Returning to the world of blogging…

Sorry for the long delay. I’ve been doing an internship at Yee-Haw Industrial Letterpress this summer and have spent a lot of time with that. It’s been a wonderful experience, and packed full of learning. Kevin, Julie, and the rest of the Yee-Haw gang are tremendous people. It’s also been wonderful working with my good friend Charlie Finch. Spending the summer the best way I can imagine!

As always, I’m buying things online. I’ve come across a couple of awesome deals, so there are two of my recent purchases:

I believe that has me set on shoes for the time being. Lately I’ve been studying Wolfgang Weingart, great stuff (thanks to Kyle Blue for the recommendation.)

More soon, I promise!

synthesizing

By way of Antenna Trade Digest.

sockless, grids, mags.

So, I am a big fan of the sockless look/feel. I have a pair of oxfords, a pair of sperry topsiders, and onitsuka tigers and all feel awesome without socks. The biggest challenge is not having your shoes become ruined or smell really bad after wearing them without socks. Right now I have some cheap no-show socks that are pretty good, but still come up a little too much (aka, they can be seen.) Are there any awesome no-show socks that are 100% invisible in most shoes? Maybe I should design my own with a pair of scissors.

I found a copy of Allen Hurlburt’s The Grid in Nashville for $4.50. Quite the deal, as it is normally around $65. There’s some highlighting throughout the book, which kind of kills the quality of the copy, but I will not complain too much since I got such a great deal on it. Lately I’ve been sitting down to really get down with grids. I love simple, clean layouts with small details added to give character.

A good example (that I would love to get my hands on) is Fantastic Man magazine, which I came across thanks to Kyle Blue’s (creative director at Dwell, who judged our 62nd annual student design compeition) twitter status.I can’t find copies of the magazine around my area, but the covers and layouts feature realely elegant, beautiful type and compositions.

There’s so much beautiful work out there that I just can’t seem to get enough of. Just studying these magazines and books gives me such a quicker grasp on how to make things work in design. Looking at them on the internet is never enough, though, because seeing the physical relationships on the page is what it’s all about.

Lately I’ve also been enjoying browsing the Wim Crouwel flickr group. Like a lot of students in design, I appreciated his commentary and work shown in the film Helvetica. Good stuff and notably, back in the day, he used gradients very well.

I’m going to become more engaged

Not only in blogging (thanks for the motivation, Grace) but in my study of design in general. I’ll begin by doing a short run down of some interesting things I’ve been looking at recently.

I am currently reading a book on Abram Games and have really grown fond of his work. I don’t see a lot of posters that activate 3-D dimensional space so well, and he was doing this 60 years ago. My hope is to develop some posters that use similar techniques, marrying design with some 3-D renderings, to achieve some work with a lot more depth.

His environments are so expansive, yet the ideas put forth in the posters read immediately. Balancing that act is something I am not able to do yet, but through the study of his work I hope to gain some sort of understanding.

Though it isn’t carried in Knoxville, I’ve seen a lot of spreads from Newwork Magazine and completely love it. When I get some money, I am thinking about ordering a copy or two. The large format of the magazine is incredible, and the use of photography, overprinting, and whitespace is amazing.

But that’s enough talking about things. I need to get back to making. I have various projects on my plate right now, and I really feed the need to push forward with my design. Rather than wishing for more time to do things, I have to figure out how to do more valuable things with the time that I have available. On top of that, I really want to see Watchmen this weekend.

web typography

Typography on the web seems to be rarely considered. It’s always a pleasure to find a site that is considered as a page, with ample amounts of white space, typographical hierarchy, and readability. Through the advent of great sites like Web Typography, which uses Robert Bringhurst’s book The Elements of Typography Style as an inspiration, many websites I’ve seen recently are starting to really take into account the beauty of the grid, and proper typographic style.

Three I’ve seen recently are:

A Brief Message – Good use of classic red, white, and black scheme. Plenty of white space.

Monday by Noon – I love simply, black and white pages. I’m a word person, so I always love to see words held up to such clean, pristine quality, especially on the web.

The Morning News – Black, white, and read all over. It’s great to see a clean, readable newspaper done online.

first post

So I left my old blog behind and began anew. Also, I’ve been in bed, asleep and on massive pain killers and antibiotics for the past week, fighting off an upper respiratory infection. After being sick for so long, and with the advent of a new blog, I feel like this is a fresh start. In Knoxville today, it was also well above 60 degrees, so it also feels like spring.

Getting back into gear, tomorrow I will make some posts regarding design. See you then.