Daily Book Graphics #184 / Deep Freeze Girls

©1964 this printing 1968

Some things that are keeping me busy

I have been extremely busy lately with client work, preparations for my upcoming show Ecologies of Decay (see the right hand side for details) and starting a new graphic design partnership. I don't actually have time to write about these projects now but I wanted to get some of the related images up on the blog, before I turn on the hype machine for real.

13x20" screen printed poster designed by me, printed by Anne Muntges

5x7" card

The only way to get one of these is to buy it at the September 18th opening at Artspace

Pieces for my Ecologies of Decay installation in progress

The logo my new business venture with Betsy Frazer, more about that later.

Daily Book Graphics #183 / Helvetica

Lars Muller's little book (5 x 6.5 in) contains thousands of examples of Helvetica in use. I highly recommend it.

Daily Book Graphics #182 / Modern Graphics

cover design: Ian Craig

Back Cover

The graphic on this page is adapted from an ad designed by Erhard Loblein that appears later in the book.

This 1969 book provides a black and white overview of graphic design from the turn of the century forward.

Buffalo Terrorized by Graphic Design Thief

The back cover of this week's Artvoice (Buffalo's alt weekly) is causing some controversy. The major elements of the page have been shamelessly lifted from a poster designed and produced by my friends at Hero Design Studio. If you are going to steal someone's work you should probably steal from someone whose office isn't four blocks away. The person who did this must be very young and not understand the rules of the game. Hero isn't too happy. The other element in the layout was appropriated from something I designed, see below.

The Artvoice back cover

Hero Design's original show poster for Iron & Wine

The Buffalo skyline used behind Hero's tree and leaf, looks very much like a distorted version of the skyline I designed for Mark Goldman's book City on The Edge (Prometheus Books 2007). The corners are sharper than in my original and some of the buildings have less detail, I suspect that someone used mine as a template and made a new version in Illustrator.

Daily Book Graphics #181 / Design and Expression

Published in 1964, no design credit.

Daily Book Graphics #180 / Monkees Go Mod

I have a lot of sympathy for The Monkees, it's easy to dismiss them as the ultimate fake/commercial band, but 40 years out, the fake counter culture seems more interesting than the official version of the 60's that has been drummed into our skulls forever. I watched Monkees re-runs as a child in the mid 1980s, I think it put the idea in my head that bands were supposed to live in the same house, I'm still disappointed that most don't. In any case, this book, published in 1967, is kind of great, it borrows liberally from Dada collage which results in some very weird imagery. The book was designed by Barney Etengoff and (associate designer) Bob Prestopino, I haven't tried to look them up yet, but I would be interested to see how a project like this fit into their graphic design careers.

Daily Book Graphics #179 / Automation

Rich Kegler (of p22 Type Foundry and the Western New York Book Arts Collaborative) generously gave me this book for my blog. Published in 1963, it is concerned with the coming age of automation and how that will affect industry and society.

What they do with carts in Nova Scotia

Because of my Stray Shopping Cart Identification System, people often send me photographs and ask if they have gotten the I.D. right. The occurrence documented above is one of the most interesting I have ever received. Cam from Halifax, Nova Scotia sent this to me a couple weeks ago and wondered how to properly classify this assemblage he found behind a mall in Upper Tantallon, Nova Scotia. He noted that the carts are clearly A/1 Close False but that that A/8 Mixed Group didn't seem to apply because Source Agents were not involved. The answer is that it is an A/8 Mixed Group with B/12 Simple Vandalism as a secondary type designation. Class B types can be used as secondary designations for Class A specimens. However, there is a great deal of play in the system, considering the effort put into arranging the carts, the secondary designation could arguably be B/13 Complex Vandalism.