New Website!

Hey all, I've started putting up all my new work on my website at:

www.jacobmcmurray.com

I may continue updating this blog, but time seems getting more and more compressed, so who knows!

xox. -jacob

Poster: Clarion West (2009)

3 color screenprint, 18x24, the skull and the "skull breath" are overprinted in a glow-in-the-dark ink. I assembled this together mostly from bits and pieces that I had gathered from the Stand on Zanzibar project (that I posted about below) - I don't know if that's laziness or a cunning maximization of available assets - you decide. Anyway, I kind of love it.

Poster: Tea Cozies (2009)

Here's a poster that I created for some friends of mine in the Tea Cozies. Created in about an hour, using imagery I already had on my computer and some quickly-drawn type. This style feels so remote to what I seem to be doing now that I don't really know what I think of the poster overall, but I guess other people liked it, because I was flipping through our local weekly The Stranger, and it was selected for their Poster of the Week!

11x17 color xerox

Book Illos: Stand on Zanzibar (2009)

I'm currently working with Centipede Press on their reissue of Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner, which has been a big project, but very fulfilling. I have a bit of work to go, but I wanted to share some of the comp "illustrations" that I've been doing for the project. They probably will be modified slightly here and there, but overall I'm feeling pretty good about them.

Written in the late 1960s, SoZ is rife with themes of overpopulation, hypercapitalism, eugenics, and information overload - all stuff that is quite relevant today. The book was a groundbreaking work of science fiction when it was released, but visually I wanted to create a decidedly non-sf (or at least a non-traditional sf) look for the pieces, using a lot of photomontage and collage techniques, keeping in mind a mid-century feel. I found that a lot of the images were feeling quite techno-religious (is it just me?), which I think fits quite well.

A lot of the textures were from scanned sections of b/w photography that had been printed in photography annuals. Because of the printing process, there's lots of nice, juicy halftone gradients to work with. Makes everything feel a bit gritty and moody, I think.

Anyway, I'll post further designs and the final book when it is released.

Ephemera: Holiday Coaster / Drink Set (2008)

This holiday, my wife and I constructed coaster sets for presents.

The coasters were cut out of old 78 rpm records that we had collected - we keep the one's we like to play on our hand-crank Brunswick record player, and the one's we don't (or the damaged records) get sacrificed to the greater good. I use a 4" hole saw on my drill press and cut each of the labels out. With a little sanding on the edges, they make great coasters. Most of the labels are heat pressed onto the shellac/vinyl composition, so they weather quite well with normal use.

We added a little booklet with seven drinks that we enjoy. The cover paper was something that my wife had collected a few years ago, and the interiors were printed on a color photocopier. Everything was hand trimmed (we only made 30 sets, so not so much work), the booklets were stapled in the spines, and the whole assemblage was tied together using candlewicking (purchased at a local craft store in rolls of 100 feet.







Some of the page spreads:

Book: Cosmocopia by DiFilippo/Woodring (2008)

The small press that Therese Littleton and I run, Payseur & Schmidt, released Cosmocopia, a project by Paul DiFilippo and Jim Woodring. Basically, Paul has written a short novel that is an homage to Woodring, Richard Powers, Frank Frazetta, and David Lindsay, and Jim has created artwork to visually bring the novel alive. Jim came up with the idea to have a jigsaw puzzle, which fits perfectly in the Payseur & Schmidt aesthetic. I designed the book and the packaging and Lance and Beth at Thingmakers manufactured the whole thing. I have to say that I was pretty surprised at how awesome they looked when I first saw a finished copy. It's nice to work with quality content!!!

As with all the Payseur & Schmidt material, I try to hit that balance between something that looks polished and professional, and something that feels a bit DIY, hand-made and punk rock. The goal is to not worry about perfection, to take risks, to not worry about if something sells, and to just DO IT. Oh, and a recent goal for me is to try and make everything out of biodegradable materials, as much as possible. Ever since I read The World Without Us by Alan Weisman and learned about the floating mound of plastic the size of Texas in the north Pacific, I'm anti-plastic.

Buy a copy today at our Payseur & Schmidt website!

What's in the set:

Sample spread (showing chapter heads that orient perpendicular to the rest of the text block):

Gratuitous and unnecessary multi-page title (spreads shown):

Bound-in bullshit postcard (I was hoping that it would be reminiscent of those postcards you'd see in a crappy old paperback. Text by Therese Littleton.)

Ephemera: Wedding Invites (2008)

After a long pause, I'm finally adding more projects!

This is a wedding invite set that I created. The clients wanted to create something that was inexpensive, had a hand-made feel, was reminiscent of Mexican loteria cards, but carried imagery that was important to them.

We came up with some initial ideas together and then we went through a few comps to get it just right. The outer enclosure is screenprinted in 2 colors and then folded and "die-cut" by hand on the front panel (the panel with the bride and groom's initials), using an exacto knife and a paper punch.

The interior cards contained wedding information on the reverse sides and simple imagery on the fronts. These were printed on a color photocopier using a nice paper that was laser printer friendly. By doing something as simple as using a nice paper, it's pretty easy to fool people into thinking that you used a much more expensive printing method than was actually used.

All in all, I think these turned out pretty nice, and offered something unique for a special day. A little hand-made action goes a long way.

The invite enclosure, and cards for directions, info, and an rsvp postcard:

The back of the invite enclosure:

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.

Here's some images of the finished van:

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.

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.

Book: The Darkening Garden by John Clute (2006)

The Darkening Garden: A Short Lexicon of Horror, by John Clute, was Payseur & Schmidt's second big release, right after MeccaMettle. John Clute gives us an incredibly indepth and intelligent exploration of the fundamental motifs of modern horror literature with his always-entertaining verbal dexterity.

I acted as art director and designer for this project. Since the work was non-fiction and scholarly, I wanted to make sure that the end product would be as hip and desirable to all audiences, and not just get stuck in with all those other mostly-boring scholarly genre works. Especially because Clute is such an entertaining and, really, important, writer.

I decided that it would be extremely exciting to cajole and persuade 30 different illustrators to create images for each of the motifs discussed in the volume. I came up with the initial list, which was for the most part artists within either the rock poster, alternative comics, or "low-brow" art communities (only one true genre illustrator - Jason Van Hollander - contributed to the project). I sent out the ask to each of the illustrators and it was first come, first served. The illustrators picked whichever motif they wanted. There were only a handful of artists that declined, and I found more than enough talented illustrators to fill in. Each illustrator received the text for the specific motif that was chosen, and a final illustration size - that was it. What they came up with was entirely their own choice.

In any case, I was pretty amazed actually how well the illustrations turned out. For the most part, I think they are all excellent. So much so, in fact, that I decided to create a seperate boxed postcard set of all the images called Postcards of Doom.

I wanted to keep the interior design as clear and spare as possible, especially since the book was an encyclopedia of sorts, and contains tons of information, references to other works, and many situations where I needed to come up with a clear and ordered typographical solution to achieve clarity in the design. Below are some spreads:

Jason Van Hollander created the cover illustration. The cover, spine, and back cover imagery was pressed directly into the casebound cover in a grey ink. It works nice with the black cloth.

I wanted to have a screen printed sash to surround the book. I asked Adam Grano, who's an excellent illustrator and a designer at Fantagraphics, to come up with an idea in 3 colors, to which I could add the title info typographically. He created this excellent cute and horrific scene, which contrasts nicely with the black of the book.

Below is the Postcards of Doom boxset, featuring every illustration in The Darkening Garden.

Art: Russian Space paintings (2006)

5" x 5" each, acrylic on framed board.

I created these paintings for a group show at the Greenwood Space Travel Supply Co., which is the storefront of the McSweeney's-driven non-profit writing center, 826 Seattle.

Given the name of the store, the show was space-themed. I initially was going to do a series of paintings about the various Russian space dogs, but it was difficult to find good imagery of the dogs, except for Laika. So I expanded out the concept to icon events of the early Russian space program: Laika, Sputnik, Vostok, and Yuri Gagarin.

I designed each of the assemblages in illustrator, and then made seperations for each color as black positives. These would then be projected onto the painting surface with an old overhead projector. Since my painting surface was only 5 x 5", and I was going to need to scale down the seperations so that they each were only about one inch square.

Each color layer was projected, traced, and painted seperately. The entire process took about 4 evenings to complete. The hardest part was painting detail at that small of a scale. In any case, they turned out differently than I thought, but still look pretty decent, I think.

Exhibition: Alien Encounters (2006)

Curated by myself, Brooks Peck, Jane Frank, and Howard Frank. Installed at the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle. September 10, 2006 - August 10, 2007.

This exhibition showcased commercial book and pulp cover artwork from the sf and fantasy genres from the last 70 years. Almost all of the paintings were on loan from the collection of Jane and Howard Frank, who are one of the preeminent collectors of sf/f artwork in the world.

We were working with a set room configuration, and not a whole lot of space. We worked with the Franks to determine rough thematic sections. Brooks and I worked on the layout. Brooks came up with the idea for interactive pulp magazine "flipbooks" and displaying some of the book covers as well, to emphasize the idea that all this art was used for book and magazine covers, and thus had to have blank spaces in the paintings for that advertising text.

I developed the look and feel of the exhibition, designed all exhibition panels and citations, shepherded all of that through production, and installed all graphics. My goal was to keep the color scheme of the exhibition very monotone - shades of grey, specifically, with an accent color (a reddish-orange) - in order to allow the paintings, with all their vibrant colors, to speak for themselves. The citations were printed on a flatbed printer directly onto a light grey 1/8" sintra, which was then adhered directly to the walls.

The wall murals were assembled by myself using iconic found imagery from various classic sf illustrators and movie posters. I made black positives of the images on transparencies and projected the images onto the walls. The silhouettes were then traced in pencil and painted in a darker grey paint. On certain walls I didn't have room to project the images large enough, so new transparencies were made where I spread the images into sections over several transparencies, which were then projected one at a time and "stitched" together over the wall. Time-consuming work, but, beyond staff time, a low-cost, effective, but not disruptive wall design.

Example (below) of citation layout. On several citations throughout the exhibition, we incorporated quotes from the source texts that illustrated the subjects of the cover art. I wanted to combined left and right justification of different type elements to give it a very geometric, clean, and hierarchical look.

All of the citations and text panels were printed from the same sheet of 1/8 inch grey sintra, and then cut from there to the indicated crop lines. This was printed on a flatbed printer, so it was just one pass to print all of the exhibition graphics. It creates a nice screenprinted effect on the substrate, with a tiny bit of texture from the ink, which is nice. And has the added benefit of being relatively cheap to produce.

Poster: New Fangs #2 (2005)

11" x 17", color xerox, edition of 50. Created for New Fangs. Another example of gathering random pleasing images and arranging them into something abstract and delicious. Arabic script, Chinese block print, Modernist female form, and highly-magnified half-toned flower-ish ornaments. Colors conform to the old print standard: primary=black, secondary=red, tertiary=blue/green, which interestingly enough, is the same color progression for Haida and Tlingit Native American design.

T-shirt design: Sugarcult (2004)

Three t-shirt designs for the band Sugarcult. Never used. The band's management contacted me (along with, I assume, several other designers) and solicited some t-shirt designs for the band. Any ideas were ok, 3-4 colors max. Even though they were never used, I like the designs below, and may reuse them for something in the future in modified form.

Poster: Orchestra Baobab (2003)

11 x 17", color xerox, edition of 300.

My housemate, Meghan, drew out the title type used in the poster. I added the ink spatters. The flower image was created by scanning in a real flower photo and then taking "snapshots" of the image when it was contrasted out at various levels. Each snapshot was then bitmapped and hand-overlayed and colored.

Ephemera: Patent Pending Press coupons (2005)

I created these as advertisement for my screenprinting shop. Partners Brian Taylor and Heather Freeman at Patent Pending Press were going to go down to the Flatstock poster art covention down in Austin and wanted to hand out coupons to acquire new customers.

There were 4 different designs, 3 colors apiece, and printed on chipboard. About 7 x 10" each. I used my favored technique at the time of choosing random pleasing images and then scaling, overlapping, modifying, and placing them in interesting assemblages. I suppose it's my Dada phase.

Book: Generation Loss by Elizabeth Hand (2007)

Kelly Link and Gavin Grant of Small Beer Press asked me to work on concepts for Elizabeth Hand's new novel Generation Loss. The novel is an excellent old school punk rock, incredibly creepy, maritime thriller where nearly every character is damaged. Junkie-damaged. Dead end punk-damaged. Post-hippie "The Family"-style-damaged. Weird Maine sea captain-damaged. But with redemption! of sorts.

In any case, I tried to get across the idea of damage in the imagery. "Generation Loss" as a demographic (i.e. Generation X), as a photographic event (when copies are made from copies, resulting in resolution loss in the subsequent generations), and as a mental process (instead of photographic resolution, mental resolution) are also represented. As are the maritime and tree themes that are present in the book. See below for the final and comps.

Final version (below) of the dustjacket cover (minus all jacket copy):


Intial comp 4 (below). This comp actually is my favorite, from a purely artistic standpoint, but there was some well-founded concern about bookstore readability of the vertical title type. The face I got from some old photography book. The violent perpendicular line/slashes was a section of a Herbert Bayer illustration, I believe. The ships were from some old 19th century postcard, and the smoke-like trail was from a 19th century japanese postcard of a snail. The red line was a sharpie line drawn on a sheet of regular printer paper and then scanned in and blown up.

Initial comp 3 (below). I tried a photographic approach using a photograph by artist Steven Berardelli. The tree plays a vivid role in the book, and it was fun to reflect that in this cover comp.

Initial comp 2 (below). I'm not sure I like the color scheme on this comp, viewing it today. I like the heavily degraded texture. The type was scanned in from actual wood type that I use for my letterpress. The background photo was a small snippet from a photograph of my grandmother at the beach in Iowa in the 1930s.

Initial comp #1 (below). I like this comp an awful lot. I kind of stole the hanging man concept from my New Fangs poster (which was really based on Saul Bass imagery), but I incorporated the camera image (it's a Leica) as the figure's head. I like how the tree is such a negative space. And I like how it's upsidedown. The good thing about rejected comps is that you can use them for future projects! I think this one would make a nice book cover or poster. Hmm.

Poster: Future Visions (2004)

4-color poster, screen printed by Brian Taylor at Patent Pending Press. Edition of 300, I think.

More ridiculous amounts of text for a poster. Posters are interesting that way, because they really are this active battle between design/art/illustration and advertising. There's a dual purpose to posters - to attract attention and to convey information. Those two aspects sometimes work together, but often butt heads. As a designer, I want less information to convey and more freedom to let the design through. Sometimes there's just too much type to layout pleasingly at the sizes desired. (But perhaps I just need to suck it up.) As a marketing person, you want the opposite, it seems. Or at least a total submission of design to the specific marketing thrust. Of course, there are ways for all of that to live together happily. And I suppose that's the way it should be. Sometimes it is difficult, though.

Sometimes I just want to create an art piece and have the client pay for it. The truth comes out.

I forget where the compass rose image came from. The spacemen came from a cover illustration on some 1950s edition of War Against the Rull by A.E. Van Vogt. The clouds came from the endpapers of an old 1930s almanac. Type in various weights of Univers.

T-Shirt: Vera Project (2004, 2005)

1-color t-shirt designs created for the Vera Project's annual screen printing fundraiser. For a couple years I've helped Vera organize this event by asking, cajoling, and blackmailing different artists and designer to submit 1-color t-shirt designs for this event. At the event, you can buy a t-shirt or bring your own piece of clothing and pick one of 20 different designs from different artists, and then screen print the image yourself in whatever ink color you want onto the clothing. It's a really great event. In any case, here are the t-shirt designs I've done for the 2004 and 2005 events.

Poster: New Fangs (2004)

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

I designed this poster for a coworker who was the drummer for New Fangs. I've always had a hard time with 2-color posters. I find them incredibly difficult to create, but there are friends and designers that I admire (like Art Chantry or Andrio Abero) that excel at 1- and 2-color poster design. This was my conscious attempt to limit myself color-wise. One of the nice things about doing a limited color design is that you are so much more aware of how the white of the paper is your friend and, if used right, becomes more than just the canvas, but a color in itself. The Saul Bass-ish hanging man in the poster is a good example of this.

The type is almost all hand lettered with sharpie, and then scanned, bitmapped, placed, and colored, in Illustrator.

Exhibition: Disney - The Music behind the Magic (2007)

EMP's new exhibition Disney: The Music Behind the Magic was curated by Jasen Emmons. I co-art directed the exhibition with exhibit designer Ken Burns (not that Ken Burns) and did all of the graphic production. We decided to use a translucent P95 substrate to print the text panels on - we used a flatbed printed process that works sort of like screenprinting, but all colors at once - it made a nice effect. We used the same process for all of the case citations, which were printed ganged up on panels of archival mattboard and then cut to size. I also came up with the idea of doing large-scale murals on the walls. I created the graphics for the murals, printed them out as black positives on transparencies, and then used an old overhead projector to project the images on the walls, which were then traced and then painted. Cheap and effective.

I used Futura Medium solely throughout the whole exhibition.

Image (below) showing the Name That Tune interactive. Note the halftoned "head" graphics on the interactive and the Disneyland schematic mural painted on the yellow wall to the right.


Image (below) of fake record labels I created for the outside wall of the exhibition, which was actually made of different colored vinyl records.Image (below) showing painted murals on the right and left walls.

Image (below) of the Theme Parks section, showing the Disneyland schematic mural, and one of the P95 text panels.


Image (below) of how I designed and ganged up the citations so that they all could be printed on a few sheets of archival mattboard. The grey color was the color of the mattboard and is just included for reference.Image (below) showing a closeup of one of the P95 text panels. The panels were offset off the wall by 3/4ths of an inch or so, to create a layered, depth effect.

Brochure: 826 Seattle (2006)

Design and layout for 826 Seattle's general brochure. 826 Seattle is a non-profit center started by Dave Eggers of McSweeney's fame. Their goal is to act as a writing workshop for kids and teens. They do some amazing work and have a whole space-themed storefront.

This is one of those projects where you are provided with a massive amount of text and imagery, and somehow you have to make it all work, look good, and maintain a sense of informational hierarchy.

Book Cover: Mapping the Beast (2007)

I just finished working on a rough version of the new Jeff VanderMeer-edited anthology Mapping the Beast: The Best of Leviathan and Album Zutique, which will be published by Prime Books sometime in 2007. So far, the cover has gotten initial approval from Jeff and Prime, so that's exciting. I'll add more as it comes to pass.

On to the design itself. Jeff had suggested using the Leviathan and ship image by Liza Phoenix, which is a great painting that really fits the theme. Once Jeff came up with the title Mapping the Beast, I was pretty excited because I had recently bought this huge Taschen-published tome called Atlas Maior, which was initially published in 1665. In any case, it has amazing cartographic imagery, which I used extensively in the design. The difficult part was that the book itself is about 20" tall and weighs probably 30lbs, so it was kind of a nightmare to get specific pages onto my scanner to scan.

The title type is set in Poetica, which is a face designed by Robert Slimbach for Adobe in 1992. Poetica is reminiscent of early Renaissance typography and the cool part of the typeface is that it has a zillion different sets of ligatures, alternate characters, swashes, ornaments, etc., which I used a bit on the cover.

Bottle Labels: McGuizzo Holiday Beer (2006)

This year our friends Shane and Meghan created two batches of beer - a porter and and ESB. I ran out of time and was lazy, so printed the designs off a color laser printer onto a nice, textured paper, and then cut them to size on the paper cutter at the screen printing shop. Affixed with glue stick. I think they turned out rather nice.

Poster: Clarion West (2005)

The last 4 years the Clarion West staff have asked me to design the poster for their yearly reading series. This was the 3rd poster that I created for them. Each year I've used the same headline type and then designed the posters around that, keeping a core look and feel, while creating a unique look for each year. Eileen Gunn has an excellent design sense that thankfully strays away from the often boring and poorly-executed visual tropes exhibited in science fiction/fantasy/horror visual art. Because of this, she's really wanted to open up the poster design for Clarion so that designs aren't so sf-centric, but perhaps broader in appeal.

This design contains images from a multitude of sources. The red "painterly" background came from a 1950s War of the Worlds film poster. The monsterish shadow from some other 1950s monster flick poster. The man in the foreground left is an sf illustration inside-joke, since it's from a small detail of a Frank Kelly Freas illustration. The guys-with-swans motif was an old engraving. The orange sun motif was sourced from the back of an old paperback edition of House on the Borderlands and I believe was illustrated by Jack Gaughan. And I forget where the rest of the little people and other bits came from.

This brings up a never-ending conversation about the controversial nature of image appropriation in graphic design. There are designers that abhor the very thought of using material that wasn't created directly by themselves (unless the material is outside of accepted copyright range.) And then there are graphic designers and photomontage-ists that are more comfortable with the idea, and cognizant of the idea of "fair use." The "fair use" legal argument for me is in many ways aligned with a moral artistic argument. No one condones stealing, and stealing is obvious when you see it. But I don't have a problem using visual imagery in my designs that wasn't created by myself as long as the material is used ethically and is internally reviewed by myself in light of four factors:

1) How much of the source material are you using? If your design is entirely comprised of or based on a single source, or if your design is only 5% different than the source material, then that's a red flag.

2) Is the way in which you are using the source material transformative in any way? Does my design use the source material in a way that transforms it visually, contextually, or otherwise, so in a sense, am I creating a unique work of art, or is the artwork still overwhelmingly derivative of the source material that I'm incorporating.

3) How is my resulting artwork going to be used? Is it going to be on t-shirts selling across the nation in Urban Outfitters or is it for a screenprinted poster of which there were 300 copies printed and posted within the confines of the city of Seattle. Am I making money from the artwork, or not? All these questions need to be factored in.

4) Does the use of said source material within my design impact the potential market value of the source material? This sort of related to #2. If your design is sufficiently transformative, there shouldn't be an issue.

In any case, as in all of my posters, I've used numerous different visual pieces, and stitched them together into the below poster. 18" x 24", 4 colors, screen printed by Brian Taylor and Heather Freeman at Patent Pending Press. The orange ink was overprinted on the red, and the white of the headline type and the "ray of death" was overprinted onto the black, so the print order was 1) red, 2) orange, 3) black, 4) white.

Poster: Heaven and Hell Ball (2004)

This is the first of two posters that I designed for the once-loved, once-extant Seattle arts facility, Consolidated Works. This is a perfect example of 99% of the poster jobs that I've done: a gigantic amount of mandatory text that I somehow have to incorporate into a pleasing design. I used to think fondly of being able to design the kind of posters that Jeff Kleinsmith or Dusty from Heads of State or Jason from The Small Stakes are able to design (i.e., posters that aren't really advertisements, but more commodities for the bands to sell - thus, they generally have minimal amounts of type.) But alas, they are much better artists than I am, so I must feed off the scraps.

In any case, I think this poster turned out rather well. With that amount of type, it kind of begs to be a simple, minimal poster, in order to be able to discern any hierarchy of information from the type. Typography was all in various weights of Univers. The bottle and hand were scanned from a Dover book on hands - I think it's called Hands, even. The ocean was part of some smallish engraving/illo that I found in some old Print magazine from the late 1940s. There was a ship in the middle of the ocean that I erased and replaced with the milk drop image, which was sourced from the internet, rez'd up, contrasted out, and placed. This poster was declared "The Poster of the Week" in The Stranger, some time in early 2005.

18" x 24", 3 colors, screenprinted by Heather Freeman and Brian Taylor at Patent Pending Press.

Exhibition: Paper Scissors ROCK (2003)

Paper Scissors ROCK: 25 Years of Northwest Punk Poster Design was an exhibition that I curated at the Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) in Portland. I was living in Portland at the time and contracting for Jim Fricke at Experience Music Project helping to correct and edit transcripts for his hip-hop book Yes Yes Y'all. Other than that, I was taking a few design classes at PNCA and decided to pitch the idea of a Northwest punk-focused poster show to the school. At first I was thinking it would be a show that would solely focus on three individuals that, to me, defined more than any others, the "look" of PNW graphics in the 1980s and 1990s. Art Chantry, Jeff Kleinsmith, and Mike King.

I pitched this idea to PNCA and they liked it. My friend Dave Rosencrans, who was a curator at EMP at the time, liked it as well, and pitched the idea to his superiors. The thought was that EMP could "own" the show, pay for it, and use materials from its vast collection, but that I would have curatorial control. To better fit with EMP's mission, Dave and I changed the focus of the show to be more of a historical overview of the last 25 years of design in the NW. From there it was a go.

The show was a hit at PNCA at then it travelled to EMP, where it was displayed in a slightly different configuration. I was rehired at EMP at the time, so I was able to have a lot of control as to how the exhibition was displayed in the new venue. My favorite part, however, was adding an ambient soundtrack of Muzak-inspired Grunge hits called Grunge Lite, which seemed to universally bug everyone in the gallery (thus serving its purpose.)

PSR exhibition poster (below) by Mike King, 3 colors, 20" x 26", screen printed by the PNCA printmaking students.

Paper Scissors ROCK at EMP (below):

Poster: Richard Peterson (2005)

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

I created this during a period where I was using the typeface Univers almost, um, universally in my designs, partially because I really liked Univers and I felt that if I used it constantly, I'd be able to learn its strengths and weaknesses by design osmosis. I think also because the world of type is a scary one, and I wanted to focus on only using a few typefaces, instead of zillions.

During this time I was also trying to design posters by pulling together 5 - 10 random, pleasing images, and making them work together as an assemblage. I was less (or not at all) interested in how the imagery worked as an effective advertisement for the band or venue (perhaps to their dislike.)


I reused this assemblage for one image in a series of fake book covers that I did for an article on SF Site by Jeff VanderMeer.

Book: Strange Tales of Secret Lives by Jeff VanderMeer (2007)

Here's a rough comp of the cover of a new Jeff VanderMeer book to be published by Prime. Jeff asked me to design the cover and interior layout. I suggested that we see if Heiko Mueller would be interested in letting us use his "Swallow" illustration for the cover. Heiko agreed, and I just added some typographical fluff around his stellar illo. Notice the reuse of the typographic ornament from the rejected Privilege of the Sword cover design. More to come.

Poster: Ian McLagan/Victor Mature (2003)

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

I still like this poster a lot. This was at a time where I actually had enough free time to be able to spend 8 hours on a poster I wasn't getting paid for. My friend Liam was the lead guitar player in the Victor Mature and he asked me if I'd do a poster for their upcoming show. I created an initial design that was horrible, and Matt, Victor Mature's crazy drummer, convinced me to give it another go.

The previous winter I had gotten several nice sets of wood type for my letterpress from my mother, and I got the idea to actually ink up the letters that I needed, press them onto paper by hand, and then scan those forms into the computer to hand place for the type. The only problem was that I overinked the letters, and didn't really know at the time how long it would take for the ink to dry on the page. I ended up having to use a fan over the course of an hour to dry the ink, while I worked on the other parts of the design. I remember at the show that Ian McLagan really liked the poster and wanted me to send him a copy, which I never did. I should have, though.

[Addendum: one of McLagan's associates saw this post recently and I will be sending them copies of the poster - aw, the internet. -jjm]

Poster, Lachrymator (2002)

This is the first poster I ever designed to be screenprinted (and about the 3rd poster I ever created.) I remember asking Jeff Kleinsmith for type help on this, and he took pity on me, since I didn't know what I was doing, and suggested doing the color switch on the date and venue. For some reason I was really liking Block Berthold at that time - the roughness of the typeface reminded me of type that Jeff or Art Chantry would create. Now it just looks kind of horrible. 4 colors, 14" x 20".

Magazine: Frank 151 layout (2006)

Frank is an arts and culture magazine based in NYC. It's published as a cool, small format perfect bound book, and the issues are usually themed. This layout was for a Pacific Northwest issue. Seattle curator Nin Truong assembled a bunch of different artists and people-about-town to pull together the various sections for the magazine. People like Charles Peterson on photography, Mark Arm talking about Fantagraphics, etc. In any case, he asked me to put something together about Seattle posters. It was pretty cool, since I was able to design the layouts and write the text myself. In anycase, I'm not sure if it has ever come out, since Frank's website seems perpetually under construction.

Exhibition / Book: Eight Essential Ingredients / Cuckoo's Nest (2006)

"Eight Essential Ingredients" was a group exhibition curated by myself and Gabe Kean of Belle & Wissell at the Richard Hugo House in February of 2006. "Cuckoo's Nest" was a component of the exhibition where I coerced friend and poster designer Mike King to create fake advertisements of a strange nature. Those images were then handed out to 5 different authors related to the Richard Hugo House. The writers then wrote fictional "reviews" based on the "advertisements" provided. I designed and, along with Gabe, Sara, Celeste, and Lily, fabricated each of the exhibition pieces. Hilarity ensues.

I created a commemorative chapbook for the exhibition, entitled "Cuckoo's Nest." The chapbook was a simple 5" x 7" saddle-stitched affair, with color-xeroxed interiors on a nice stock. Below are sample spreads from the interior. Chapbook is for sale at Payseur & Schmidt.

Bottle Labels: McGuizzo Winter ESB (2005)

Beer label designs for a Winter ESB brewed by my friends Shane and Meghan. I designed the labels and printed them (1 color) on my letterpress, using custom rubber stamps to print the second color.

Different color comp (below)

Label (below) designed (and printed) for Shane and Meghan for their half of the beer.

Book: Teeth by Therese Littleton (2006)

Chapbook, 5" x 7", 2 color screenprinted cover, hand sewn and assembled (with shark tooth). The red eye of the shark was hand applied screenprinting ink. Interior also designed by me. (For sale at Payseur & Schmidt)


Layout for screenprinting (below), indicating fold lines and spine.

Book Cover: The Privilege of the Sword (2006)

Book cover rough comp (rejected) for Small Beer Press's reissue of Ellen Kushner's The Privilege of the Sword. Title type doesn't have enough presence in this comp, but I like the overall assemblage pretty well.

Poster: Bob Dylan's American Journey (2004)

Poster comps for the Experience Music Project Bob Dylan exhibition. The top design ended up being the exhibition poster, and the logo assemblage has been used on all the advertising and marketing ephemera during the run of the exhibition.

Poster: Clarion West (2006)

Poster, 18" x 24", 3 color screenprint. The orange color was faked by overprinting yellow ink on red ink. Printed by Brian Taylor and Heather Freeman at Patent Pending Press.