Cate (10), Elias (12), and Lukas (7) contemplating Jan Tschichold’s non-arbitrary page proportioning system at SolBar in Calistoga on Christmas.
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Play Press: 2011 Print Regional Design Annual
The Far West category in Print’s 31st Regional Design Annual was judged by Brigitta Bungard, Assistant Creative Director in the Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Advertising and Graphic Design. Fortunately for us, Brigitta responded to work that she believed demonstrated “a sense of craft,” and she chose three of our pieces to represent our region: an elephant icon we created for BO.LT, the CCA CraftForward symposium announcement, and our own announcement for the Design is Play website launch.
We were also quoted in the issue. In case you missed it:
Q: What visual stereotype would you eliminate from the Bay Area?
A: San Francisco, like any urban American center, is rife with folks who excel at using software to alter and recombine found images. Our culture would be richer without the ensuing visual mash-ups. They are ultimately cannibalistic. As instructors, we insist that our students create all of the imagery they work with in our classes. They shoot their own photographs, generate their own drawings, and hand-ink their symbols. We want our students to become designers who will elevate the visual culture.
We are pleased to note that a number of our CCA colleagues are also represented in the Far West category: Christopher Simmons of Mine, Michael Vanderbyl of Vanderbyl Design, and Cinthia Wen of Noon. Sputnik, CCA’s in-house undergraduate graphic design studio, is honored as well.
See the BO.LT icon under Design is Play Studio Symbols; the CCA CraftForward symposium announcement under Design is Play Studio Systems; and the Design is Play website announcement under Design is Play Studio Systems.
Studio Climbing Identity
Touchstone Climbing is opening yet another gym, this time in downtown San Jose, California. Located in a former movie theater called Studio, the building features a classic 1950 channel lettering neon sign. As part of our visual research, we took photographs of the signage while atop an electric scissor lift 30 feet above the street so we could capture the images without distortion. These photographs ultimately became the basis of hand-inked studies with which we created custom lettering.
The eye and gear symbol we designed references the history of the building as a theater, and is inspired by ideas of projection and seeing. The art was meticulously crafted to optically pulsate: it both radiates outward as it simultaneously contracts inward to the center. Noted speed climber Hans Florine summarizes the new Studio identity on Facebook with the phrase “I got my eye on your gear.”
Play at RE:DESIGN / Creative Directors, 11.07.2011 (part 2)
“There is ecstasy in paying attention.” —Anne Lamott
Some of the interrelated themes we explored at the RE:DESIGN / Creative Directors conference earlier this month were notions of detail, craft, and tempo. In both our studio practice as well as in our classes at California College of the Arts, we strive to create and foster work that is the result of disciplined focus. Angie’s class, in particular, stresses attention to typographic detail.
In the act of reading, all of us are accustomed to seeing letters (and words) as discrete units of meaning; as a result, we are unaccustomed to paying attention to the nuanced details of individual letterforms. (And for good reason! Paying attention to these details impedes the process of reading.) Angie’s second assignment requires her students to create abstract compositions with the dissected forms and counterforms of letter anatomy. The nature of the assignment leads her students to focus on the very details of letterform design that are typically overlooked. These small, revelatory moments of seeing—fulfillments of Josef Albers’ teaching dictum “I want the eyes to open”—are essential to the development of any competent designer.
The images above show Jeff Lin at work and a finished composition by Constance Smith, two students in Angie’s Fall, 2011 class. See more examples of abstract typographic compositions under Design is Play Classroom Letters.
March Trunk Show Invitation
Our friends at March asked us to design an invitation to a trunk show of apparel conceived by interior designer Sam Hamilton of March and textile and clothing designer Matt Dick of Mato Creative. Inspired by a mid-century photograph of a newspaper seller wearing a white paper apron with oversize headlines (i.e. “Football Results”), the invitation is screen printed on Tyvek. Matt transformed the flat piece into an apron by adding metal grommets and cotton ties, and then folding it.
Our original intention was to hand set the invitation text with xeroxes of hot metal type from an old Linotype specimen book, pasting it up one letter at a time. As sometimes happens, though, March fell in love with Angie’s rough sketch, and this became the basis of the final art. (The rough sketch is 3 1/2 inches wide—we enlarged it 1000% to the final width of 35 inches.) We like the contrast between the warmth and imprecision of Angie’s hand-traced type and the machined quality of Tyvek.