Design is Play

Recent Posts

CCA Craft Forward Symposium 2011 Applications

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We recently completed a section on our site featuring applications of the Craft Forward identity. To create variation within the system, we utilized a range of reproduction methods. We combined foil stamping, letterpress printing, offset lithography on a web press, laser printing, and screen printing with a mix of substrates, including chipboard, newsprint, DayGlo paper, and cotton organza. Photographer Mark Serr documented the work for us.

See the complete Craft Forward project under Design is Play Studio Systems.

Greg Clarke at Play

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“Each year, I’m asked by editor/designer Monte Beauchamp to create a sequential comic for BLAB, his idiosyncratic paean to the graphically unorthodox. He’s been curating these anthologies more or less every year since 1986, and I’ve had the honor of contributing since 2000. It’s a welcome respite from my usual grind of editorial illustration. I’m given only a general theme and 2–4 pages to write and draw whatever I want. No sketches, no revisions, no committee approvals—just a deadline to deliver finished art.

“This year’s theme is ‘the hereafter.’ I wanted to create a character who is skeptical of the notion of an afterlife, yet amuses himself by imagining he is receiving signs from the dead. The title is Dispatches From Oblivion. This issue of BLAB (newly rechristenedBLAB WORLD and now printing in hardcover) will be published this Fall by Last Gasp/San Francisco.”

Greg Clarke is a Southern California illustrator and recovering graphic designer. We invited him to share a moment of play with us.

MetalMark Naming and Identity

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Touchstone Climbing is opening a gym in Fresno, California, and we were asked to develop its name and visual identity. We named the new gym MetalMark after a native California butterfly with distinctive, metallic markings. We were inspired by the simple idea of metamorphosis, by the physical and mental changes we undergo as rock climbers. The form of our butterfly symbol is transformed as well: it is modeled on the engineered aluminum cams used in outdoor rock climbing.

The MetalMark logotype is set in Rockwell Antique, a slab serif typeface issued in 1931. As a cast-metal typeface, we like the connection between the materiality of the original type (metal) and the name MetalMark. The typeface is not available commercially, so we redrew the letters by hand before creating the art digitally.

Play at the Pasadena Museum of California Art

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Curator Amos Klausner charged twenty-six designers with re-imagining one letter from the alphabet, using the illegibility and deconstructive nature of graffiti as their starting point. (We chose the letter A.) The ensuing exhibition, Getting Upper, will open at the Pasadena Museum of California Art on May 15, 2011.

Our lowercase letter a is derived from Albrecht Dürer’s schema for blackletter construction published in 1538. Dürer’s line drawing breaks down the letter into component parts to reveal its design. We subvert this intent by reversing the diagram, flipping the negative spaces to positive ones. The resulting segments are then printed in a palette of modulated colors that further fragment (and deconstruct) the constructed letter. Our poster layout utilizes Jan Tschichold’s non-arbitrary page proportioning system to suggest a book page with the image area as the text block.

Each of the twenty-six letters will be published as a screen printed poster by Bloom Screen Printing Co. and made available for sale at the museum and online.

See more examples of our poster designs under Design is Play Studio Posters.

20 Years Ago: Bomb the Pentagon

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For a 1991 AIGA San Francisco event, Steve Tolleson asked fifty Bay Area graphic designers to create posters addressing an environmental issue of their choice. My topic? The tendency of the US military to avoid environmental scrutiny—and, at times, responsibility—by invoking the so-called state secrets privilege. According to Project Censored, “the Department of Defense is the largest polluter in the world, producing more hazardous waste than the five largest US chemical companies combined. Depleted uranium, petroleum, oil, pesticides, defoliant agents such as Agent Orange, and lead, along with vast amounts of radiation from weaponry produced, tested, and used, are just some of the pollutants with which the US military is contaminating the environment.” The design parameters were tight: one color on a recycled stock at a size of 18 x 24. A number of the posters went on to win awards in national competitions, including my poster and those designed by Doug Akagi and Michael Schwab.

I hand-inked the arrows, target, and Bomb lettering, and built the constructivist-inspired typography with an early version of Adobe Illustrator. Final art was a black and white “stat” from which the printer shot a Kodalith film positive; he then screen printed the design using black enamel ink on corrugated cardboard. For any designer who remembers the prevalence of bright white, cast-coated papers such as Kromecote in the 1980s, printing “high end” work on an unbleached and uncoated substrate was unorthodox.

Twenty years later, given our post-Timothy McVeigh, post-9/11 mind-set, Bomb the Pentagon has become both visually and politically jarring: a year or so ago I watched a young museum curator’s body literally recoil from the poster. 1991 was a moment in American history that now seems strangely distant, when calls to bomb anything were rightly understood as hyperbole. Unlike much graphic design which is subject to visual trends, the “look” of this poster doesn’t appear dated, at least to my eyes; rather, it is the message—and its stridency—that dates the piece. [MF]