December 2008

Happy Holidays everyone! Thanks for making 2008 a great year. Gleeful shout outs to all the wonderful people that have contributed, commented and generally taken time out of their day to visit Grain Edit. We’ll be back on Jan 5th. Lots of good things planned for the new year!

(image via webgirlpip’s awesome flickr photostream)

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Really, really into these lovely illustrations from Andrew Bannecker. Definitely the best beer and shoe prints I’ve seen in a long time. I love how he mixes flat graphics with intricate details. His work has a nice depth to it as well, thanks in part to those great rough textures.

A few (we want more!) of his prints are available from Charming Wall.

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Thanks to Alex Haigh of ThinkDust for making my day. I love looking though my old 1970s/80s Letraset catalogs, so I’m really excited to see that someone has finally created a digitized version of the Yagi Link Double typeface. Alex has put in hundreds of hours to create the upper and lower case 255 character set which he calls Miyagi.

I just fired up Illustrator and gave the typeface a test drive. It looks great. This makes me want to break out the Letraset catalogs and see what other typefaces I’m missing.

Technical details: 255 character set upper and lowercase, full ascii characters, opentype format compatible with pc and mac, full manual kerning.

You can purchase the Miyagi typeface at Alex’s new foundry HypeForType

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One person we adore at Grain Edit is Japanese illustrator Rica Takada. Beauty and whimsy meet simplicity in each of her works. She uses natural vibrant colors and textured shapes to create depth, and also meticulously plays with clean and often rhythmic lines. Some of her work includes designing decorative pieces for the home, illustrating CD covers featuring wide eyed dreamy mod gals, and publishing books including Un Coin de Soleil and Moi Saison Préférée. Find out more by visiting her site, www.weekendstroll.com.

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Rad luggage label for Hotel Filser which is located in Oberstdorf, Germany. The mountains in the back would be the Bavarian Alps. Anyone know what typeface “Filser” is set in? Is it Hand-drawn?

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Italia Modern Design – Published by PIE Books c2007

Japanese publisher PIE Books has put together some excellent design related books over the past couple years including Book Design of Graphic Designers in the World, Olle Eksell and Book Design of Graphic Designers in Japan. I picked up Italia Modern Design recently and it doesn’t disappoint. The book focuses on Italian graphic design from the 1950s-1970s and includes many of the heavyweights like Bruno Munari, Giovanni Pintori, Max Huber, Enzo Mari, Pino Tovaglia, Albe Steiner etc. It also includes a fair amount of work from Olivetti and Pirelli.

The people at PIE Books do a great job of sourcing and presenting the materials. They always dig up a few posters/books/magazines that I’ve never seen before. I just wish they would include an English translation (all the text is in Japanese) so, I can follow along with the notes.

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I really like Maria Homler Dahlgren’s Bricka Stockholm tray, so I was excited when Maria emailed me with this bag she designed for Loka. Lots of fun colors and shapes.

Check out the rest of Maria’s work at the Metagram Art Ab website.

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I first stumbled upon Eleanor’s work while out shoe shopping a few years ago. I found a menagerie of Keds slip-on shoes with the loveliest animal patterns ever-imaginable…doves, giraffes, camels, and even cows! It was love at first sight!

Since that shopping extravaganza, I came to learn that the wonderful Ms. Grosch was behind those whimsical designs. Her work incorporates carefully chosen color palettes with geometric shapes and attentive lines, much in the style of her hero, Charley Harper.

In addition to designing for Keds, Eleanor has also designed for Alien Workshop, Urban Outfitters, and Chronicle Books. Her work diversely appears on rock posters, skateboards, apparel, and various publications. This past April, Print Magazine honored Eleanor as one of their New Visual Artists of 2008.

Before we bite into the meat of this interview, I’ve gathered a few nibbles and goodies of Eleanor’s work from the past years:

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1979 Republica Argentina- de junio dia mundial del medio ambiente

Rad man tree stamp via David McFarline

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Monaco 75 Grand Prix Auto Poster illustrated by Michael Turner

Little something for everyone here….racing stripes, slanted type and a big pink castle.

(via Posterclassics.com)

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I have an upcoming trip to Singapore. Can anyone suggest places to visit? (museums, shops, lounges, restaurants, etc.) Is the toy museum worth visiting?

Also I while I’m in Singapore I’d like to contact a few designers/design firms in regards to a studio visit we could feature on Grain Edit. Can anyone suggest any designers/design firms I should contact? If anyone wants to meet up while I’m in Singapore just send me an email the contact page.

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Wow. I’m really impressed with Scotty Reifsnyder‘s work. He has great variety and a nice range of projects up on his site. His use of type and texture is really effective — lots of little details to soak up. Scotty is a recent Tyler School of Art MFA graduate, and works at Headcase Design by day.

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Sweet Mother! Six columns of grid goodness! Antonio from Aisle One just emailed me with his latest project The Grid System. The site features links to articles, tools, books as well as templates and other goodies. It’s basically an ever-growing resource site on the topic of grid systems and anything associated to it. Tap it and pass it!

(image via the grid loving Swiss Legacy)

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Bag for Polish handicraft store Cepelia 1970s?

Breaking out that case of premium rooster loot. Found this a while back at the local dirt mall. The type is nice, but really its all about that rooster tail.  Even the rooster can’t get his eyes off it. I’d be having a how ya doing all day too if I had a tail like that.

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Back in Febuary we featured John Foster’s work for the So-Cal Fire Poster Project . Recently John contacted us regarding his latest project, a book on packaging design entitled FOR SALE: Over 200 Innovative Solutions in Packaging Design. The book features many of the designers we’ve featured on Grain Edit including: Invisible Creature, Wink, Jason Munn of The Small Stakes and Burlesque of North America. In the exchange below John shares some of his thoughts on the book for Grain Edit Readers.

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