This is what I do when I’m bored at lunch. Usually I just write little lists of words in series, changing a single letter as the words progress, or playing around with spelling or simple phrases, but since this wordplay was a little more fancy-looking than usual, I thought it would be appropriate for Typo Friday this week.
For the entire time I have lived in Portland, this building in my neighborhood, once a convenience store, had been in great exterior disrepair; this included the ghost image of the sign for what was most likely the original tenant of the building, dated 1891. A few months ago, I noticed workers preparing to repaint the exterior of the building, and I was worried because it’s on a much-used bike route of mine and seeing even the remnants of old, hand-painted signs always warms my heart. Much to my surprise, when they repainted the rest of the building, they repainted the original signage as well!
I had never seen that done before, and certainly would not have assumed they would do it with such a basic sign like this one, but it made me happy and I thought it deserving to be part of Typo Friday this week. Has anyone else seen an old sign get repainted when the new tenants refurbish the space?
My friend Doug Merritt recently created this wonderful typeface, which he calls “Hoffee,” inspired by Portland’s two favorite beverages, coffee and beer. Doug painstakingly arranged roasted coffee beans and hops leaves into letterforms and photographed the results; no Photoshoppery here! I was incredibly impressed when Doug showed me this last week and I knew I had to feature here on Typo Friday. I love the little touches like the single leaf as the dot on the i and j, and how some of the leaves still have some of the vine attached. The whole set just has such great character. Drink up and enjoy!
Most of the letters I post on Typo Friday will be of the hand-drawn variety, but in the last week I’ve taken two letterpress classes at the IPRC, and I’m sort of in love with setting metal type, so I thought I’d show you what we came up with during the Intro to the Poster Press class last night. The teacher, Michael d’Alessandro set and printed the green, wooden type while showing us how to use the table top poster press. Then, each student got to set a small chunk of text and/or imagetype and that was locked into the press bed and everyone got a go inking up and rolling the paper over.
I did the eagle, ZAP, and stars, as if you couldn’t guess, so here’s a close-up.
Remember: 15% discount on orders of $20+ (before shipping) from the radrobot.org store or my Etsy shop.
I’m adding a new feature for Typo Friday posts. When ever I see some lettering or signage that strikes my eye around Portland, I will try to snap a picture of it if I can and share it with you folks. For the first one, I thought it appropriate to start with one of my favorite signs in town, and a favorite store as well, the Portland Outdoor Store on SW 3rd. It’s a huge store, and you can still buy all manner of western and outdoor wear here, in fact I just bought a new belt and shirt when I stopped by to take these pictures. Enjoy!
The store has been around for a while and the original painted signage on the building is starting to fade a lot.
Close up.
In honor of Halloween being tomorrow and all, I thought this week’s Typo Friday should have a spooky flair to it, so I present to you Ryan Heshka’s ABC Spookshow, one of my favorite alphabet books. I bought it a few years ago and I just keep coming back to it time and time again for a fun and quick read.
Heshka does a wonderful job of mixing his retro-esque, painted illustration style with both painted and collaged type throughout the book. Each page of the book is very engaging. Here are a few of my favorite pages:
ABC Spookshow is available for a very reasonable price on Amazon.
And of course you should check out more of Ryan Heshka’s work at his website, www.ryanheshka.com
I’m working on an alphabet book for my thesis, which I made reference to on Wednesday, so I’m looking for more alphabet books for research, both those geared towards children and not. Anyone have any favorites?
Welcome back to Typo Friday, friends! I went out to the Bins again a few days ago, and even though they raised their price on hardcover books, I was of course, convinced to pick up a handful of goodies such as this music education book with its super bright dust jacket.
The cloth cover itself is no less pleasing. There’s something I really like about the awkward alignment of the type.
Nothing too impressive with the type, but a great cover overall.
This is the real find of my trip. This was just a completely unexpected, stellar find.
No type at all on this cover of Elephant Bill, but I though this elephant line drawing was rad.
This one was just the covers, all the innards having already been removed. I’ve already bound up some heavy drawing paper and turned it into a sketchbook for future use. Which brings up a topic on which I’d like some opinions. The internet and artsy, handmade boutiques and such are full of people who have torn apart old books to turn into sketchbooks and journals and the like. I never really know how to feel; there’s that part of me that feels like there’s something sacred about these books, as relics of another time, but now having collected a wealth of them myself, I realize that most will not be read beyond a cursory skimming, and most of what I have is not worth anything to be resold as either a collectible or serving their original purpose.
My question is: is it better to re-purpose what parts I can of these gems that I can for more modern use, as many others do without thought, or the other option, which may eventually lead back to the Goodwill and into the hands of someone in the same position?
Today’s Typo Friday also happens to be my current illustration class assignment. The assignment was to re-illustrate the cover of a book on the New York Times Bestseller List. I took it in my own direction and chose to create a cover for one of my favorite books of all time, Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. The problem as I see it is that the book gets categorized as a self-help book, and thus, gets boring, self-help book cover design. But this book is so much more than your average, modern self-help book.
I wanted to make a cover that would appeal to a newer, younger generation of readers that may be able to make some positive steps by reading this book. Since first reading How to Win Friends and Influence People, and applying some of its teachings in my interactions with clients and customers as a freelancer and behind the table at comic shows, I’ve noticed a marked difference in how I act, how others react to me, and how well I sell.
I went through pages of sketchbook sketches, trying out different type styles for the cover, but in the end felt confident that I had written the title enough to just sort of wing it on the final illustration. The only part I really was unsure on was “Influence,” which I drew three times before happy.
Just for fun, here’s a scan of a 1959 paperback version I recently bought.
Also, as I mentioned on Wednesday, I was asked to speak about the DIY community and my experiences with Etsy before introducing Matt Stinchcomb of Etsy.com at a PNCA-sponsored event. You can go to Flickr to see the rest of the set this photo came from, but I liked this one the best because it looks like I know what I’m talking about, when in actuality, my mind was a blank the entire time I was on stage. Apparently I didn’t say anything stupid and was kind of funny at times, so that’s rad. Matt had a lot of good things to say about both the past and future of Etsy, and I happily had the opportunity to have a one-on-one meeting with him yesterday afternoon, to get some more tips on how to better use my Etsy store.
Less than a week before I left for SPX last weekend, I decided I was tired of almost all of my stock of 1″ buttons that I sell at shows, some of which have been for sale for almost three years now. I took a day and whipped up these new designs and because I am who I am now, they all ended up being typography based.
I think they are all pretty representative of where I’m at with lettering right now, so they seemed fitting for a Typo Friday, and they went over pretty well at the show too, so hooray for that.
If anyone is interested in any of these, they are available for $1 each. Feel free to contact me or use the Paypal button below!
It’s Typo Friday again! I try to read just about any book I can find about hand lettering or sign painting, so I want to use some Typo Fridays to review them, so others who may be curious can know what’s out there.
The Art & Craft of Sign-writing was written by William Sutherland in 1889. I have a reprint of it from 1989. There are a few good books out in the world about the business of running a sign-painting business, and I’m sure this was certainly one of the only one from its era, but I would probably recommend reading some of the more modern books first, unless you have an unyielding interest in Victorian-era lettering and decoration.
The book covers a lot of ground: from how to set up a board to be painted on, mixing your own colored paint from pigment and boiled linseed oil, gold and other metal leafing techniques, to etching and embossing glass, as well as how to combine said techniques to pleasing effect. One of my favorite parts of the book is a small paragraph aside from the regular text, describing the multi-step process of how to paint a usable chalkboard for a school.
Many of the paint and varnish ingredients are still readily available: linseed oil, copal drier, etc, but some ingredients I feel may have fallen out of use or changed names over the years. It recommends taking a visit to your local pipe maker (tobacco pipes, not household pipes) and buying pipe clay. I assume a local pipe maker was much easier to find in London in 1889 than it would be today.
This book would be a fun experiment for anyone wishing to try out sign-painting the old way and is certainly a wonderful historical document for those interested in the subject. It can be found fairly cheaply on Amazon.
The last half of the book are these color plates showing examples of various alphabets or 3-D lettering techniques that you may want to use, as well as oft-used crests for various organizations, and other examples of Victorian decoration to mix in with your lettering.
