Here’s a 2-color sleeve for a 7″ record by Generalissimo. I spent some time over the summer with General Zivkovich talking about their graphical presentation – something that should be first and foremost for any budding young fascist. He’s really run with it, and the fruits of that are rolling out, starting with the new logo used here and on their website.

For my part, I’ve been thinking a lot about the design overlaps between socialist/communist/fascist work from the 50s and the postwar design giddiness we had here in the US. They’re alarmingly similar – partially due to the tools available at the time, obviously, but also likely due to some sort of cultural seepage. Without doing anything too complex, I tried to steal a little from both camps for this sleeve. 2 colors, big shapes, and some fancy rubylith cutting (not actually executed with rubylith). The utilitarian chipboard gives it a certain prole charm.

You can listen to and then purchase this wee piece of vinyl here.

The design is obviously related to the Art in Print site. I wanted to sort out some ideas I’d had based on that, and this was a good place to do that. I’m okay with being a bit of a scavenger with my own work – taking the leftover bits of one thing and using them for something else, and there’s some of that going on here. So the color scheme and font choices borrow heavily from some of the ideas I couldn’t get to work for AiP.

It was important to give the site strong horizontals, based on the proportions of a movie screen. The large logo up top defines the horizontal space, as do the navigation and all-caps titles. I think of the top section as being a curtain or proscenium, framing what comes below. It’s a little heavy, but it works.

I decided to try something different and hand the logo design off to someone else. Just to see what would happen. I asked my friend and colleague Stefan Gutermuth if he’d be interested in taking a shot at it. No promises, of course, since I’m very particular and this project is my baby. After he agreed I was overwhelmed by second thoughts. This is my work, after all, and it has to represent my vision. What kind of designer asks someone else to do that for them?

Not surprisingly, Stefan delivered. Being a consummate professional he took the jumble of ideas I’d thrown at him, added his own sense of the project, and delivered half a dozen variations, all of which worked in a way I would never have come up with. That right there is why I like collaboration: it multiplies the talent of those involved.

Of the logos he delivered, this was the one I liked most:

That’s a really great W. Makes the whole thing work. The downside was that it looks very soviet/futurist, especially with the bars above and below. And it’s very square instead of horizontal, and I’d already decided that the logo needed to establish a strong horizontal. I bounced some changes back to him and he sent back this:

Perfect.

I distressed it a little for the website (punk rock!) but didn’t want to take it too far down that road. I could still go back to the very crisp version he delivered at some point, but as of now I’m leaning toward a looser, more lived-in quality of what’s currently live.

I don’t mind long lines of type, obviously, and for this site with the horizontal emphasis it makes sense. Others may disagree, and I would certainly consider changing it if this was for a client. I did bring the column width in for the blog, as that’s the most word-heavy part of the site.

I’ve been hesitant to use web fonts since I had seen problems with their implimentation before, and honestly it just seems too good to be true. I’ve been beaten into submission using only 8 fonts for so long that it just doesn’t seem possible to design without that crippling limitation. Chris encouraged using them for AiP, and now I’m sold. This is like having more than 8 colors available – it fundamentally changes design for the web and makes it more like design. My only regret is being so late to the party. The font used for all of the titles and navigation on the site is Oswald. It’s a little too wacky for this site when it’s lowercase, but all upper it looks great. Some extra letter spacing in there to let it breathe a bit and we’re good to go. I liked it enough to switch titles for this site over to it, even.

The site was built using WordPress. It’s the single greatest tool out there for small-scale sites, hands down. The only plug-in that users will see is MailPress, which has come a long, long way since I first used it. It’s a very powerful and flexible tool and, like many things associated with WordPress, suddenly seems like a real professional option instead of a cut-rate freebie. It’s amazing how well executed it is, and how solid their support is. Now if they could just make their home page a little more usable…

I couldn’t be more proud of this record. I think it’s the most cohesive album we made, with the most solid set of songs. Eli Crews at New, Improved Recording did an excellent job recording and mixing it, and the end result represents us well.

My only regret is that it’s only getting released as a digital download. Call me sentimental, but I like a physical product. I sat on it for a long time trying to get packaging together, but as my plans got more and more elaborate the will to put a lot of work in for what was effectively a dead band shrank. Ultimately I had to admit defeat and settle for just getting it out. Lesson learned.

I hope you enjoy it.

There is currently a lack of serious writing about prints and printmaking, which is somewhat ironic. As editor-in-chief Susan Tallman points out in her introductory essay, “Take a walk through the contemporary wing of your local museum and count the number of works that do not employ print media, imitate print media, or allude to print media.  You probably won’t need both hands.” From industrial processes to classical techniques, printmaking defines much of contemporary art. The medium may not be the entirety of the message, but it’s a damn big part.

Printmaking is obviously very close to my heart, and I jumped at the chance to build this site. I studied printmaking in school, and it shaped how I work to this day. When I’m working on a project, be it a film or a website or a song, the conception and execution are inextricably tied together. The image and the processes that make that image are parts of a whole.

As proud as I am with the design work, it goes without saying that good design is meaningless without good content. This site and journal have that in spades, enough so that they started getting recognition before the site even launched.

Working on this site with Chris was a pleasure, and I will willingly do it again any chance I get. It was important to me that not just the construction but the design process be collaborative for a couple of reasons: 1, Chris suffers from extreme technical competence, and because of that he rarely gets asked to do visual design (which he’s very good at); and 2, because I really like collaboration. I generally work alone, and miss the back-and-forth of working with peers, especially ones that are good at what they do. Our aesthetics are fairly different, and I’d say this site reflects a good balance.

How we got there.

(I’ve been meaning to write some detailed accounts of how the design process works with specific projects, and I think this one is a good place to start. I realize this is a bad idea, professionally speaking, in that what appeals about design is subjective, and by framing projects based on how I approached them I’m depriving potential clients of seeing my brilliance in ways I’d never intended. So it goes.)

I always start by discussing over-arching design and execution issues with clients. Who’s the audience? How complex is the site? How dynamic is the content? How much of it goes where? I also try to get a sense of what they’re looking for in both design and functionality by asking them to send me 5 sites they love and 5 they hate and explain why. This is usually a good way to begin discussing design as more than just decoration.

Art in Print were very prepared. They had a survey of their potential clients, a rough outline of sections and content, and since they were just starting out they had a business plan. I put together a site map and started estimating the number of templates we would need to make.

From there, I built 4 very divergent comps of how the site could be laid out based on initial conversations. More of a Rorschach test than good design, they served the purpose of fleshing out how pages should function. For me it was an experiment to see what would happen if I delivered comps that were more developed instead of just wireframes at the beginning of a project, and I’m still unsure of whether it was a helpful step or not. On the one hand it does help all involved picture actual content in actual layouts, but on the other hand it makes ideas seem more final than they really are.

As part of this experiment I built the comps in Photoshop instead of HTML, and I probably won’t do that again. While I like the fact that Photoshop makes me solve problems differently than code, I don’t think it inspired me to do anything superior to what I would have done with just code.

This was followed by a day of meetings in Chicago to flesh out the structure and concept, during which Chris built a rough model for the home page that we all agreed was great. The current home page isn’t too far from what he delivered there: large images cycling up top, 4 articles cycling below.

From there, Chris and I came back to Oakland and got to work. Since we already had a sitemap and some sense of the components for each page, we wanted to focus on the visual presentation, starting with a logo. Multiple ideas were thrown around, mostly based on classic magazine identities, none of which quite clicked. Eventually, Chris came up with this idea:

A great font choice (Vinyl OT) and relevant without being too stylistically narrow. I came up with the idea of reversing out one word to connect it to the positive/negative processes of printmaking. I played around with a few variations, and narrowed it down to these:

We both felt like there was a clear winner there, as did the client. We had initially been thinking we would color code the various sections of the website, but kept coming back to a rich red. Using different colors for each section became tedious and didn’t compliment the simplicity of the site. We also ditched the texture. While I liked the use of wood grain and the implication of an inked-up block, detailed texture doesn’t scale well, as illustrated by that thumbnail. Plus, it narrows down the range of print mediums implied to just woodcuts.

With that out of the way, we started focusing on layout. The client wanted a lot of white space. This is every designer’s dream, not to have to worry about cramming content together to “get it above the fold.” Getting things above the fold is obviously important, but using white space is more important, if harder to explain. Clearly delineating components of the page makes it easier for the reader to use what’s there, and users will appreciate the logical structure even if they have to scroll. Plus, lots of white space mirrors the tradition of having generous margins around fine arts prints.

Several different layouts were tried, with variations on list pages and content pages. Sidebars jumped around. All the sort of uninteresting but important mechanical page flow ideas were sorted through, and we ended up with what we have now: a single sidebar to the right, large titles, and blurbs with thumbnails.

It was important that the site not get too tied to a specific era in the graphic design. This site deals with everything print-related, from medieval to contemporary, and leaning too heavily towards an era-specific stylistic frame would favor one kind of content over another. Having significant white space and a condensed, sans serif logo started implying a mid-twentieth century aesthetic – something we all responded positively to, but not as neutral as it should be. That lead us to the idea of using Calluna Italic for all headers. It’s a modern font from ex-libris, but it has a classical feel to it, which helped balance the stylistic range of the pages. I often say that only bad font choices really matter, but this is an example of that not being true. That one little component ties the site together quite nicely.

From there on in, it was all a matter of building templates and testing them with actual content (followed by building the more technically-oriented components, such as a way for members to pay for subscriptions). This site was built on the Expression Engine platform. We needed something a more robust than my go-to CMS (WordPress) and Chris suggested EE. Because he had experience with it and I didn’t, he became the technical lead, leaving me to do the CSS, template coding, and project management.

Expression Engine was very straight forward. There was a learning curve involved, but the principles are still the same, and building templates proved easy enough once I learned the lingo. In my opinion there are some big holes in EE as a CMS, but I’m convinced that it’s only a matter of time before those are overcome. The way they work with their community of users should be the model for software development, and their product has benefitted greatly because of it.

Part of the business model for Art in Print is based on selling a bi-monthly PDF, designed to fill the void of some previous print-oriented publications. Since I don’t do much InDesign work, Chris took on the job of building templates for the magazine and did a stellar job. The package he delivered them will suit them for a long time to come. You can download the first issue in its entirety here for free.

I really enjoy seeing big projects like this through from start to finish, and this one in particular was a real treat.

A few months ago, a group of people from the forum decided to put out a quarterly series of records featuring some of the bands who hang out there.

As with much of what comes out of there, these records are being done collectively. Money goes in the pot for manufacturing, one forum member handles the mastering, another does the artwork, another coordinates bringing the elements together and getting them to their respective manufacturers, and a group gets together to assemble the final product and get it in the mail. The participants are from around the world – the US, Uk, Brazil, Croatia, and Japan. The internet makes this sort of collaboration possible.

I volunteered to do artwork for the second quarterly slab o’ vinyl. Unfortunately, the deadline coincided with a bunch of other deadlines, and I was in the weeds. So I did what I often do when I need to work quickly: set aside 3 hours, grab interesting objects off the mantle, and start stacking them.

Here is the final cover image:

And here are a few of the other photos from that session:

You can hear the music of the bands involved on the bandcamp page, as well as see the excellent cover from the first record.

I’m happy with my contribution to this project, but it’s one small piece of a solid package. The records come with an obi and letterpressed inserts, both well designed and executed. The records feature 6 songs by 6 bands. Everyone involved has done their best, and their best turns out to be pretty damn good.

Here’s the front:

And here’s the back:

The cover unfolds into a nice big pin-up:

Here’s what the center of the record looks like:

And the CD:

I’ve been working with this process of layering halftones, usually working from dark to light and crude to fine. Here’s what that process looked like for this print:

I flew out to Minneapolis to film the recording sessions for their upcoming record, and put together this trailer:

Over the course of this summer I’ll be shooting live shows of Michael Yonkers as well as The Blind Shake and at least one where they play together.

I’m shooting with a Panasonic AG-AF100 and my Canon 5D. As usual, I’ll edit in Premier Pro and grade in After Effects. I’ve always been more oriented towards post-production, so this is going to be a bit of a leap for me – which is exciting.

There is a website coming for that film, and I’ll post updates there, but it seemed worth mentioning here.

Anyway, I’m sticking my head up quickly to post a link to the new Creekside Inn and Resort website. We started this project quite a while ago, and for various reasons it took quite a while to come to fruition. However, the results are worth the wait.

My wife and I have been going up to Guerneville for several years. It’s a convenient getaway from Oakland and one of those instances where driving two hours seems to take you a million miles away. The Russian River Valley is a lush and wild environment exactly unlike Oakland. Driving along the Bohemian Highway, I always have a sense that the cities and buildings are extremely tenuous and constantly on the verge of being overgrown. Plus there’s a lot of wine up there, which suits us to a T.

Perhaps 5 years ago we first stayed at the Creekside. It’s just across the bridge from downtown, so it’s a short walk from downtown and we were looking for somewhere new to try. It was so fantastic that we’ve been going back there ever since. When Lynn and I discussed their need for a new website, I all but demanded that they let me do it.

The graphical goal of the website was to convey the visual excitement of the location while keeping the content streamlined and focused so that it’s easy to use. So every header has unique photography but doesn’t take up much real estate on the page.

I did all of the photography with my Canon 5D, taking the rare opportunity (for me) to work mostly in daylight. The grounds for the Inn are very photogenic (as exhibited here), as is the whole Russian River Valley. I did a lot of shooting, spread out over multiple visits.  However, there is no monitor on which shots of giant redwoods actually convey the slightest sense of what it is like to be surrounded by them, so rather than try to capture the wide vistas and grand scale of the locale, I tried to narrow the scope of my shots down. Shots are often tightly cropped with elements cut off to convey that you’re not seeing the whole scene. The content column itself is very narrow, almost like a keyhole. The internet can only show you a tiny sliver of this place, but the sliver is very exciting.

It was important that the site convey the fact that this is a small family-owned business in a very special locale, and to that end there is what will hopefully be  a very active blog and events pages. Lynn, the owner, is a wealth of information on what’s going on locally, and one of our goals with the site was to give her a platform to convey that information. Want to find a good winery? Want a good restaurant for your evening? Perhaps even a special chef’s event? Lynn has the answer for you, and is eager to share. If she finds time to post even half of what is going on in the area this site will become an indispensable resource for people who want to visit the area. Her son, Mark, is an avid cyclist and is likewise a huge potential resource for the area. That end of the valley seems to be less known to cyclists, who usually stick to Healdsburg and surrounding environs. Mark is exactly the right person to point you to a new route and give you some insight into the ride. Because he’s already ridden it.

The site is built using WordPress. There is a reasonable amount of dynamic sorting and unique templating used to give the pages a lot of photographic range. This is a good example of a WordPress site that offers enough sophistication and flexibility on the back-end without getting too technically complicated to be functional: For this website to be successful, it’s going to have to have a lot of active content updated regularly, and to that end it’s important that that process be easy.

You can also watch it on YouTube if Vimeo makes your computer stammer.

You can also watch it on YouTube if Vimeo makes your computer stammer.