Some teaser/progress work for a freelance project. I tend to draw a lot of afflicted little people.

Messing around with some themes and characters from my favorite films tonight. Hoping to start posting more sketches and in progress stuff on here.

I am in the middle of orientating a slew of new students at MICA this week, and therefor am completely exhausted. As part of tomorrow night’s DIY fair (an evening activity during the orientation program), I will be doing live, green screened photo-manipulations of new students. I know, it isn’t really DIY at all, but I still think it’s going to work out pretty nicely. I have set up a Tumblr to showcase the results of these live photo-manipulations, with the students’ permission, of course. You can check out all the action tonight at 9:30pm EST at photoboothofwonder.tumblr.com.

I have my friends and coworkers at MICA‘s Student Activities Office to thank for this awesome find. Been working hard there all week to get ready for new student orientation, which will be consuming all of my time next week.

I wish I could develop a self-brand with this much character, I just don’t quite know what my unique character is yet.

I will now make up a person for the purposes of illustrating what has been bouncing around my head for the past couple of days.

There is this guy I know named Jerry. Jerry is a very passionate person, especially about one subject in particular: lighting fixtures. Jerry’s job is to sell and install lighting fixtures, in his spare time he reads his favorite lamp blogs, and he surrounds himself with other lighting enthusiasts. By all quantifiable measures, it would seem that Jerry is an expert in lighting: the guy you would want to have around when making lighting decisions in your own home. However, for the sake of this story at least, Jerry is an extremist. Though he may know all there is to know about these fixtures themselves, he has no interest in your family, your home, or your specific lighting needs. When you ask him a question about lamps, his answer is so full of jargon and the snobbery that all to often comes with expertise that he is no help to you. Despite all of his knowledge, he is useless and irrelevant to you and your lighting woes.

While Jerry is clearly not real, this question of specialization vs. expertise was spurred by someone just like Jerry, though his/her passion was not lighting, unfortunately. I was reading an individual’s thoughts on a particular subject, and though they had clearly devoted a large portion of their life to pursuing this subject, he/she had surrounded him/herself with so much like-mindedness and extremism that his/her ideas were no longer relevant to the population at large. (I apologize for all the him/her-ing; now you see why I made up Jerry.) As I was reading, and finding this person more and more irrelevant for their extremism, I wondered if I myself had not become an extremist. I spend the majority of my days either designing things, reading about design, admiring and studying design, or trying to take everything I learn in life that is not design and relate it to design. I follow my favorite designers’ blogs, I try and surround myself with talented and dedicated designers, and I work very hard to try and become good at what I do. Am I no different than Jerry?

I hope I have not made myself irrelevant. I want to become a specialist: the go-to guy, not the obsessive looney. After some thinking, and discussion with some of my close friends, including my ever-insightful roommate, Dai, I have decided that the main difference between an extremist and a specialist is not expertise in their field of choice (which is likely comparable) but their sensitivity to the world at large. To be a great graphic designer, one mustn’t focus on the details and minutia of the trade alone, but also, and I think more importantly, how everyday people are affected by design. Without skills and expertise in adjacent fields, one becomes obsessive and extreme.

I am going to try and remember that sometimes the best way to move forward is to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. Taking an afternoon off and having a picnic may just make me a better designer than pulling beziers all day.

One of my favorite resources in Baltimore is The Book Thing, which is just an awesome place where one can go one weekends and get free books of all types. Though most of them are unfortunately designed, every time I go I manage to find a few gems. These are some of my books from my last two trips to the book thing. The Practical English guide and “Geometry: Plane & Solid” are definitely two of my favorite book covers ever. I would love the opportunity to design a textbook cover!

I hope you enjoy these as much as I do, and you can find bigger versions of the pictures on Flickr

I recently watched Field of Dreams for the first time in a very long time; and while I felt the movie was a bit overdramatic and sentimental, I was captivated by the White Sox logo that “Shoeless” Joe Jackson sports on his old school jersey. This prompted me to dig into some other vintage sports logos, and I was surprised by how many are truly beautiful. I wish more modern day teams would use marks with as much character as the old school ones. I have collected some of my favorites, all from www.sportslogos.net, to share with you here. Enjoy!

Up next: College Logos!

I spoke with the proprietors, asked them what they would want from a sign, and let them know I intended to donate one to them. A month of sketching, lettering and painting later, I had this four foot tall A-frame sign, gilded with gold leaf no less! (My first attempt at the laborious process)

The sign is certainly not perfect, as it was my first shot at gilding and sign painting, but it’s a long shot better than what the AUCCTS already had, and with its solid wood construction, enamel lettering, and polyurethane finish, should have lasted them a very long time. However, a day or two after my final review in class, just before I could deliver the sign, the thrift store was tragically destroyed by a fire. According to their website, they are trying to get it up and running soon.

I have contacted the organization to let them know that I still intend to donate the sign. Hopefully they can get the store reopened soon, and it would be really cool if my sign could help draw in some business on opening day. I will post updates on the situation as it progresses.

I had the privilege of spending the month of June completely off the grid (no electricity, cell phone service, internet or running water) studying materials and gothic bookbinding structures with Jim Croft at his home in Santa, Idaho. It was a big decision for me to spend such a large chunk of time, so late in my design education, doing something not directly related to my professional pursuits, but I feel that I learned more living in a tree in Idaho for a month than I would have pushing pixels and pulling beziers back in Baltimore. I expected to learn tons about gothic bookbinding, a field in which Jim is a world-renowned expert, but I did not expect to learn so much about homesteading and sustainable living.

View all the photos from my trip

Jim and his wife Melody live almost completely self-sufficiently in the woods of northern Idaho, in a house they built themselves from the ground up. The paradigm of recycling, Jim is always salvaging materials that would otherwise have gone to waste to create unique and beautiful things. The hardwood floor and roof of his house are from an old hotel and mercantile that Jim help deconstruct; he makes his own binders board by laminating old cereal boxes together with paste; he turns bones and antlers that hunters and butchers consider useless into amazingly beautiful bone tools and folders; almost all of his impressive amount of wood, used for everything from construction of outhouses to covers for some of the most beautiful books on the planet, is rescued from lumber mill burn piles.

Jim himself is a true renaissance man. Not only is he a master bookbinder and wood-worker, but he also knows how to wire a solar panel system, how to rejuvenate 100 year old Edison batteries, how to repair Chevy trucks from the 30′s, 40′s & 50′s, how to use, sharpen and repair every one of his hundreds of tools, and how to whoop my ass at tennis. He is hands down one of the most passionate individuals I have ever met, about every single one of the many things he loves.

I got to fulfill a childhood dream of living in a tree house for the four weeks I spent with Jim. While I will admit I was wishing I hadn’t seen The Blair Witch Project as I walked the few hundred feet into the pitch black Idahoan woods to goto bed every night, sleeping outside, rain or shine, was a great experience. I woke up with the sun every morning, often with a squirrel friend or two scampering on my bed.

Jim and Melody host a pair of workshops each summer on gothic bookbinding, wooden board covers, paper making, etc. During the last week of my stay, I participated in one of these workshops, and worked on two gothic books in addition to the tools and covers I had made in the weeks preceding. Going through the process of making a book in Jim’s style, splitting and shaping the covers with no power tools, pack sewing on cords with a sewing frame, hand crafting the hinges and clasps from raw cuts of brass and bronze, gave me a new respect for the beautiful books he makes. Not only are they aesthetically pleasing, but the functionality of Jim’s binding, the smoothness with which the book opens, is incredible. As nice as they are to look at, holding one of these books in your hands is the only way to completely appreciate it.

I have some plans to make a book or two this coming year with the skills and knowledge I gained in Idaho. I am hoping to translate Jim’s brand of upcycling from the woods of Idaho to the streets of Baltimore: can someone create a book of the same quality using only materials found in the urban environment?

View all the photos from my trip

After much delay, my new website is finally up and running! Please have a look around, check out the new work, and be sure to shoot me an email if you have any comments or find any bugs. I have some more content to push out later today, so stay tuned.