Two years ago I setup a screenprinting studio in my apartment here in Bristol in the UK. I had recently been to a printed ephemera sale and had been introduced to the idea of a make-ready, where printers use the same sheets when setting up different jobs. This creates a haphazard layering, a record of recent jobs. I liked the idea as I had inadvertently done if myself while screenprinting in the studios at my university.

DOWNLOAD DOUGHBOY HERE

After a couple years of drawing my own fonts, I’ve decided it’s about time to go ahead and just finish one already. I usually get about as far as ASCII (lower & uppercase, figures, basic punctuation) before my interest begins to dwindle and its on the the next batch of artwork. But after a good amount of time working on the back end of my thesis project, the font family Hera, I’m going back and finishing some unfinished typographic projects that had been put on the back-burner. I’m alot more on the lettering side of the made up typography/lettering dichotomy, so a lot of the letters I draw don’t end up as finished fonts, even though I do alot of my drawing in fontlab. But there are a few fonts I drew that, after what I learned from Hera, I’ve decided to go back and finish; by which I mean build out to full character sets for and kern. This guy was originally drawn the for a single poster; a typographic rendition of the phrase “Your designer handbag sucks” I’ve since built it out into a display font, and I’m letting you get it for free. I give you Doughboy:

Jono Lewarne is a Type/Code contributor as well as a typographer working out of Bristol, UK. A member of the International Society of Typographic Designers, he also is the founder of City Edition Studio, a fledgling graphic design studio currently working on their first commissions.

Xavier Antin has just graduated from the two year MA Communication, Art & Design course at the Royal College of Art. Interested in scales of production and the ideas and processes of publishing, he’s deconstructed desktop printing devices. And by deconstructed I mean he’s gone at them with a screwdriver, not just in the fine art sense of the word. He’s produced a fascinating manual, ‘Printing at Home’, in which he gives simple instructions on how to re-appropriate your printer to suit different needs, such as watercolour effects by replacing the print head with a painting brush. Very interesting…

From July 5–9 I attended Typography Summer School, a week-long workshop in London ran by Fraser Muggeridge. The experience was incredible, a week of learning from experts in the field and fellow students from around the world. Each day was visited by different tutors: Ken Garland, David Pearson, Paul Elliman, Europa and Sara De Bondt.

TSS gave a new perspective on graphic design and typography — a perspective that both confirmed and challenged my already present beliefs. Though it is hard to put everything I gained into a single article, here are four general concepts I learned:

The YEAH Manual is now available for ordering at Swill Children for only $5!

Here are the details:

The YEAH Manual is a multi-lingual guide to YeahYeahYeahYeahYeah, an internet project conceived by Tyler Healy that allows anyone with a cell phone camera the ability to upload their pictures anonymously and globally. What has resulted, is an environment that Mashable states is “blurry, funny, ugly, sad, voyeuristic, boring and even mystifying; altogether, the collection can be described as fascinating and bizarre, an exercise for the culture of curation amid a mobile world.”

Over the last few days my sister and I logged in over 1500 miles road tripping from Reno Nevada to the Grand Canyon and then back again. The entire round trip took us through Nevada, California, Arizona, and Utah. We drove through mountains, cities, canyons, and villages, and never touched rubber on the same road twice. About an hour into the beginning of the trip, captivated by the breathtaking scenery of the Western Sierras, I started to notice some of the hand crafted call-out signs on the side of the road.  My sister and I found it necessary to be on the lookout and haphazardly stop on a dime to photograph them along the way for your viewing pleasure.

WildGarden paused screen

WildGarden is my thesis project at Parsons, exhibited during the show two weeks ago. It’s an open source, Google Code hosted software application that enables you to paint with a Wiimote. WildGarden works as a live performance tool or it can just be used to end up with a static composition. The basic idea is that you use the Wiimote to create elements that resemble paint strokes. Active paint strokes are animated and take on partially autonomous behaviors that you manipulate. When you make a new stroke, older strokes become deactivated (and once they’re not active they can only be faded out or completely erased), enabling you to gradually layer on strokes.

During a recent trip to Daedalus Bookshop, quite possibly the coolest bookstore in the state of Virginia, I came across an odd set of books titled “Little Journeys.” The design of the books was highly reminiscent of William Morris’s Arts and Crafts Movement and dated MCMIX (1909!) Without hesitation, I picked up one of the books for only $8.