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.