to check out the work page to see lots of new stuff!

For Chinese New Year every year, a group of local pyromaniacs descend upon the streets of Chinatown.
The result is an evening of bangs and bursts, and a block-wide swath of red paper.
Watch the above video to get the full effect.

A special thank you to Jillian for letting me shoot with her camera.
I’m hoping to release a little video with a little bit of branding and animation every month for you guys to check out, so hopefully this is the first of a series.

DOUBLE EDITION! Brought to you thanks to the ddos attack that leveled my blog last week, making me unable to post. More on that later. But now, photos- In the brand new WordPress Jetpack mosaic format! PREEEETY.

1. Double dragon. This was Mission Chinese lunch with 2 folks who has not previously enjoyed the glory of their food. So much fun to watch their faces as they nommed like that had never nommed before.
2.Chinatown Bang 2013. This is one of my favorite things. Check out my video post for an in depth recap.
3. My friend Oscar. The folks at Stuff had these life size oscar statues out front! So neat!
4. This guy. Oh man. To whoever put this googly eye on this plant. I love you. Also what plant is this? All you folks helped out greatly with the rosehip, so I don’t doubt that one of you will know.
5. Utility power…and a cyclops. This one kind of speaks for itself.
6. Conversation hearts. The folks at Stanza know that “sext me” is clearly the romantic statement of the century.
7. Happiest of Valentines to all my lovelies! <3<3 I am so lucky to have so many wonderful people in my life.
8. 6, 43, 39 Just waiting for my number to come up.

9. The view from here. Had an excellent weekend staycation adventure at the Kabuki. Here’s Tim and Lisa on the balcony looking like something from a movie.
10. Edison was kind of a jerk. Srsly, He killed an elephant.
11. Wrong way. I really liked how the background blur worked out on this one.
12. Post-Valentines at the Bull Valley roadhouse. Glitter letters by Wendy Addison, hanging in my new favorite bay area restaurant.
13. Building Bridges. The natural motion blur on the foreground really made this photo for me.
14. Caution. Wet paint. This whole building was *covered* in tape!

My apologies that I’m a bit late in getting this up. But I promise I’ll make up for it with some other really awesome content soon!

Muir Woods | Sugar on the keys | Plus pastel. | “Every girl goes through a photography phase…”

1. Jillian was visiting from New York and she’d never seen the redwoods before, so we made a trip to Muir Woods! More on this trip soon.
2. Gaylord’s cafe has an organ from the 70′s inside their condiment table. So cool!
3. This week I discovered that Blender is the most superior of all the double exposure apps. This is some telephone wires and a decorative concrete block.
4. This is a horribly cliche shot of my legs in stripey tights. I posted it originally with a quote from Lost in Translation, referring to how horribly cliche photos like this are. All that said, I still posted it.

Persimmon maybe? | Lines & leaks. | The magic hour. | Like one of @thisrabbit’s collages.

5. I shot this not knowing what kind of plant it was. Thanks to all of you, I now know it’s a rosehip!
6. I discovered ndpatterns this week- which you can download for free and use in your projects! You just have to tag the things you make with #ndpatterns. Special thanks to Neal Dieker!
7. This shot was an experiment with using Gelo and Over, which are 2 pretty awesome apps. I don’t generally use a lot of text on my IG photos, but you guys seemed to like this, so maybe I’ll do more of it.
8. Lastly, this photo reminded me a lot of one of Sou MacMillan’s collages after I edited it. Mostly just the colors and the sharpness.

Golden Gate Bridging it. http://vine.co/v/bnYY3IiKID1

Parlour Trick Kickstarter Concert vine.co/v/bnUlpVZFhbW

Purikura. http://vine.co/v/bntdvi9pATV

Jilli changes her septum vine.co/v/bnXe6tZI637

Boy- I was all trees and telephones this week wasn’t I? I’ll try to cut down on that! Until next week!

• I love this New Years card.
• Agency Wank had me at hello.
• A treasure trove of vintage movie type! The Movie Title Stills Collection
• If you’re like me and didn’t watch the superbowl, apparently you missed some super sexist ads! As if we needed another reason to hate GoDaddy.
• Thankfully, we have some people fighting the good fight elsewhere: The battle against ‘sexist’ sci-fi and fantasy book covers.
• Also somewhat related- I discovered LADYDRAWERS! So so awesome! Gender + comics + statistics = totally my jam.
• Could you rock some of these untapped fashion trends of yore?
• Did you know Penguins are ticklish?

371. | @timriot making photoshop magic. | The visible man, in 3d. | In front of the weird installation in the window at Madrone.

1. Whenever I walk by this gate in my neighborhood, I always notice how this 7 looks like a scythe.
2. This photo was run through so many apps I can’t even remember them all. First, a hipstamatic double exposure, then lots of Gelo gels, through decim8 and back again, add bokeh, etc. The photo is actually of Tim working on some truly epic stuff for Adobe. I’ll update you on that when it comes out to the public (I’m so proud of him!).
3. This is a weird one. This gallery down the street has these weird windows with spiral grating on them, but they wedged one half of a Visible Man doll between the grate and the window, so when the lights are on the shadow is all weird. Then I just added some 3d effect.
4. There’s a giant light up installation in the window of Madrone- which actually makes a pretty great diffused light for photos.
I might go back with a more serious camera and a crazy outfit before they take it down.

No way back. | One way to sunset. | Aerialist Electric Blue’s shadow. | Lincoln’s face on all the ads.

5. People have been wheatpasting all over the burnt out Walgreens since they boarded it up, and they’ve been shoddily painting over them the whole time. I liked this tiger and also the guy behind him.
6. Sutro Tower forevs.
7. I went to the Soviet Space themed Hubba Hubba show to see my ladyfriend do her tribute to Laika the space dog. This aerialist was awesome, but I spent almost as much time watching her shadow as I did her. It just looked so awesome against those curtains!
8. I mistakenly took this Lincoln head for street art. Apparently this is the actual Ad. I guess I was just calibrated for Lincoln fandom after the vampire hunter and Daniel Day Louis bit.

Let’s take just a moment about Vine.co. Because it’s awesome, and you should use it. I’m Star StGermain on there, since the period in my last name is invalid punctuation or something. :/ Anyway- if nobody objects, I’m going to put my little vine videos in these posts too, cool? If you’re viewing on an rss feed, this might not work, so click on through to the original post.

The Parlour Trick- motion tests vine.co/v/b1uT6PjaP5d

Labels for fishes vine.co/v/b1AOETlXqg7

Rainbow Pastries vine.co/v/bJtYIAjVvg1

Drawing the millipede from Charlie the Unicorn 4 http://vine.co/v/bJdmQ562bxg

That’s it for this week. I’m going to go get some awesome french toast now!

• I have no practical use for these, but goddamn I want these Brick Books.
• Did you hear about Jonathan Coulton getting ripped off by Glee? Short version, they ripped off his arrangement of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s Baby Got Back. Glee had permission from Mix- but in this case, that’s like asking Bob Dylan permission to do Jimi Hendrix’s version of All Along the Watchtower. In response, Coulton followed up with a plan for revenge. On This radio show Sir Mix-a-Lot is quoted as saying: “Do not underestimate a cat like Jonathan with a million followers. He will wax that ass.”
• I was incredibly moved by the story of a family that spent 40 years in isolation.
• Noisebridge responds to Dreamwork’s request to use their logo in an upcoming film.
• While looking for resources on silent film intertitles, I found Mark Simonson’s critique on the type in The Artist. For extra credit, check out Alastair Johnston tearing The Mystery of Edwin Drood a typographic new one.
• Are you in need of some sweet rhymes? Why not have this robot write them for you?
• Here’s a list of Iconic songs despised by the people who created them.
• In case anyone forgot, Fred Astaire is amazing!
• Lastly, This Disney Short made my day.

Back in November, I had the honor of working on the hiatus redesign of Coilhouse.net.
I also did the illustration on their goodbye post.
Back then, I promised you I’d make a more proper post about the redesign, so here it is!

My dear friend Nadya Lev had been designing the site, and ended up initially asking me to provide some CSS wizardry.
It was to be the last hoorah for this much celebrated magazine and blog, before it went dark for a few years. Even though I started just doing fill in CSS work, I ended up being development lead and also helping Nadya with a bunch of the design decisions.

The site was particularly challenging because it had originally been designed to be quite narrow, and all the images in the archive were less than 400px wide! I was concerned that such a narrow layout would make the site look dated, even though we’d just redesigned.
However, going through and upsizing the content wasn’t an option. Nadya had wanted to fill all the horizontal space with illustrations she had comissioned from the awesomely talented Jason Levesque. She had thought she would just set them as a background image- but at some point the topic of parallax scrolling came up.
Normally I wouldn’t go for something this busy for a content site like this, but since it would no longer be updating- a fun approach like this seemed appropriate.

We ended up putting the whole menagerie of tiny illustrations into a parallax scrolling, easter egg filled layout. This solved most of my concerns about the site looking dated, as this animation technique has only recently seen a rise in popularity.
We spent hours and ours placing every illustration manually, choosing the speed it should scroll at, and making certain characters interact with others in particular ways as you scroll.

As much as I advocate for responsive design, with a content width as small as it is, we decided to just make a standard view and a mobile view instead of the usual full range of responsive breakpoints. I’d love to go back in and optimize for a better tablet experience at some point.
Perhaps when they decide to return to the site and come out of hiatus, I’ll come back to help come up with a new theme for relaunch.
Until then, enjoy clicking around on the illustrations, and reading the massive archive of content from the past several years.

While I am sad that there’s no new activity over there- I’m overjoyed that my friends who worked on it can now take the time to pursue other things that they love.

Goodnight sweet Coilhouse.
I’ll be here when you wake up.

This post is going up rather late in the day because I was busy enjoying Pie Friday. Trust me guys- so worth it.
This week was packed with all kinds of epic things, both work and play!

1. I shot this in the window of the now-closed Om Sham Teahouse. I’ve always loved those reflective bodoni-ish numbers.
I was pleased when I realized after the fact that the second 3 caught my face in it. I wonder what will go in here now that the tea is gone!

2. This was a several shot appsperiment of the rainbow lanterns in my friend Nadya’s room. I used about 8 different apps to make this shot, but I’m really happy with how it came out after some initial false starts that just didn’t capture the vibrance of how it looked in real life.

3. A gold toothed skull in the Prarie Collective storefront. The original shot was rather earthy in nature, so of course I ran it through decim8 until it was cold and mechanical looking. After which, I used dxp to overlay a few different variations on what decim8 turned out. I added extra triangles with the gelo app that mimicked the glass dagger effect from decim8- but gave me control over where they would appear. This is a much better expression of the more dynamic kinds of effects I think I’ll be using from the Decim8 app- which feels more successful than last week’s lightbulb shot.

4. I was interested in playing with the new hipstamatic tintype lens- having gotten a real one at Photobooth a few months back. I had heard that this lens used the iPhone’s facial recognition to help determine where to place the depth of field- which was super interesting to me. Unfortunately, the lens uses a ton of memory and was super crashy for me. If you’re having this problem, try to quit everything and restart your phone before even attempting to use it. All that said- so far I’ve had the most success using it on things that aren’t people. I’m sure I’ll eventually shoot some portraits with it later and talk about the facial recog thing more then.

5. Valencia and 26th. The entire crosswalk is covered with blue splatters. No idea how it got that way. Anyone know?

6. The Edwardian Ball. I helped the ball with some design and development this year, so I was especially excited to go. This ripped up portrait totally spoke to me and is largely unedited except for the color. Super curious who the people in it were.

7. More Edwardian Ball. This was Vau de Vivre’s production of Edward Gorey’s The Doubtful Guest- which was totally wonderful. I’ll ping you guys with video if it ever turns up on the internet, because it was just that good.

8. The night before, Tim and I went to see Tycho. Some of you might know Tycho better as Scott Hansen of ISO50 fame. I really preferred the visuals to the performance at this show- which makes sense, as Scott is a brilliant designer. I wish I had gotten a good shot of some of the desert footage he was showing, but the light was too tough in there to capture it.

That’s all for this week. Check out my instagram feed for updates as they happen, or higher res shots!

In the spirit of trying to get into blogging more regularly- I’m going to try to do a weekly link roundup thing.
I’ve done this in the past, but never really seemed to hit my stride.
Here’s trying to make things different this time around.

• If you only watch one animated youtube clip this week, let it be Charlie the Unicorn 4. The millipede is my spirit animal. Also my hero.
• The Audacity of Lena Dunam, musings on body image and public shaming in the media.
• Breanna Rose shares Some awesome web fonts.
• This list of 10 characters whose genders were swapped in production might surprise you.
• Amazing photos of The Frozen Aftermath of a Chicago Warehouse Fire.
• How cute is this identity for The Oyster Inn?
• Need scaling images for your next responsive layout project? Try adaptive images.
• While this one is a few months old- it’s super worth a read. Molly Crabapple talks about The World of a Professional Naked Girl.

This has been a packed week, my friends. Here’s a quick rundown of all the stuff I snapped!

1. My neighbors are painting their house purple! I took a ton of pictures of it while they were painting. It was an awesome purple mess.

2. Upon upgrading my phone, one of the first things I did was download the Decim8 App, as it wouldn’t work on the previous OS. I haven’t really figured out how to work it into my regular photo editing workflow yet, but here’s a first try. This was originally a photo of a crazy lamp.

3. I’m in love with this pencil burst mirror! Too bad it was over $500. I took this photo after coming from a job interview at California College of the Arts, where I was applying to teach a summer comics class for 9th graders.
I got the job! So come July, I’ll be teaching the next generation the ways of the sequential arts. Call me Professor.

4. When I was on my way to the interview, I was taking the BART into Oakland. The windows are so grimy it’s like shooting with a filter even if you don’t use one. This is, of course, filtered- but the dirt really made the photo.

5. I actually took this picture in the Rare Device window a few weeks back, but only got around to editing it now.
This was a just a tiny section of the original picture.

6. Similar to the Decim8 shot above, this was also edited with a new app I’ve been trying out. Gelo lets you add overlays that are similar to using colored gel in analogue photography. I liked the result, but you guys in instagramland seemed less impressed, so I’m probably going to try to use it more creatively next time.

7. I stumbled along this random pony when I was coming home from recording this week’s Destroy All Podcast on Alien. Click that if you want to hear me give nerds a typography lesson.

8. Lastly, here’s a shot from West Portal- an area I haven’t spent much time in until recently. The whole street is lined with lovely gnarled trees, made all the more lovely when the light is as nice as it was in this shot.

Here’s looking forward to next week!

I’ve been actively taking cell phone pictures and sharing them for a few years now, starting with the remnants series back in 2009, and of course on photo sharing sites like instagram and flickr.

I’ve found myself inspired by my friends and acquaintances who have tried to push themselves to create better and better things using their phones (DocPop and Kris Atomic come to mind) by using in camera apps to make their photos extra awesome.

Now that it’s been a while, I feel like I’ve managed to start taking some pretty awesome shots. More importantly, I’ve managed to take and post photos I’m proud of on a regular basis.

I’ve struggled with what to do with this content, and for a long time I’ve just shuttled all my photos off to tumblr/flickr/facebook & called it done. But I’ve grown dissatisfied with this, so I want to see if I can make this bunch of photos into a weekly roundup of sorts- in the hopes that it helps me to take more/better photos. Also, there’s the added bonus of having a record of every week- and more regular blog updates. Here’s hoping I can stick with it?

1. The mirror in the bathroom at the El Rio. I had gone to watch my ladyfriend compete in the Go Deep lube wrestling series. She had one win and one loss, respectively. A ton of people were yelling at me to hurry up while I took this photo, which was nearly impossible to get in focus in the low light. These things take time.

2. I walk by this gate most every day, as it is very near to my house. I’ve almost taken this photo more times than I can count, but for some reason held off until now. I’m glad I did.

3. The rain and cold has been dreadful this winter! I say this, of course, completely betraying my New England roots. It is far colder back east, and my family has not let me forget it.
The drops stick to the panes and shimmer like glitter, and as I sit shivering in my drafty house, I almost think it’s worth it.

4. This was, in fact, a mighty fine sunset.

5. My band played a show during Art Murmur at the Moco Gallery. The bathroom was down the block, behind a gate and up a flight of stairs. It required 3 keys to get into. Luckily when I got there I not only got to pee, but was also greeted by this delightful retro wallpaper. All the voices in my head agreed that the print looked like panties.

6. Oh man do ginko leaves make me happy! When they shed themselves basically all at once and the entire block is full of yellow awesomeness? Best ever. It is my own tiny San Francisco version of New England fall foliage.

7. I’ve always wanted a red Kit Kat Clock, so I clearly had to snap a picture of this one. I like how he looks extra janky and weird because the HDR setting on my phone made the right eyeball double expose a little.

8. This display in the Accident & Artifact window made me swoon. I hope it makes you swoon too!

To see more of these images, as I post them, follow me on Instagram!

Happy New Year, guys!

2012 was a whirlwind of crazy changes for me!
I’m really looking forward to being able to settle into a version of my life that I can stick with for a while, without something huge coming through to unsettle me.

One of the many changes that happened during 2012 was that I transitioned to full time freelance.
I’ve been working so hard with so many projects and different clients that I haven’t had a chance to stop and breathe, let alone update this blog.

That said, I’ve been doing so much cool stuff!
All the projects have been fun to work on, and I feel like I’m doing the best work I’ve ever done.
& I know I said this months ago, but I’m working on a full redesign of this website and blog to highlight all this new work- so all of you can see it too!

I’m really hopeful that this new chapter is the beginning of something really excellent.
Thanks to all of you for reading. Your support has meant so much to me!
Here’s to an awesome new year!

Meredith Yayanos is one half of spooky chamber music duo, The Parlour Trick, and also a dear friend. I was so thrilled when she asked me to do her band’s identity branding!

She’s only got a couple days left on the kickstarter for her new album, so please go over there and listen to the lovely noises they are making.

I started with these two basic sketches, and Mer liked them both. She asked me to start with the one on the left as the base, and try to work in the curliques from the second sketch.

I brought the sketches into illustrator and proceeded to iterate through a bunch of edits while vectorizing the design. This process involved many many hours of tweaking bezier curves while watching RuPaul’s Drag Race.

After some critique from my favorite sister in letters, Jillian Adel, I was ready to tweak the design down to the final draft.

They’ve made their initial kickstarter goal, but they’re making a last push to try to raise enough to make a music video with 5 time Oscar winner, Richard Taylor. There’s only 2 days left- help them make it count.

My dear friends at Coilhouse announced today that they are going on hiatus.
I was honored to be asked to illustrate their goodbye post.
In addition, I was lead developer and codesigner of their new webpage, which I spent many long days and late nights working on with the lovely Miss Nadya Lev.

Coilhouse has been an inspiration to me for the past 5 years.
I am so happy to have been involved with such an amazing project- run by such a lovely group of humans.

If you know their work- please visit and wish them well in their future endeavors.
If you are unfamiliar, please let yourself pour over their archive- there’s lots of stuff in there that’s worth a read.

I’ll be posting a design breakdown on the new site design after Thanksgiving, but in the meantime, go over to Coilhouse and congratulate them on the end of this chapter and the start of a new one.

As you know, I am rather passionate about my halloween attire, and this year I pulled out all the stops.
After being Frida Kahlo last year, and a silent film star the year before, I decided it was time to do something that was a whole different side of retro.

You may recall Halloween 2009, when I was Velma from Scooby Doo, wherein I expressed my love for impersonating cartoon characters.
This year, I wanted to return to bringing the animated to life- in a way that was close to my 80′s childhood heart.

I knew that to be Jem, I couldn’t do it halfway. To make sure I pulled it off, I enlisted the skills of the fabulous Miss Tess Aquarium to make the costume.

After several trips to the fabric store, ordering a half calf of silver leather, and laser cutting custom Jem earrings, Tess and I had created what I believe to be the most awesome Jem outfit ever to exist. The belt even has a pocket to keep my keys and id!

After all the sewing, the next thing I wanted to make sure I got right was the hair. I called my trusted stylist Jinelle at Glamarama to get the job done!

We looked at these awesome Jem illustrations and decided that all over pink and white with just a touch of yellow was the way to go!

Super special thanks to Tess and Jinelle for making my cartoon dreams come true!
Also thanks to Tim Riot for taking all the photos in this post.

What were you guys for halloween?
Show me your costumes in the comments!