I'm Gridding from Ear to Ear

You are so sharp! Pretty cool to see this listing—and who knew Griddies (or would that be Griddites) are so quick about listing resources. This is a good time to flog, blog, and promote. I have yet to do a mass blast of the e-cards Anel Henning designed for Layout Essentials; here's a preview of e-card one of three.

While I'm at it, here's part of an e-mail from Scott Citron, Director at Large, Type Directors Club, Adobe Community Expert, Adobe Certified Instructor, ID | IC | PS | AI CS3:

I just received a copy of your new book, and wanted you to know how much I'm enjoying it! Not only is it beautifully designed, but the information and analysis is excellent.

Scott also noted that Rockport Publishers really knows how to produce a beautiful book. It's true. Props to Rockport, editor Emily Potts, and art director David Martinell.

But enough about Layout Essentials. For now. More promotional hoo-hah to come (with the amused admission that the irony of writing a post about grids after a squib about the victoriously-untrammeled James does not escape your humble author).

Speaking of pretty pictures

Look who landed smack dab in the middle of The Grid System...

Is now a good time to flog your unbelievably timely and designer-istically necessary book!?

Me No Longer Talk Pretty Some Day

James Victore galvanized students in the AIGA/NY AIGA/NY Mentoring Program to create posters using the theme "I Have a Voice." Decrying "Pretty Pictures," (guilty?), Victore urged kids and everyone to test and push themselves. Arielle Jennings, my excellent student who's a Junior at the High School of Art & Design, holds her poster about racial discrimination. Arielle is a diligent high-achieving student, was not upset by James's occasional expletives; her takeaway was to follow your passions and be true to yourself—and, of course, to sign your work.

Connected

Frankie was indeed happy that one of his Wednesday Night Hoppers designed his book and jacket. His inscription in Pat's and my copy included a line something like "Thank you for making me look so good." He didn't any need help to look good; he always looked great. When we had the project in work at BTD, I know you weren't lovin' the script used for the jacket subtitle; I see your point. My goal was to show dynamics using type, but with a great jacket photo like Eugene Smith's, who needs to be fuusy?

Trendily connected or not, the graphics for Frankie95 are pretty darned nice. Everything is clean, handsome, strong, consistent, and lively. The whole approach shows Frankie and swing as the strong phenomenon he was/is, without any of the retro trappings that tie graphically to his first heydey (Guilty!). The muscular of-this-decade look is perfect for the current generation of scarily talented and acrobatic dancers who are building on Frankie's steps. Eugene Smith's image gets a workout—an an abstracted workover—in the tee shirt below.



I don't know how consciously the organizers plotted the branding of Frankie's Festival. As someone privileged to hang out with him as a member of the class that became extended family, I have mixed feelings about Frankie becoming more icon than person—especially on the kicky signage for the memorial service.



But, if you need to show the Obamization of someone, then Frankie's the man. Speaking of Obamization, one of the ads even included the slogan "Yes We Can Lindy Hop."

The program design is by Daniel Bosse of Bayon Creative. The program cover illustration, based on a photo of Frankie arriving in Australia in the 1930s, is by Chris Switzer. Eli Pritikin had a lot to do with the website, designing posters, and being a general aide-de-camp (mixed metaphors intended).





Without Frankie himself to pose with, people gathered for shots in front of the iconic poster at the venue's entry (I don't know the folks in the shot below; a lot of attendees were from abroad—including lots and lots and lots of Swedes, many of them superlative dancers).



Yup, we attended a number of the events and most of the dances. Frankie's birthday eve was the best, with an awesome Wycliffe Gordon leading the battle of the bones (trombones, that is) and Yvonne Glover (she has some set of pipes!) doing occasional vocals. You may find this hard to believe, but what I wore were short, non-vintage dresses—assuming things I've had for 25 years aren't vintage!

Swinging Design

I never did get to see a printed copy of that fabulous Frankie Manning book you designed,but I snuck at peek with the "look inside" function on Amazon. He must have been very happy having one of his dancing students design the book—it's pretty swingtastic. Are you planning on going to any of the Frankie 95 festivities? More importantly, what are you wearing!?

The logo on the website has that "connected I" thing going on that seems to be pretty popular this year, eh?

Honoring one Special Veteran

The New York Times article about the swingin' memorial service got it right. The late Frankie Manning was a great dancer and great leader. Thanks to Frankie, the Lindy Hop has new and zealous ambassadors. More importantly, though, Frankie was a human anti-depressant, a beloved friend and muse who inspired people to make things—including art and design—not just dance routines. As he got older, he could still swing. What made him great, though, was his generosity, warmth, grace. He taught us to hang out as well as swing out. More on the graphics for the Frankie 95 weekend (not done by BTD) separately. And just to tie things into this Memorial Day weekend: he served in World War II.

Symbiotica

Ha! John Parks's talented and truly gracious spouse, Melanie Marder Parks, is as talented as they come but not scary. Was John Park scared of you during crits because you were Patty Hearst (whatever happened to her? cf Sondheim) or because you were out of his mazeway? As for Ali and checking out the intersection of Catholic saints and Muslim beliefs: what a great anecdote. Let's get ecumenical! In a future post: more on famous women and one of Rafael's most recent projects . . .

Symbionese Suzanne

I've been wondering lately how Rafael is doing, and how his new(ish!?) venture, Alfalfa, has been going. I love the cheekiness of him as the George Lois-Muhammad Ali Saint Sebastian! I read somewhere that Muhammad Ali had to check with his spiritual advisor to make sure it was okay (as a Muslim) to be photographed as a Catholic saint.
It's tougher for women to pose as somebody [female] and still make it recognizable, I think. We were posed that problem (paint yourself as someone famous) in John Park's portrait painting class I took. The only famous women I could think of wouldn't necessarily be recognizable without their face, except for maybe Marie Antoinette or the Virgin Mary. I didn't want to do a film image, and I didn't want to do a "male gaze" portrait, so I came up with a painting of Patti Hearst in front of the SLA emblem.

Growing up in the '70s I was obsessed with her story, and in retrospect I realize how much I loved painting that logo (and I'm a little bit interested in why I left the palette as part of the painting—how po-mo of me!) I remember John Parks saying he was a little bit afraid of me during that painting critique.

Esquer and Esquire

More on my visit with Rafael Esquer in a longer, gushing-with-awe entry, but I'm sure—George Lois fan that you are—you'll get a kick out of a poster Rafael created for his talk at the Louisville Graphic Design Association in Muhammed Ali's Kentucky hometown. Serendipitously, while in the Ali Center, Rafael not only espied but also had his photo taken with The Greatest himself.

Lois . . . Louisville . . . Esquire . . . Esquer . . . what graphic punch to show off . . .

Semi-Separated at Birth

The logotype on this truck is not exactly migrating forms , but it seems to have sprung from a related typographic gene pool. Like "Migrating Forms," it moves.

Not my way or the highway

I am a fan of Interstate, but I think it's too urban for this 'un. Also, it doesn't have an italic, which can be inconvenient. I was thinking something like a Knockout, or Trade Gothic or Franklin Gothic. Depending on how they're used, they have grit but aren't too funky. Unlike Noah, who thought of using Adrian as a name (good name!) I didn't think of naming my kid Franklin (good thing! look ma, no kid!). Like Noah, I think Meta works well.

Good to know about PS Print. I recently did a favor for a friend who's starting a business as a house tender (from styling shoots, to headhunting to house tending) and the online printer seemed to give good value but it's good to have another option—aside from "real" offset and digital printers.

More etsy type

I always have such a problem picking a good sans! What is an earthier, less formal one? I'm always stuck in my mind with Frutiger, Helvetica Neue, and Gill Sans. I know you're a big fan of Interstate, but I can never get that to work for me.

Actually, I had a big mental problem switching from the long skinny format of the Etsy banner to the postcard size. Design is planning, but that wasn't in the plan in the beginning!

The postcard was in lieu of a business card, made at my favorite online cheapie digital printing place, PSPrint. Some of those miniatures (actually a whole set of 100 or so) were purchased by a hotel in Chicago, and they wanted a stack of business cards or postcards as promotional giveaways for their guests who inquire about the paintings.

Meanwhile, of course, yes, there was an eblast made. It's so 2009!

Lovely landscape langiappes

What lovely paintings, Suz. I hope Lori Kent does really well with her Etsy site (and her other brick-and-mortar galleries, for that matter). The Blockhead and Bickham Script play off of each other well. The Gill is readable, but I wonder if an earthier, less formal sans would have served the landscapes better. The overall postcard is handsome; your space frames the works so well (AND leaves space for the bar code strip!); and the important point is to get the word out about these beautiful encaustics, so my niggle about what the type may convey is is academic.

Are you/she making the postcard into an e-mailer as well? Have you noticed the huge proliferation of e-mail marketing during this economy? It seems a combo of life moving away from snail mail plus web marketing.

What's up with your painting?

My Design for an Etsy site

Haven't shown you this yet, but I helped an artist friend, Lori Kent, design her Etsy site for her series of 1,000 small paintings called Landfall: Small Southern Places.

I made a promo postcard for her, too, and was smart enough to remember to leave a white bar at the bottom for the mailing barcodes that always get slapped on! I was trying to capture her sense of whimsy and a folk art type feel, while still getting it to look clean and professional. For the record, the typefaces are Gill Sans, Bickham Script, and Blockhead Unplugged.
Front:

Back:

While I was at it, I snapped up a whole bunch of her lovely little encaustics.

Trajan Blow-up

Beth, that Trajan: The Movie Font video from the Goodie Bag people is so funny it deserves it's own embed!

Designing by a Star

I confess.

I love ABC's reality show Dancing With The Stars I love the dancing, the sometimes-teeny and always over-the-top costumes, and the show's evolving self-satirical bits. But wait! Before the AIGA revokes my membership, I rush to give a big disclaimer. I don't love the design. The graphics couldn't be cheesier. The show open with its script, is laughable. (Despite my comment about a flirty script in the TRAJAN TRUMP post, flirty scripts are pretty dang lame—and why do they pair one script with another, Nuptial Script to be precise? Oddly enough, my out-of-focus screen shot from the TV showing the sans serif label "STILL" provides a tacky but welcome typographical accent).



Looks 3; dance 10. But oh, the dance.

Luckily, dance and design-wise, it's possible to have the best of both worlds. A total aesthetic contrast to ABC's shows are the breathtaking dance publications issued by 2wice.



Running till May 15 at the AIGA gallery on Fifth Avenue, the exhibit honors Abbott Miller's collaboration with Patsy Tarr. Together, Tarr and Miller have produced the most glorious, exciting, extraordinarily tactile, and witty magazine that exalts dance. I give it them and the exhibit a 10! If you're following the DWTS metaphor, I'll be three judges and give it three 10s!

Dance Ink and 2wice are high to DWTS's low, but the magazines are never snooty, embalmed, or inaccessible. The designs (and editing; Abbott Miller has also been the editor for years) are so wonderful that they soar. The exhibit design/installation is also glorious—complete with mirror ball, just like the admittedly tacky mirror ball trophy about which Tom Bergeron so cheekily winks and nods.



One of my favorite set of panels shows an homage to Gerald and Sarah Murphy's ballet sets done in the 1920s for the Ballet Russes in Paris when they were gifted expatriates muses, and artists—and when everybody was so young. The same 1995 issue includes typography that is anything but laughable.



There's a also a Rauschenberg issue, which may be my favorite.





The sheer lyricism of the Rauschenberg issue vies with the sly and hilarious Martin Parr edition, Everybody Dance Now (from my posts, you'd think that it's Martin Parr month).




Of course, there are better shots than mine on the Pentagram site, but I took these FPO photo/notes just for you (and Tommy Salami).

While I'm showing the love, I'll quote Martin Parr's statement at the end of Everybody Dance Now:

Photography is perhaps the most democratic form of human expression, second only to dance. Virtually everybody owns a camera, even if it is a camera phone, and people record their family and friends. But the world probably has more dancers than photographers. Dancing in its many guises is a worldwide phenomenon, no matter your wealth, class or age. If you can still physically get up onto the floor, that urge never dies. I am delighted to combine these two precious art forms into one photographic essay.

I totally agree with my hero, Martin Parr. The art forms of dance and photography are precious in the sense they are to be cherished. In this exhbition, both dance and design are never precious in the sense of being affected, cool, or overly mannered. Have fun! Everybody dance now!

Trajan Whores

Yes and Yes. Yes I like it. Yes it's overused.

I admire Trajan, even though at this point Carol Twombly's type can seem soooo late 80s. What's cool about Trajan to me is that it refers to—surprise!—Trajan's column and is an homage to the incised proclamations on the column. But it's so overused—lazily and badly—that it's a typographical cliché, almost as bad as that your students's typographical chestnut, Papyrus.

I can see why you think of Trump and Trajan as evil twins.
TRAJAN's column is a monument in Rome to TRAJAN in TRAJAN's Forum to commemorate TRAJAN's victory in the Dacian Wars. The all caps face is perfect for a man like TRUMP who's built many a TRUMP Tower and TRUMP Hollywood and has had a few TRUMP cards in Atlantic City. Ego. Pride. Empires. It can get exhausting.

The Trump Hollywood logo is cleaner and less hackneyed, but the typography still lacks any detail and finesse and space. I do fear it's indeed the finished logo. At least it's used on the Trump Hollywood website, paired incongruously with a flirty flirty script (a nod to bikini babes?).





The most recent Ebert jacket (I'm not even going to talk about the earlier one) looks like an embryonic satire on movie titles and trailers. So many film titles use Trajan that there's a jokey film about it (which has no doubt been forwarded to you by at least 10 designers). My guess is that the jacket designer chose Trajan to evoke all those film titles and just didn't push it far enough.

Is it me?

Do you like Trajan? Is it just overused? I associate Trajan with Donald Trump!

This Trump logo is much, much better, although I'm not sure it's really an official one—


I was looking at the design of this Roger Ebert book cover (designer unknown, 2007), and I just hate the type. And I hate that the Trajan type is not sitting on the Helvetica type, but not NOT sitting on it either.


It is, however, a vast improvement on other Roger Ebert titles, like this one from 2000:

Triangle dot border, baseline shifted text, and the simulacra of typewriter AND handstamp! He's such a good movie critic; I wish we could design the covers!

You Have a Right to Sing the Crabbies

Well, he's just being ridiculous. Of course the arts don't need an AIG (don't hate me; I do think the Medicis were sorta helpful to the arts). I think that the current crappy economic climate will inspire more art.

Crabby arts

I'm thinking that artists have always, and will always, make art no matter what the current financial crisis is. And it's always been okay to have integrity—the arts don't need to count on the Medicis or the AIGs to finance ideas and creativity and thought—that a business has sprung up around the real estate and the resale of art is not my concern. Holland Cotter's point that it's going to be okay to make "real art" now that the economy is tanking . . . grrr.

Day-Job Time in America

Pretty cool contest! I'd love to spend a day with Parr.

Out of curiosity, what specific things made you cranky? One comment that struck me as odd is that "It's day job time in America." Day-jobs—even crappy ones—are hard to find. That said, the film director/tech genius/former painter who will soon no longer rent a desk in the BTD office has taken a job as a tech because his movie isn't getting funded. So, maybe Holland Cotter is right.

I hadn't seen "FPO." You're right. I'd indeed say they're so smart. I'll quote you quoting me. They are so all caps bold with handsome classic-aesthetic-applied-to-web smart! Handsome site, with glorious typography.

Synchronicity

Wow. Do I ever think of Martin Parr in my everyday life? (I would love a photo of beleaguered poor firefighters struggling around that landscaping!) Oddly, today's email included a link to a Google contest for photography students where the grand prize is to spend the day with Martin Parr.

More! Sam's club! I think I'm more concerned about the color coding. I'm with you on the Breakfast, but shouldn't Pizza be red, and New or Seasonal be spring green? That grey isn't doing anybody any favors!


And yes, I am a big fan of Holland Cotter, although The Boom is Over article in the NYTimes made me crabby.

Moving on, almost literally—have you seen Armin Vit and Bryony Gomez-Palacio's new blog, For Print Only? As you would say, they are so smart!

My Martin Parr Moment

It's presumptuous to even mention myself in the same sentence as Martin Parr (nice clean link to Martin Parr to come) but I just love his takes on life. On a rare walk around our Tarrytown neighborhood, I noticed this somewhat bizarre suburban symmetry.

Dance 10; Looks 3

Okay, I'm on a cheesy roll (both in images and in puns). While bemused and agog at Sam's Club—a far cry from carefully-designed city shopping—I noted this sign for the new freezer layout. While I applaud the idea of design planning and the goal of getting a customers in and out of Sam's stocks as quickly as possible, I shudder at the overall look and readability (and type choices) for the layout touting the new layout. The yellow for "Breakfast" is cute, however.

Happy Mother's Day, Suz!

I couldn't resist this totally tacky, totally undesigned and totally nasty piece of cake, courtesy of Sam's Club, where Pat and I did a major shop in prep for a get-together. I've always loved Noel Coward's quote "Extraordinary how potent cheap music is." The variation here is "Extraordinary how potent cheap dessert is."

Wavy Gravy with Gravitas

Pat pointed out the review, partly because Storm King is such a treasure to us.

There seems to be a movement among leading design thinkers to include science in a design worldview. In the video accompanying the Holland Cotter piece, Maya Lin talks about her interests to combine science and nature and the environment. I am happy to say I don't think Maya Lin is simply riding the wave (pun sort of intended) of a trend.

Goldsworthy's wall is amazing, although everything at Storm King is inspiring. Even the picnic areas at Storm King inspire outdoor meals worthy of an Impressionist painting (I realize that combining easy-viewing paintings with the awesome sculptures at Storm King seems silly, but more than once I've seen well-appointed picnic tables with food and feasts that are themselves works of art. Art in nature nurtures more art in nature?

BTW, is Holland Cotter an awesome art critic or what?

Wavy-gravy

I know what I'm doing this summer. Holland Cotter beat me to a review of Maya Lin's installation at Storm King in yesterday's New York Times—but wow!

I was lucky enough to see the stone wall by Andy Goldsworthy when it was first completed, and now I am totally going back to see this.

Wordy bird

I'll be wordy just for a sentence or two, to nod to the most recent (no longer that recent!) redesign of The Atlantic. Most designs—even the classical ones—have a subtle date stamp; the November 2008 inauguration of the redesign is no exception. It screams 2008 and is typographically cacaphonous. BUT that was 2008.

The slide show gives a grand tour of the magazine's design evolution http://podcasts.theatlantic.com/2008/10/151-years-of-atlantic-covers.php and gives a pretty clear view of how time periods are so very much themselves.

1, 2, 3

Another thought about that 19 20 21.

I showed the Helvetica movie in class last night (and I'm starting to meditate on some of the segments—I've seen the film 8 times already in the 2 years), and I spotted Wim Crouwel's earlier calendars, too, sporting the crushed Helvetica type.

The Cat and Baby Show

I was sorry to miss that event (and you!), too! Was my night to mind the store, as it were.

Yes, Jasper John's directive "Take something; do something to it; then do something else to it" runs through my head at least once a day. It helps to keep pushing the problem one more step. So 1 + 1 + 1 = 4.

I love the distillation of the Pentagram approach: x=big numbers + Rubik's cube image manipulation. I've been thinking that I'm the only non-fan of that Michael Bierut Sak's Fifth Avenue logo.



I'd think it was cool if it was just their tissue paper pattern, but I'm not sure of the rework of the old logo into the bags and stuff, which is mostly what I see people carrying. He did that with his redesign of the Atlantic, too. Does that count as doing something + doing something else? Or just doing something? (And sadly this 2008 redesign comes just 7 years after the last one.)

I agree with you about the 19 20 21 site. Without context or seeing the presentation you saw, the site seems a bit labored and belabored. Sometimes Flash sites can just seem endless. But the use of the numbers is pretty spot on, if not a direct homage to the Massimo Vignelli calendar.