By now I’ve had a few meetings with David Fox about his Upside architecture studio and their current Green Magnolia project, and I’ve offered to design an identity for them and work with some Pellissippi Media Technologies students to design a presentation package.

My favorites are the two in the upper left. Please leave comments below with your preferences.

I’ve spent four terrific days learning more about letterpress wood type at APSU’s Goldsmith Press and Rare Type Archive, and have printed the above 15 x 20″ poster from Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Here’s a rundown of the process.

Day One: I arrive, meet press proprietor and professor Cindy Marsh, get the lay of the land, and begin typesetting the headlines for the Shakespearean Revival poster. I find some great “period” faces and lay out the type n a table top. But, after lunch I discover that there is not enough smaller metal type to set the poster’s text. So, after considering my options, I decide to print this Royal Nonesuch poster since it has less text.

Day Two: I finish pulling type for the poster, robbing 36 pt. wood type from some old projects. After lunch I work on the negative space, building up the form with quads, spacers, leading, and furniture. By the end of the day the poster is locked up on the press bed and ready for its first proof.

Day Three: I fine tune the letterspacing, cut down the paper, and pull a first proof, which is badly over-inked. Cindy arrives to critique my work while my daughter Chloe races around the studio on her scooter. After marking up the proof, I wash out the press and tweak some kerning, flip a reversed 3, and add the crown and rule dingbats. This last item was Cindy’s suggestion, giving a regal tough to the Royal Nonesuch. I decide to leave the typo in “David” as an homage to the Duke’s many errors with Shakespeare and facts in general. We re-ink the press properly this time and pull a second proof. Not bad. More tweaking: the apostrophe is a bit low and the A is a bit high. Cindy removes an unnoticed label stuck to the bottom of the A, and places a scrap of paper beneath the apostrophe. Perfection! I pull the edition and leave them in the drying racks.

Day Four: I break down the press form, working from the top down to carefully re-file the type, spacers, leads, furniture, quoins, and other detritus from printing. I refile a few other old projects as well, just for good karma. I also stack, count, and wrap my dry prints. After some chatting with Cindy and my professor Bruce Childs, Chloe and I say our goodbyes and drive off toward home.

Design students need an online portfolio, and I recommend a great free resource called Carbonmade. Technology Goddess Audrey Williams turned me on to this online community of designers, illustrators, photographers and other creatives based around portfolios. Carbonmade offers an attractive, clean slide show interface that uses JPEGs. Easy for anybody with basic graphic computer skills to create. Pellissippi design student Mellissa Dos Santos has just set up her portfolio. And, here’s a link to mine.

My Design I students are presenting their online portfolios as their final exam. I’d suggest that students set up a free account, use Photoshop to JPEG their PDFs, and start uploading their portfolio samples before exam week. Remember: the early bird ends up owning the worm farm.

Update: Check out the student portfolios below and leave a comment by clicking on the comments link.

Kitty Garland
Mark Friebus
Anastasia Williams
Cordelia Norris

OK, So I changed my mind. The card design I put up yesterday seemed kind of flat, and too much like an ad. These are “message” cards that advocate generosity during the holiday season, hopefully without being too didactic or “preachy.”

Update: I entered the “volunteer” card and it was juried into the exhibit, along with one designed by my students Ken Van Dyne and Kitty Garland. Check out the whole exhibit online.

I like the subversiveness of hiding literary references in a product shot. OK, so Thanksgiving is in two days, and the Christmas season is now officially here. “And now suppose you put the chops on.”

Here’s my proposed t-shirt design for Pellissippi State’s Common Book. The front includes a civil war map of Knoxville. The back lists our campus events surrounding Sharpshooter. Opinions?

I’ve been wanting to get a new online portfolio up, and today I finally did it. Check it out here. It’s a readymade thing I got at Carbonmade until I get a custom site, which I’ll eventually link to this blog. Let me know what you think of the work, the site and the name. Also, the Pi and Hamlet books are organized a bit diferently in the portfolio. Which do you think is better?