the mehallo blog. beta.

Lyon’s Coffee Shop, San Bruno, CA 1962. Found via Googie Art.

I grew up around Googie Architecture. It was just there. Space age-looking buildings, funky decor and rocks in the walls. Lots of rocks. Flintstones-like, but where the Jetson’s were running the quarry.

The 24 hour Lyon’s in San Bruno (see above) was the high school hangout. Long weird nights. In college, those weird nights spread to the other Lyon’s in San Mateo, San Carlos and Daly City. Denny’s was the alternative.

The style’s roots can be traced back to Frank Lloyd Wright and Tallesin West. Architect John Lautner designed the first Googie structure in 1949 and it was panned by critics. The firm of Armet and Davis designed most of the rest. [Read more →]

Tags: cool finds, design, design history, fonts, thoughts, typography by steve
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Snapped these while in Reno a few weeks back. Love 1950s vernacular typography, I’ve built an entire font family around this.

Drove the guy at the motel front desk crazy with my flash.

A really nice drug dealer tried to sell me his wares.

I’m not being sarcastic, he was really, really nice.

Took me a long moment before I realized what he was up to.

Tags: cool finds, design, design history, fonts, photography, thoughts, typography by steve
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Photographic Quaker Oats advertisement, 1897

I always thought the Quaker Oats guy was Benjamin Franklin.

He actually started as a printer’s cut – clip art, in today’s terms – that was selected to go on the Oats packaging to show ‘purity.’ Quakers always looked pure, let’s sell some oats with that in mind.

Benjamin Franklin was really smart, not quite pure though.

Tags: art, cool finds, culinary, design history, education, photography, thoughts by steve
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Click the image to read Maira Kalman’s ode to Franklin  . . . .

Benjamin Franklin was fun. So much fun, the International Printing Museum has on staff the incredible Phil Soinski.

Soinski portrays Franklin as part of their educational services; and does such a fantastic job, I learned more about Hot Type in one hour with ‘Ben’ than reading thru whatever pile of type books are currently stacked on my desk. Drop by the museum, set up a tour, take a class – their programs, their dedication to the craft of printing can be contagious.

And illustrator Maira Kalman gives us a bunch of really cool things to know about ultramegasuperinventor Ben Franklin in yesterday’s New York Times  . . . .

Tags: art, cool finds, design history, education, illustration by steve
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Here’s a great article at Typotheque on fonts who hang out in families. Where they come from, why they get along better than real families.

Tags: design, design history, education, fonts, typography by steve
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Wine label inspired by the work (and life) of font designer Eric Gill (1882-1940). Student-designed project.

Tags: cool finds, culinary, design, design history, fonts, typography by steve
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‘Graphic designers were never meant to set type  . . .  That’s what typesetters are for.’

I’m not even sure who said this, it was early on; probably college. Possibly a printer, maybe Roger. Roger would say stuff like that. He’d swear to the ‘ITC god’ and he had the old dusty Varitype machine sitting in the corner to prove it. [Read more →]

Tags: design, design history, education, fonts, typography by steve
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Like Helvetica? Like the Swiss International Style?

Armin Hofmann’s Graphic Design Manual (1965) is what I learned out of – and if it weren’t out of print, I’d be using it in my basics classes. (right now, I have a few slides made from my dog eared edition as part of a form lecture)

Graphic Design Manual breaks composition into basics: dot, line, confrontation, plus letters and signs. And it shows by example how these basics can be applied to good, clean graphic design: form, composition, typography.

I’ve seen it going for upwards of 90 bucks in some listings. As I write this, there are 22 used available at Amazon starting at $4.10.

Tags: cool finds, design, design history, typography by steve
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Image via dvisible magazine

Graphic designer Reid Miles and the Blue Note label – incredible album cover design. Here’s a great article on Miles.

And here’s the Wu-Tang albums as Blue Note releases. Found via Twitter.com/Sandoer.

Tags: cool finds, design, design history, music, typography by steve
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I remember almost all of these.

Found via Twirk Ethic

Tags: cool finds, design history, music by steve
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I used to use ‘The Kroy Machine’ for the Monday Morning Blues.

The Blues was a college zine. I was editor and designer. We had no Macintosh, only an old Apple II with a basic word processing program hooked up to an inky typewriter-like dot matrix printer. Most articles were typed on an actual typewriter because that was sometimes easier.

The Kroy was a lot like a large Dymo labeller. And it was a BITCH to work with, the kerning sucked (the dial on the bottom was for kerning/tracking, but you couldn’t easily see what you were doing), the letters jumped around a lot – the gum on the labels was very sticky/not repositionable. But you could make little headlines on transparent tape – and it was a huge step up from rub off lettering.

Learned to hate the Souvenir and Stymie fonts while using that thing. Cooper, LOTS of Cooper Black!

Here’s more info about this particular machine, via our design studio uses only the finest state of the art technology.

Tags: design history, thoughts by steve
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