Poster: Clarion West (2008)

This is the 5th year in a row that the Clarion West Writer's Workshop has asked me to design a poster for their advertising. It's a yearly project that I look forward to and I happily donate my design time, because they are really great at giving me a lot of creative freedom (and pay for the printing of a cool screenprint too!)

It's also a big challenge because the poster is used for advertising and there's a lot of information to get across. John Berry has been their art director for the past couple years and is an excellent typographer, so I get a bunch of type mentoring too, which is always nice.

This poster is the second idea that I came up with. The initial idea I actually created a rough comp for, but I decided that that design would probably work better (with evolution) as a book cover, rather than a poster, so I'm saving it for later.

The design that I ended up creating I really like a lot. I created it at night during a business trip to Denver, and I had no access to a scanner, so all of the imagery that is collaged into the poster I already had on my harddrive -- the elements I've either used before in other compositions or they were images that I had scanned in for other projects but never ended up using.

I like that it doesn't overtly scream "science fiction and fantasy". Well, maybe the skeleton dude does, but maybe not. I really enjoy the shape of the black arabic letterform bits and the overall colors. I'd like to have a small amount printed on a natural stock, which I think will work with those colors well. The colors remind me of 1950s gravure printing, which had such mellow, non-super-saturated colors.

18" x 24", 3-color screenprint.

Unclassifiable: Pacifico Van design (2008)

One of the coolest jobs that I've done this year is a van design for Pacifico Beer. The campaign is really cool. 18 different artists were picked and each given a theme that relates to the story/idea/feel of Pacifico Beer. Each artist was then given free reign to create a design/illustration that would then be actually hand-painted onto a mid-1960s Volkswagen van. A lot of the surfers in the 1960s and 1970s painted their VW vans and this is picking up on that. The vans are then driven all around the US, spreading the gospel of Pacifico.

For a big corporation, I think this campaign is really edgy and cool. The artists involved all were top notch and I felt really honored and really nervous to be in the final group (I will happily say that I thought I was the least talented of the bunch).

My theme was the Pescadores (the fishermen). The pescadores are in many ways the wisemen of the fishing villages, and there are a set of tall tales, myths, and traditions that are orally passed down by them, like how the rattlesnake got its rattle, and the legend of the octopus (and how it likes to steal beer - especially Pacifico, of course).

I came up with the idea of having the color gradation on the top and bottom halves -- I was thinking of how with many printing techniques, you can have a 'split fountain' effect, which means that two or more different colors of ink are allowed to mix together on the print surface, creating this gradation effect (this originated with letterpress, I believe, where ink for large jobs was held in a "fountain" device which sat above your ink plate or roller surface and fed a steady, measured amount of ink. Different colors of ink could be compartmentalized in the fountain, only to mix when they hit the printing rollers.) Anyway...

If your familiar with any of my work, you know already that I'm pretty enamored with ornamentation and squigglies and both are used prominently here. The squiggly fishing line really conveyed to me the idea of the motion and active skill of the pescadores. And it looked cool.

Apparently the van is being painted right now or is already done. I'm super excited to see what it ends up looking like. I'm especially excited that it's going to be hand-painted and not just wrapped in a digital print, like you see all the time now. I'm really interested in the process of how the painter and their technique and skill will modify my original design, making it a hybrid of my art and theirs. I'll post a pic of the van when I get one.

I'd love to do this type of project again.

Poster: Art of Modern Rock (2006)

This was a poster created for the opening of the exhibition Art of Modern Rock: The Poster Explosion at Experience Music Project in 2006. This was an exhibition that I curated with Dennis King, Gabe Kean, and Jacob Covey which originally debuted at Seattle's Bumbershoot Festival in late August 2005. The exhibition was based on a book of the same name edited by Dennis King and Paul Grushkin. More on the exhibition later. The poster was designed by myself, using as the central image the exhibition logo that was created by Jacob Covey (an excellent designer, who just happens to be the art director at Fantagraphics.)

The idea for the poster (and the logo, really) was to try and create some sort of pleasing abstract collage using imagery and striking colors that seems\ to be common in rock posters. The arrows and cloud of the logo combine with the skulls, birds, women, dots and doodles of the background to hopefully form a poster that is evocative of rock posters, without being a cliche. I kind of like it.

Book Covers: Lost Books Resurrected (2006)

In early 2006, I think, Jeff VanderMeer was working on an article for SFsite about the lost or forgotten books by various well-known and respected authors. The trick was that the books were all made-up. He asked me if I'd design some covers for these bullshit books. It sounded like something right up my alley, so I agreed. Jeff supplied the authors and titles and I was free to do whatever I wanted.

Since it was just for fun and there wasn't any money exchanging hands, I decided that I'd try and spend under 30 minutes on each one and just try and make something cool in that amount of time. It actually worked pretty well. Some are stinkers, like The Original Laura and Dictionary of the Khazars: Hermaphrodite Edition, but the others I kind of like. The Messiah is kind of cheating, since it's basically a poster that I did for an improv show and just repurposed. In any case, it was a fun project, that made me think more about not worrying so much about details and trusting in the "happy accident."

Poster: Zidane (2008)

I recently designed a poster for the Northwest Film Forum for their screening of Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait. They already has a poster that was being used for advertising, but one of the board members had pushed forward the idea of creating a commemorative screen printed poster to sell at the showings.

I donated my design time and we kept the designs to 2 colors to save on cost. I first created the design below, which I thought would look pretty cool. The idea was that the black layer would actually go down first and the dark grey layer would be a thinned-out white ink screen printed on top of the black, creating the ghostly grey. It didn't resonate with the client, so I created the design at top, which they did like. I'm pretty happy with both.

VERA t-shirt (2007)

The Vera Project is a great resource for kids who are into music and art in Seattle. It's an all-ages venue, but also has a recording studio and a screen printing studio. Every year they have a screen printing fundraiser, where 20 or so designers submit one-color VERA logo designs. Then you go to the event, buy a t-shirt, pick your design, and screen it yourself. This is what I submitted this year.

Book Cover: The Devil Gets His Due by Leslie Fiedler (2007)

I just finished this cover design for The Devil Gets His Due by Leslie Fiedler. It comes out on Counterpoint Press at some point in 2008.

I've been noticing lately that, whereas in the past I would naturally design as if I were designing for screen printing, regardless of whether it would be screen printed, now I seem to be breaking out of that a little bit and getting very inspired by texture and transparency. I guess it's still "screen print think", since you can achieve colors shifts with overlapping, but instead of having everything be completely opaque, I'm liking this new subtlety of overlapping semi-transparent objects.

In any case, I'm pretty happy with this design. Click on the image to see details.

Exhibition Catalog: American Sabor (2007)

Experience Music Project opened a new exhibition called American Sabor: Latinos in U.S. Popular Music on October 13, 2007. It was curated by Jasen Emmons and the exhibition was designed by Ken Burns. I was fortunate enough to be able to design the catalog. It is 40-odd pages, saddlestitched, with deep "french flaps" on the front and back covers. It was a challenge to design because all of the text was bilingual, English and Spanish. The english text of course came rather late, and the translations later, so there were lots of last minute layout freakouts. There were many artifacts pictured in the catalog and in order to promote the idea that these aren't just images, but archival, physical artifacts, I clipped out each image and did a slight drop shadow on the images. All in all, I think it turned out beautifully.

Ephemera: McGuizzo Dry Chimichurri Rub (2007)

Every holiday, my wife and I try and plan some sort of handmade item that we can give out to friends and family. In past years it has been home-brewed beer with custom designed labels. This year it is the McGuizzo Dry Chimichurri Rub. I like projects like this because they are easy to do, make you feel good because you're exercising your DIY muscles, and they look fabulous. The rub recipe is from the McGuizzo Family Archives, circa 1957. Spices were bought in bulk at PCC, the steel tins were purchased at Storables, and the label was designed by myself, printed out on my printer, and hand trimmed with an Xacto knife. The labels were then adhered with a combination of Elmer's glue and gluestick. Instant cool present. And it makes meat taste good as well.

Exhibition: The Seattle-Havana Poster Show (2007)

The Seattle-Havana Poster Show is an exhibition of contemporary screen printed posters from, uh, Seattle and Havana that debuted at the Bumbershoot Festival in Seattle in 2007. The show was organized by myself and Seattle-based graphic designer (and Creative Manager at Starbucks) Daniel Smith, along with two curators based in Havana: Pedro Contreras Suárez of El Centro de Desarrollo de las Artes Visuales and Pepe Menéndez, Design Director of Casa de las Américas. The show is currently gearing up to travel to Havana, Cuba, where it will be on display at El Centro de Dessarollo de las Artes Visuales from April 17 - May 17, 2008. More information on the show itself (besides this post) can be found at the exhibition website.

The show concept was initiated by Dan Smith, who had travelled a few times to Cuba for pleasure and as part of a graphic design conference. During his time there, he met with several graphic designers and the seed idea for the show was germinated.

Dan contacted me because I had curated several shows on music posters (Paper Scissors ROCK: 25 Years of NW Punk Poster Design (2003) and the Art of Modern Rock (2005/6)) and I just happen to co-own a screenprinting shop. In any case, I was to be the Seattle guy and Dan was to be the Cuban guy, and Pedro and Pepe were to be our Cuban experts (and future lead curators when this travels to Havana in 2008).

There was no particular reason to feature these two cities except for the fact that both of them have vibrant screen printed poster scenes, although seemingly for very different reasons. In Seattle, screen printing is not an inexpensive process (xeroxed flyers are much more economical) and the posters are often created not really to advertise an event (almost always a music concert) but more as commodities that are sold to fans of the bands that have played at the show. This is obvious, at least to me, in the way that typography is often dealt with in Seattle posters -- since they aren't usually used to advertise, there is no need for all of the relevant text (bands/dates/venue/price) to be prominent and large, as they would be with posters with a primary purpose to advertise. Seattle posters, for the most part, serve as fairly free-form creative canvases for the designer.

In Havana, screen printing is one of the most affordable methods of printing. Strangely enough, the Cuban government largely doesn't allow the posters to be posted in the city, so most of the screen prints in Havana are seen only at the event they would have advertised. Many of these posters are created for cultural events -- not music as much as film series, exhibitions, etc.

Dan and I decided that our approach would be to meld the two cities visually. We found visual similarities between individual Seattle and Havana posters, and displayed them together, always in a Seattle poster/Havana poster pair. We also had four focus areas, where we featured individual artists in either city, that we thought deserved a closer look.

One aspect that we planned from the beginning was large-scale maps of each city, indicating prominent artists' studios with associated artist bios, venues, and other serigraphic hotspots. These maps would be projected onto a wall with an overhead projector (and standard McMurray exhibition trick), traced, and painted. Any text or precision elements would be added in vinyl.

At first we envisioned literal maps, but we soon realized that they would most likely be unrecognizeable to most people (not to mention really difficult to execute with the time and people available), so we decided on thematic maps. So, the United States became a cow, and Cuba a swordfish. Below is a horrible photo of me (white shirt) in front of a half-finished U.S. map with artist Devon Varmega in the foreground.



We also wanted to have a projected slideshow where we could feature Dan's copious photos of Havana and photos of artists and studios in Seattle.




Below is the United States map, indicating Seattle at the rump. Devon Varmega's posters on the right.


The Cuban map (apparently inspiring amorous feelings in the audience):


One wall of the gallery featuring the poster pairs



In order to show how screen printing works, we featured two sets of progressive proofs, which show the poster as each color layer is printed. This shows how designers use color order, trapping, and ovelapping colors to create their designs. The poster featured below is the exhibition poster, created by a design collective in Havana called Grupo Camaleon.


An artist focus section (below) featuring famed Pacific NW designer Art Chantry. The King of Hawaii pumpkin poster is actually printed onto a copper foil sheet!


Designer Andrio Abero standing in front of his Death Cab for Cutie poster.



The exhibition was only ran for less than a week -- the length of the Bumbershoot Festival. Portions of the exhibition were then shown at three branches of the Cafe Verite coffeeshops in Seattle (Verite is one of the exhibition sponsors). As I said above, the exhibition is going to travel to Cuba in March of 2008. Dan and I are planning to create a catalog featuring all of the designers' work to further the cultural exchange.

The framing devices I made out of plexiglas and a compressed plastic sheeting called sintra. I created them for a previous exhibition (The Art of Modern Rock) and reused them for this show. The plex and sintra were cut to size on a table saw, paired together and drilled with spaced holes. Once the posters were installed in the frames (the were held in position along the bottom edge of the posters by transparent photo corners) the frames were screwed directly into the walls. There were spacers behind the frames so that they stood out from the wall just so. The screws meant that install took a while, but it also was instant security. You'd have to tear down the walls to steal a poster.

Maybe I'll see you in Havana in April!

Book Cover: Voyage of the Proteus by Thomas M. Disch (2007)

Bill Schafer at Subterranean Press asked me recently if I'd like to do a cover design for a new Thomas Disch novella, titled The Voyage of the Proteus: An Eyewitness Account of the End of the World (preorder it here). I've always loved Disch -- I kind of consider him the Frank Zappa of genre lit, in that he seems to delight in surprising and shocking anyone and everyone. I think it's a fascinating quality. In any case, after working with Tom on Payseur & Schmidt's first hit, the Mecca/Mettle project, how could I say no to another round?

I had a slight problem, however, in that I got the following from Bill:

It would be of a single mast Greek ship, coming toward the viewer, with the sail full and puffed forward. The perspective would be from slightly above. You might be able to see the oars on either side of the ship though this isn't strictly necessary. There could be people on the deck or not. Your call. In the background, at sea, on the horizon, would be the mushroom cloud from an atomic blast.

Very specific idea, which is fantastic for me, because there's nothing worse than vague directions in this field, but the problem was that I can't illustrate my way out of a box. If you've looked at any of my design work before, it's pretty apparent, I think, that I'm halfway decent at collage, but an illustrator, I am not.

So, I decided that it would be really cool to collaborate on this project with my friend Shawn Wolfe, who is an excellent illustrator. Shawn was in to the idea, and Bill was cool with it, so we began.

Unlike the Mecca/Mettle book (which I just realized I haven't posted about, so I'll have to), where illustrator Tim Kirk supplied a finished drawing and then I unilaterally designed the cover, I felt that this project worked out as a true collaboration between Shawn and myself.

We have completely different visual styles and methods of working, so we thought it might be good for Shawn to begin with a draft illo, since we had such specific direction, and then I would add some of my ideas and repeat until we were both satisfied.

Here's Shawn's initial rough illo:


The boat was spot on, but we decided to trim down the nukes to just one, in case there was any back cover text (we didn't have any of that at the time). Shawn revised and came back with this below:

I liked the bright colors of the trireme and thought it might be cool to have the nuke image almost seem screenprinted in a milky transparent white on some degraded paper. This also made it feel that there was some negative space where I could design something complementary. I roughed in the type alone, but it felt a little too bare. The weird squiggly bits I actually saw on the Bibliodyssey blog. They were these really interesting 19th century Art Nouveau ornaments. The images on Bibliodyssey were hi-res enough that I could play with them in Photoshop and then use Live Trace in Illustrator to turn them into smooth vector paths.

I've been getting away from my former method of designing everything as if it was going to be screen printed, and incorporating more textures and transparency into the design. It was kind of freeing to start thinking, "oh yeah, this is being printed 4-color. I can do all these things."

Shawn kept refining the nuke illustration and the ship, and we played around for a while with the idea of making the cover seem really distressed and adding a Greek trireme stamp that Shawn found (and was the color scheme inspiration), but we eventually abandoned this, since it seemed like too much going on.

Here's what the final cover worked out to be (below). It doesn't seem like a huge amount of difference from beginning to end, but Shawn and I went back and forth six or seven times, minutely tweaking bits here and there. Bill and Tom loved the cover, which was cool. I'll post the finished product when I get one in my hands in early 2008.

Farouche Assemblage Update

I posted some finished photos and commentary here on my design for "The Farouche Assemblage" chapbook.

Book: ANWAGTHAP by Nicola Griffith (2007)

Nicola Griffith was cool enough to want to publish her amazing memoir with Payseur and Schmidt. Since she was entrusting us with something near and dear to her heart, we felt like we should reciprocate by creating a whole box of memories, instead of a typical memoir in book form. For And Now We Are Going To Have A Party: Liner Notes to a Writer's Early Life, I designed the following: a CD of Nicola's songs from her early 1980s punk/new wave band Janes Plane (and more), three scratch-and-sniff cards detailing scents particular to specific wheres and whens in Nicola's life, a letterpressed preface card by Dorothy Allison, a fold-out poster of a collage Nicola made in her early years in Catholic school, a signing sheet masquerading as a baby photo, a fascimile of the first book that she ever created, and five volumes of her memoir -- all housed in die-cut box and secured by a printed "obi" band.

Design-wise, I ended up creating a very minimal design for the project, since I had little time to create this gem, and I really wanted Nicola's imagery to show through. This was the first project that was printed entirely by my friends Lance and Beth at Thingmakers in Tacoma. I'm pretty proud of the whole project and it definitely has been well-received - now I just need more people to purchase this gem, so we can make our money back!

Order here!

Book cover: Under My Roof by Nick Mamatas (2007)

Update: the final cover for Under My Roof by Nick Mamatas, for Soft Skull Press:

I think it turned out rather well. I changed the original gnome image (thanks to Mike Monteleone for the photograph) to a more capricious and semi-smiley gnome (complete with thumbs-up), and completed the spine and back covers.

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Here's a comp I just turned in for a reprint of Nick Mamatas' great short novel Under My Roof. I was a big fan of his previous novel Move Under Ground and so when Soft Skull Press asked me to create the cover, how could I say no?
I'll post more on this when I finish the spine/back/etc. I'm sure it will look different by then!

Poster: Night of Improv (2004)

This is a pretty old poster for me, but I think it still holds up pretty well. I was really trying at this point to find ways to make digital type not so clean looking. I didn't have an analog xerox machine, which is what I would have liked (and still should get, if I had the space), so I couldn't use that tried and true method of "shitting" out type, so, at least for this, I ended up setting blocks of type and then tracing over the letterforms with a sharpie, and then re-scanning those in for placement. It looks appropriately crappy and comforting.

Postcard: Payseur & Schmidt (2007)

Here's a simple piece of silly ephemera that I generated for Payseur & Schmidt. It's kind of a worthless advertising piece, but it cracks me up, so I went with it. The front is basically stolen from a late 19th century trade card advertising a hat company. I just replaced the type with what I wanted. The back Riot Act image is from this cool Encyclopedia of Ephemera book (by Maurice Rickards) that I've had for a couple years. I didn't realize that reading the Riot Act was an actual practice starting in 1714 to disperse mobs of rioters. The Act needed to be read to the letter and then the mob had 1 hour to disperse, or face life imprisonment. The Act also absolved the police force for any injuries or deaths that happened during this period (after the hour had ended.) Fun times!

Book Cover: The Best of Lady Churchill's (2007)

Update: here's the actual published version of the book, front and back. You can get it via Amazon.

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Another job I recently finished was for Del Rey for The Best of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, which if you don't know already, you really should. It's the fabulous semi-regular zine published by Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant, and if you don't know them, you should as well. Go to their awesome venture Small Beer Press and check it out.

Anyway, I had designed Elizabeth Hand's Generation Loss cover (see somewhere below in this blog) for them and that worked out nicely, so they had recommended me to Del Rey for this job. I came up with three completely different comps which were thrown around for a while. The final cover contained parts of one of the comps but really went in a different direction altogether. It was a nice project.

At top is basically the final cover (some quotes, logos, and other adjustments will be made by Del Rey/Random House)

This (below) was my favorite comp of the bunch, though I can see how they wanted something a little different. The great thing about rejected comps is that you can use them for other projects. This comp became the 2007 Clarion West poster (see below in the blog to check this out).

Poster: Jonathan Safran Foer (2005)

This was a quick poster for a co-worker that was promoting the event.

color xerox, 150 copies, 11" x 17"

Poster: Beat Bush Bash (2004)

Ah, the optimism of pre-election 2004. I created this poster for an event some friends of mine were doing to rally against the re-election of the Evil One. In an adjacent dimension, this tactic worked. But alas, we reside in a darker iteration of reality.


In any case, while they liked the design, I think my friends were wanting something a little more overtly anti-GWB. Oh well. I think it's pretty. My wife Sara did all of the lettering except for the headline type.

Poster: Clarion West (2007)

Clarion West has been cool enough to ask me to design their poster for them for the last 4 years. I really like this design. It actually was originally a rejected cover comp that I submitted to Random House for an upcoming anthology of the best of the Kelly Link and Gavin Grant - edited Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet. But that's kind of the awesome thing about rejected comps -- at least for me, since my comps are basically finished pieces -- I can reuse them for other projects!!!

So, I think this makes a great poster and I'm pretty excited by it. I like the idea that a reading series that is clearly featuring authors of science fiction and fantasy doesn't necessarily have to feature dragons, wizards or spacecraft. To me, it just needs to read as intriguing and fantastical.

This will be a 4-color screenprint, 300 copies, 18" x 24"

Book Illustrations: Ted Chiang's "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" (2007)

One of the big projects that I've been working on that I recently finished is "illustrations" for a new Ted Chiang story "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" being released in July by Subterranean Press as a deluxe hardback chapbook. Ted's short story collection, Story of Your Life, and Others, is one of my favorite story collections that I've ever read. Ted contacted me asking for suggestions for potential artists to illustrate his new story, and I suggested a few, but then I went all fan-boy and offered up my mediocre services if all other avenues failed, giving the caveat that I'm no illustrator and I didn't think that I could do anything actually illustrative of the story's content, but I could do themed abstracts. Well, since I'm posting images from the story, I guess I ended up getting the job. "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" is a crazy, awesome time travel story in a sort of Arabian Nights setting. I had to come up with 5 interior illos using black and one other color (various tints of that 2nd color were cool too) and a cover illustration that could be 4-color printed, so no limits on color there. In any case, I ended up being surprised that the initial comps that I was creating actually kind of were illustrative of the story, but that also made some things really hard, since I'd come into situations where I really needed to have an image to represent, say, a dead woman, and one that wasn't a 19th century European. And this was really hard to find. Since I'm not an illustrator, but more of a collagist or photomontage-ist, I have to have my source material. And much readily available clip art out there, via Dover books, or even non-clip art sources, are primarily European or Western oriented - at least the books readily available to me. The part that complicated this a bit was that the illustrations needed to not have any modern reference points, but needed to really seem appropriate to the Middle Ages setting, which visually means that I needed to stick with engravings and etchings, mostly. Anyway, it all worked out great. Ted is a great client, because he has really specific ideas of what he wants, and he can articulate what he wants extremely well -- so basically, as a designer, he's a client that I rarely get. So that was a pleasure. An additional pleasure was that John Berry was designing the book, and it was great to be able to work with a designer that is interested in crazy stuff (and one that knows volumes more about design than I ever will).

Below are the interior illos comps that were turned in.

Exhibition: Beasts! (2006)

Beasts! was an exhibition that opened in December 2006, curated by Gabe Kean and myself at Kean's studio/gallery Belle & Wissell. The exhibition was based on a book of the same name edited by Jacob Covey (Fantagraphics, Unflown). The exhibition and the book were "released" at roughly the same time.

Beasts! the book featured 90 different awesome artists creating their conceptions of various folklorish and mythical beasts from the cobwebby reaches of the human psyche. Amazing artists, amazing book.

For the exhibition, Gabe Kean and I wanted to be able to showcase some of the original artwork by the artists in the book, but also create a unified space that would act as a Beasts Central, so to speak. Gabe and I are very interested in the art of exhibitry and how the accoutrements of exhibitions (the graphics, text panels, casework, presentation, etc.) are just as vital to the success of the exhibition as the "artifacts" themselves. So often you see art exhibitions with amazing artwork accompanied by shittily-made object tags or a xeroxed, taped-to-the-wall artist statement. Horrible. Why not make everything look awesome.

So, Gabe and I split up the space into 4 components. 1) a flavorful intro wall, 2) an assemblage of original artworks, 3) a Beasts-centric map of the world, and 4) an interactive projection kiosk that feeds you all the content from the book in an unique way.

Gabe Kean and Aaron Hedquist created the projection interactive, I created the map wall and associated graphics, and we all collaborated on the rest, including general look, feel, graphic implementation, and install.

The opening was packed. See below for details.

(Below) - this is the graphic that I designed so the visitor could interact with the map wall. Each of the beasts featured in the book are indicated on the graphic, which correlates to data points on the map. There's also tons of pseudo-intellectual bullshit and in-jokes to fill in the rest of the white space. I love this graphic. I think it'd make a swell poster. I have the files if anyone wants to pay for it.


Exhibition opening (below) as visitors interact with map wall.

Adam Grano (below) exploring the projection interactive. The bummer with these photos is that the projection seems rather dim, which at least at night during the opening it was not.

Full view of the map wall (below) - I think these photos were taken after the map graphic fell off the wall and was slightly damaged (even with all the velcro we used!)


Another view of the map wall (below). The map graphic was stolen from some web vector image. I made a black positive onto a transparency and projected it onto the wall with my overhead projector. Then it was traced and painted with two coats of paint at a shade lighter than the wall color. Data points and numbers were vinyl and added by hand.

Assemblage of original artworks from the book (below):


Intro wall (below), including the Jacob Covey-designed Beasts! logo. Sign painter and all-around awesome artist Sven Sundbaum chalked out the logo on the blackboard and hand wrote all of the artist names.

Book: The Farouche Assemblage by Matthew Hughes (2007)

Update to this post: "The Farouche Assemblage" turned out quite well. It's gotten quite a few compliments, which is nice, and is actually now sold out. Check out photos of the chapbook:





The cover was hand-trimmed by myself and Therese Littleton, to fit the profile of Jason Van Hollander's head illustrations.

An interesting thing happened with the limitation page (directly above), primarily because of my ill-planning. As happens with most every project that I do for Payseur & Schmidt, there are long periods of idleness punctuated by concentrated moments of accomplishment. During one of these modes of action, I got the cover printed at Patent Pending Press, the interior designed and printed, and arranged to use my printer friends Lance and Beth Thingmakers' perfect binding machine. I drove down to Tacoma, spent all day wasting Lance and Beth's time by cajoling them into showing me how to score the covers, use their binding machine, and trim all the copies on the huge evil paper cutter.

Then I remembered that I needed to send just the limitation pages up to Matt Hughes in British Columbia so that he could sign them. But, alas, they were already bound. So I thought I might be able to send all the books to Matt, but he was concerned that they may get tied up at the border, and maybe even never make it to him. He's much smarter than I am. I probably would have lost all of the books forever in some U.S./Canada border black hole.


So, I thought of the solution in the last photo above. Hughes' Archonate universe is that Vancian combination of the so-far-in-the-future-it-might-as-well-be-the-past scenario, so I designed a signing strip that felt appropriate, printed them out on a color Xerox machine, all ganged up as many as I could fit on a page, and then sent those off to Hughes. Then I thought it'd be cool if we used a rubber stamp to mimic an official Archonate Seal and use an actual thumbprint to round it all off. Matt Hughes was leery of having his own thumbprint on the piece, which is reasonable, so Therese used her thumprint (consider her identity officially stolen as of now).

I think all in all it turned out rather well. Lots of pasting, stamping, and hand cutting. I really like creating the chapbooks. They're a lot cheaper to make than the proper books, and because I'm working with less quantities, I can get away with crazier packaging. It forces me to think very punk rock DIY-style and find cheap but quality methods to create what I want to create. It's worked out pretty well so far.

Original post:

One project I'm a bit behind on a Payseur & Schmidt is a deluxe chapbook edition of Matthew Hughes' Luff Imbry tale "The Farouche Assemblage". I'm cruising to the finish line, however.

Jason Van Hollander delivered some fine illustrations for the cover, and being me, I'm going a bit crazy with the cover. The cover is going to be a 3-color screen print (by Brian Taylor and Heather Freeman at Patent Pending) on a brown/green toothy cover stock. The covers will be perfect bound to the innards at Thingmakers and I will have to hand cut the "die-cut" ragged edge on the edge of the double head illustration. You can see below a comp for the closed cover, and below that the entire cover unfolded.

It's going to be a huge pain to assemble, but I think it will look fabulous. I'm going to have to estimate how the screenprinting inks will color-shift on that dark paper, but that's the fun of screenprinting -- you never really know what you're going to get, especially will different colored stocks, color overlaps, and etc.

I'll update this with examples of the interior layout when I finish.

This should be out in May. Pre-order at Payseur & Schmidt.

Poster: Sisters of Sal (2004)

11" x 17", color xerox, editions of 50.

Sisters of Sal were a local Seattle improv theater group that I created a few posters for. They were doing a series of performances at two venues over three months. I decided that I wanted to create a matched pair of posters, and focus on two-color compositions, since I find them daunting.

The top poster was assembled from four different sources - the red background, which was a halftoned texture distilled from a 1950s Galaxy magazine; the giant mushrooms; and the crowd, which was from two different sources, kluged together. I find the idea of people rioting in a miasma of red spores before the giant mushroom forest pretty amusing. I wonder what the mushrooms did to piss the townspeople off. There's a story in there.

The bottom poster I really enjoy. The same Galaxy halftone texture is used. Added to that are an image of some centuries-old Arabic calligraphy, overlapped with falling people, which I think were taken from a detail of an old Harry Stephen Keeler book. I think. I like how the black images break the red plane at the top. Someone commented to me that it reminded them of those barrels of plastic monkeys that hang off of each other. You remember those. I know you do.

Typography is all gridded out and feels pretty early modern with a bit of art nouveau. The typeface is, I think, Berliner Grotesk, which was designed by Erik Spiekermann in 1979, but based on early 20th century typefaces coming out of the Berthold Foundry in Berlin.

Logo: Music Behind the Magic (2006)

Here's a logo idea that I created for the Music Behind the Magic exhibition at Experience Music Project. Disney didn't go for it, however. You can find what Disney created for the exhibition here. Very different aesthetic. Enough said.

Poster: Vera Project Grand Opening (2007)

2 color, 18" x 24", screenprinted, edition of 100.

The Vera Project is an all-ages venue and youth organization in Seattle. It's totally awesome. They opened their new space in Seattle Center and asked if I would design a poster for the opening events. Lots of info to convey. In any case, I was kind of luke-warm on the results of my design, but I'm starting to warm up to it. Printed by Brian Taylor and Heather Freeman at Patent Pending Press.