Category: Design

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Art Design graphic design

Graphic Design In the Wild – Day 6: Hyper Bike Company

  • Spirited

I love when a company is created by a person who loves the product they’re building. It doesn’t always mean success, but at a minimum it’s a genuine attempt to improve things.

Hyper Bicycles was created in 1990 by BMX pro Clay Godsmid. It originally focused on building BMX racing frames and components. They have since expanded to mountain bikes.

Their typeface logo is an exercise in contrast. Something I learned a little about from Chris Do. From his ebook Typography Manual Vol. 1:

Go from light to bold, or from medium to extra bold when changing font weights. The key to great design is contrast.

– Chris Do

The “Hyper” font is chunky, thick, and bold, like the frame of a freestyle BMX bike. The “Bike Company” font thins out, but remains solid, like a pair of handlebars.

Contrast is king.

The+Futur+-+Type+ManualDownload
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Art Design graphic design

Graphic Design In the Wild – Day 5: Dark Horse Wine

  • But you can’t make it drink

Dark Horse Wine was founded in 2010.

Their goal was to deliver a premium tasting wine at a reasonable price.

But have you ever been to the wine aisle? There’s a glut of brands lining the shelves. How does a wine company stand out amongst the endless rows?

This was a challenge head winemaker Beth Liston understood. As she mentioned in a 2019 interview with The Buyer:

Trying to stand out in a sea of wine, and how to differentiate yourself. What is going to make someone standing in an overcrowded wine aisle pick your bottle rather than someone else’s has to be the biggest challenge.

It’s GRAPHIC DESIGN time.

Some may same say their logo is cliche. But to me, the wine glass silhouette as the horse’s blaze is graphic design brilliance. It turned my head in the wine aisle, and I was on my way to the frozen pizza. The use of negative space takes a few seconds to click in the mind (for me any way), but when it does, the entire brand is seared into your subconscious.

That last sentence might be fluff, but either way it’s a memorable piece.

Categories
Art Design graphic design

Graphic Design In the Wild – Day 4: Bird Scooters

  • Sweaty and beaten

Throughout the history of graphic design, logos emblazoned with wings are a mainstay.

You have the Detroit Red Wings, Redwing Shoes, The Athlete’s Foot, Birdman’s forehead insignia…

But the electric scooter company Bird, locked up the “winged” logo game for at least the next 6 months. It’s simple (only 7 lines). It’s distinct (recognizable 30 feet away). And still looks dope sweaty and beaten down.

And going back for seconds, Bird gives you three logos for one. Look close. Can you see the pair of wheels? The pair of raptor eyes? The pair of wings?

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Art Design graphic design

Graphic Design In the Wild – Day 3: Papa Lopez Mexican Cantina Restroom Signage

I can’t resist hand-painted lettering. A steady hand and brush can enliven any space. Even a restroom hallway.

Papa Lopez Cantina understands this. It would’ve been cheaper, and still effective, to slap the old Men and Women restroom signage to the doors. But somebody in the Papa Lopez art department believed in better.

Look close. You can still see the paint drying.

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Design graphic design

NEW PROJECT: Graphic Design In the Wild

Greeting friends!

Starting tomorrow we’re beginning a new project, Graphic Design In the Wild.

The goal? Capture a piece of graphic design in the physical world, for each day of April.

The two criteria for a daily piece are these:

1. The piece exists in the physical world. We can hold it, touch it.

2. The piece catches our eye.

I’ve wanted to do a project like this for a while, but fear and complacency have held me back.

Sometimes you have to leap.

See you tommorrow.

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amreading Art Design ideas Web

Robin Rendle’s Gorgeous Essay on Newsletters

I haven’t been surprised by the internet in a while. There’s all the common rants:

Social media sucks! Social media is the life changing wonder stick!

Substack sucks! Subtsack is majestical!

The 90s was the best decade ever! No! The 60s were utopia!

And all the other back-and-forth of opinions and wild fantasies that the internet harbors.

But then Robin Rendle‘s essay fell into my inbox – twice. (H.T. Austin Kleon and Alan Jacobs) His love note to newsletters and hope of a web for all, made for a bout of I’m finishing-this-damn-essay reading.

But it’s how he unleashed his essay, that shook my internet insides:

Using a combination of oldtimey illustrations, and funny, direct copy, he kills.

But it’s the scroll-and-read format of the essay which made it as memorable as the essay itself. I felt like I was slaloming through the piece rather than reading it.

Screenshots are weak.

Experience, read, view, contemplate, or disagree with Robin’s essay in it’s entirety below:

Categories
Art comics Commonplace Book Design Drawings Thinkers

Cartoonists and Copywork

Ivan Brunetti offers up the cartoonist’s version of copywork in his masterclass book – Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice

Homework Assignment 8 reads:

To the absolute best of your ability, create an exact replica of your favorite page. Do not trace. Any deviation from the original should be unintentional on you part; ineptitude and sloppiness are charmless when deliberate.

Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice, pg 60. Brunetti, Ivan

Brunetti then urges his students to pay close attention to each element of their comics page:

Pay close attention to what you are copying. Think about the artist’s decisions regarding page layout, panel compositions, design, characterization, dialogue, gesture, captions, balloons, word placement, sound effects, line, shape, texture, etc. Hopefully you will gain some appreciation of their working and thinking process… and the difficulty of creating a comics page.

Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice, pg 60. Brunetti, Ivan

Brunetti practiced this version of copywork in his own career.

He took on the Nancy strip for a time. The pressure from the syndicate to copy Ernie Bushmiller‘s style precisely, further developed his cartooning technique.

I can tell exactly the time period in my work when I was doing these-the syndicate were such nitpickers about me copying Bushmiller’s style exactly that my approach to cartooning got much more precise as a result. I went from doing strips just to amuse myself, without a grand plan, to focusing on formal aspects of cartooning much more: where to place a word balloon, the composition of every panel, and the flow of panels.

In the Studio: Visits with Contemporary Cartoonists, pg 279. Hignite, Tom

Brunetti enjoyed the project while in the learning phase, but admitted it was an unpleasant way to work:

When you’re copying someone else’s style exactly, you can theorize about it, and actually break it down into a set of rules. So they way I was working by imitating him had almost nothing to do with the way he was working…I also realized that working this way was totally unpleasant, because there are very strict parameters you have to follow, rather than discovering the rules that work. The project was fun while I was discovering all of the rules; I would notice that he would never put certain kind of marks next to one another because they’d look wrong. I became very aware of every penstroke, where he used a ruler, where it was freehand. He had an intuitive sense of what looked good, so for me it was trying to codify this into a set of rules, which made me realize the importance of the consistency of your cartooning vocabulary.

In the Studio: Visits with Contemporary Cartoonists, pg 279. Hignite, Tom

Could Brunetti’s copywork exercise translate into other disciplines as well?

If you’re an aspiring graphic designer you could recreate your favorite logos, stroke by stroke, in illustrator?

Or if you’re a programmer, instead of cutting and pasting, you typed out lines of code, line by line, character by character?

With thought and imagination, copywork exercises can be applied to every discipline.

Categories
amreading Design

Typeface Designer Doyald Young’s Personal Reading List

A person’s reading list is revealing.

But we tend to associate reading lists with authors, English professors, and self improvement podcasts.

So I was surprised when I came across typeface designer Doyald Young’s reading list, by both the number of titles and the content.

There was little in the way of design.

Young’s list of titles include classic literature, memoir, essay collections, and history tomes.

After learning about Young’s pre-design career life, the variety on his reading list comes as less of a surprise.

The life experiences collected as a former bellhop, usher, railroad breakman and junk car dismantler (technical term) must’ve contributed to his varied reading tastes.

Below are the titles that surprised me most. There isn’t an
algorithm here, only an instant reaction.

The descriptions below the titles are Doyald’s words.

One Hundred Years of Solitude—Gabriel Garcia Marquez 
Three generations in a Columbian village 

The Elements of Style—Prof. Strunk and E. B. White 
How to write clearly by two no-nonsense teachers.

Slow Days and Fast Company—Eve Babitz 
A wicked tale of Hollywood, Rolling Stone, and groupies

The Elements of Typographic Style—Robert Bringhurst 
A poet’s expert take on typography, beautifully designed. A classic, vital book.

Young’s reading list was posted in it’s entirety on his wonderful website.

Unfortunately it’s down at the moment.

The remainder of the list is below:

On Photography—Susan Sontag 
Thoughts on images by one of our finest thinkers 

The Proud Tower—Barbara Tuchman 
The events that led to WWI 

The Seven Sisters—Anthony Sampson 
History of the companies that developed the Middle East oil fields 

Growth of the Soil—Knut Hamsen 
A Nobel Prize winner’s take on injustice and farm life 

The Sun King—Nancy Mitford 
The History of Louis xiv, Versailles and lots of gossip 

Conquest of Mexico—William Prescott 
Cortez’s foray into Mexico; adventure, betrayal, wise kings and monks 

Language and Silence—George Steiner 
Artists who abandon their art. Heavy going. Enlightening.

Madame Bovary—Gustav Flaubert 
An elegant tale about vanity. An easy reading classic.

Collected Stories of Paul Bowles 
One of America’s finest short story writers. Penetrating. Bizarre, exotic.

Let it Come Down—Paul Bowles 
A tale of love and madness in the desert

Four Essays on Liberty—Isaiah Berlin 
Heavy going about liberty. Vital.

The Greek Way to Civilization—Edith Hamilton 
An introduction to art, history, culture and politics

Axle’s Castle—Edmund Wilson 
Literary criticism. American writers who fled to Paris after WW1

Stories of Three Decades—Thomas Mann 
Formal, classic stories of the human condition

Patterns in Nature—Peter S. Stevens 
A learned, insightful account of form and texture in nature. Vital.

From:

http://www.doyaldyoung.com/20-books-doyald-recommends/, Doyald Young

https://www.aiga.org/medalist-doyaldyoung/, Marian Bantjes