the mehallo blog. beta.

‘escaping the norm’

Just finished up my Friday night beginning type course – and final projects can take any form. Last night, Christopher Gianni-Embrey showed up for class with an old computer monitor.

Inspired by a recent viewing of The Shawshank Redemption, Christopher visualized the word ‘escaping’ using Morris Fuller Benton’s Bank Gothic.

Not on screen, but in screen.

The final piece was Christopher’s first ever attempt at model making. It was crafted from mostly found materials. As he put it, ‘driving around town, there’s a lot of stuff people throw away.’

In the process, he ended up with a bunch of dead computer monitors – just in case the first attempt didn’t pan out.

My next Friday night type course is scheduled for Fall 2011 at American River College. Course number: ARTNM 303.

Tags: art, design, design history, education, fonts, typography by steve
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‘For less than the price of a design textbook, a student can now have a sturdy and contemporary humanist sans serif family that fits pretty much any design application, and will remain useful long after academic studies and well into a professional career in design.’

Gibson is a humanist sans serif honoring designer John Gibson, designed by Rod McDonald and digitized by Patrick Griffin and Kevin King.

And it’s available at student pricing: Eight complete fonts for $48 (that comes out to six bucks a font). With revenues benefiting The Society of Graphic Designers of Canada (GDC).

Details here. Snag it here.

Tags: cool finds, design, education, fonts, typography by steve
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‘Depero Futuristi is a team at Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center re-imagining Balli Plastici, the ‘plastic dance’ created by Italian Futurist Fortunato Depero in 1918.’

More info here.

Copies of the final project are available for educational/promotional purposes, contact the team for details.

Tags: art, design, design history, education, illustration by steve
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Nicky Bradwell survived my typography and design history classes and is now making music. Each month, he’ll have a new FLAVOR on Soundcloud.

Facebook page here.

MarchFLAVOR by superhumanyouth

TripleRainbowMix by superhumanyouth

Tags: cool finds, design, education, music by steve
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‘Say it loudly and proudly!’

Tags: education, thoughts by steve
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‘Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto has created a beautiful, undeniably scary time-lapse map of the 2,053 nuclear explosions which have taken place between 1945 and 1998.’

Over the years, the US has set off over a thousand nukes. Something I never really knew.

Skip thru to the early 1960s and the multiples of blasts end up looking like Christmas lights.

Found via Marian Bantjes

Tags: design history, education by steve
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‘I was working on maintaining the quality of Bernhard’s handdone type while taking a new and different approach to it’

Student Lesley Gaesser’s large scale final project from my experimental type course at The Art Institute of California Sacramento.

Lesley did an 11 week study on the work of designer Lucian Bernhard (1883-1972) – which culminated in a final linocut-inspired project.

Bernard’s Antiqua type was traced onto Speedball carving blocks, cut by hand, inked and printed on large sheets of watercolor paper.

My next experimental course begins April 8.

If student hangs roughs low on the wall, one can only critique if lying on the floor; Photo by Daniel Mendez

Tags: design, design history, education, fonts, photography, typography by steve
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‘This is an experiment in carving one linocut letter per day in an attempt to complete an entire alphabet by March 31st. Chosen typeface: Champion Gothic by Hoefler & Frere-Jones. Lightweight was chosen based on a deep rooted affection with its ampersand.’

And so concludes Aymie Spitzer’s March of Letters. Blog here. Calendar archive here.

Found via Campbell BrownKorbel

Tags: cool finds, design, education, fonts, typography by steve
1 comment  . . .   

‘Mark Preston discovered early California recipes while cataloging rare books for the UCLA library’

I picked up Mark Preston’s California Mission Cookery at one of the missions lining El Camino Real, somewhere between Santa Clara and San Luis Obispo. Or Santa Barbara. One of them.

The cookbook is all about Californio Cuisine, a long lost Spanish-influenced cooking style using local ingredients. The food of the original missions.

I’ve made the Beef Jerky soup a few times. [Read more →]

Tags: culinary, education, photography, recipe by steve
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‘Hillbillies, long misunderstood and maligned as isolated and backward, actually have a 300-year history of achievement and success that has contributed significantly to our national identity.’

I caught this doc last year on the History channel.

Hillbilly: The Real Story (2008) – hosted by Billy Ray Cyrus – is a great overview of the ‘Appalachian American’ subculture that brought us moonshine whiskey, labor unions, NASCAR and country music.

Stream Hillbilly here. DVD here.

Pictured up top: An original ‘painter’s piss’ runner, found via theTHROTTLE

related
Also, Hillbilly does a pretty good job of setting the stage for Oscar nominated Ozark kin drama Winter’s Bone (2010). Incredible performance by Jennifer Lawrence, below. Review here.

Tags: cool finds, education by steve
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Former student takes design class. Former student notices my work in his textbook. Sends me an email. Photo, above.

Mike Dunkl spotted my 2003 ‘Make Jobs Not War’ poster in his copy of Design Basics: 8th Edition – with some academic text explaining how my visual works (below). Aside from the pencil illustration, I lifted the gothic type directly from a 1912 American Type Founders specimen book. (The green color means ‘money,’ btw) (And there are two ls in ‘mehallo’)

In 2003, jobs were drying up and we were about to go to war on some really flimsy evidence. I felt I had to say something, so I did. My poster – among others – became available for free download at Another Poster For Peace.

At the time, anti-war statements were not the popular thing. Though for me, it was the right thing to do. When the war started, I was following a young Iraqi’s ‘live from Baghdad’ blog up until he stopped posting. Never knew what happened to him – another innocent lost to history.

I still stand behind my poster. Evidence of why we ended up in Iraq in the first place has turned out to be far more flimsy than imagined  . . .  and today, we’re still at war. And the jobs have simply gone away.

Tags: design history, education, thoughts, typography by steve
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