Jun 4, 2012 | Book Covers, Recent Posts
I was contacted awhile ago to do the cover book jacket lettering for a book called "Breath." The book at last check was in limbo, the author undecided between the hundreds of versions of this word he had commissioned from calligraphers around the world. This is a word that has been done many times, perhaps not as many times as "free" or "sale" but nonetheless it is quite a challenge to do something new. I thought a lot about the breath as something circular and flowing, and tested many ways of letting the letters do this, as though breathing themselves.
These versions are done with a pointed brush, with little or no retouching. The last one in the sequence was at one point the front runner, shown here with a proposed treatment indicating a gold foil and emboss. We also considered blind emboss on white, but it would have been difficult to market in an airport book store competing with Danielle Steele or Scott Turow from the distance of the boarding gate…..
Breath calligraphy © Iskra Johnson
Apr 26, 2012 | Recent Posts
I have been meaning for awhile to write something here about Typographyshop.com, an online store that sells t-shirts you may not have known you were missing: fine, tasteful, funny designs about typography and advertising. I am not a person known to wear t-shirts with words on them. In fact I am not even a "t-shirt"-wearer. But Patrick King, chief designer and kerner at this enterprise won me over with the elegant black tanktops for women. I took my previous favorite to Mexico. People all over the Yucatan saw a woman wearing a shirt that said, "Everything is better in Bodoni." And, full of envy, they came up to me and said, (I kid you not,) "I've never been, is it beautiful?" I assured them it was, and that it was even more beautiful than Akumal, with bigger turtles.
Do take a look at the latest release, my new favorite, which bridges the hardcore world of very sans serif and the particularly zen seriflessness of the Japanese enso: "Counter," on pre-release sale until the end of April.
If you are coming to AlphabetRoadtrip from some other land, perhaps from a place where the letters have no parts and thus no names but simply emerge wholecloth as a set of pixels, this note from Patrick explains:
Counter is a new theme full of meaning far beyond the typographic. It elicited quite the discussion on our Facebook page.
Some designers and all non designers weren't familiar with the term "Counter," which among the many terms in typographic anatomy is perhaps the simplest to explain as any fully enclosed space within a letterform. Uppercase A, B, D, O, P, Q, R and lower case a, b, d, e, g, o, p, q and the numbers 4, 6, 8, 9 and 0 all contain counters. And let's not forget the & ampersand.
Or as I said to a type challenged friend, it's the hole in the letter.
What I like about Typography shop is not just the products and the complete coolness of everything they produce, but also the sense of community. Where else can you get involved as a focus group deciding just how to kern "Make the logo smaller?" (a greatest hits shirt, and if you are a graphic designer you have felt the pain.) Take a look, wear your shirt to a temple in Koyasan, and send in a photo!
Apr 10, 2012 | New Work, Recent Posts
Successfully melding words and images is a tricky design challenge, particularly when it involves a brassiere. Exactly how do you fit two unequally long words into two equal shapes? And how do you make it readable? And what style of bra? and are there ribbons???
This project for Woman Within was a lot of fun. The process started with pencils to solve basic pose and letterform style questions. Then I moved to tighter brush sketches and started mixing and matching elements to get to something that would read immediately as words, with just enough suggestion of "woman" to tell you what it was about.
Above, the final logo, before being vectorized.
Apr 3, 2012 | Experimental Lettering, Journal: Wayfinding, Recent Posts
Last week Christopher Hoff, one of our best plein air painters, passed away far too soon, too young, a huge shock to the community. I had fallen in love with his work, much of which is about the street, and which often featured the Walking Man and other signs that are part of my real and mental landscape. On Facebook and the blogosphere people have posted beautiful tributes, one of which is from Joey Veltcamp which you can read here.
Christopher's passing, and the equally sad passing of the fine calligrapher and font designer Teri Kahan has put me in a reflective mood about life in general. How quickly our days are consumed and how easy it is to lose track of what is important. Typography and lettering design are my job, but also my passion. I pulled out my journal to remind myself to stay on track. From Wayfinding:
© Iskra Johnson
Pages from this journal have been published in Martin Dawber's New Illustration with Type
Mar 16, 2012 | Current Affairs, Recent Posts, The Like Project UnFacebook Stickers
You always wonder how the famous web serendipity thing works. Somehow Flow Magazine in Holland came across the UnFacebook Like Stickers and featured them on their website yesterday. The number of visits to my design website as a result of this have been astonishing. I browsed deeper into their site and found this wonderful image from Moma Propaganda with accompanying text from Flow. I have put the google translation of the page below. The correct translation is just fine, yes, these are perfectly well educated people and their English is about 1000 percent better than my Dutch, but the google translation in some ways says more about the whole feel of our modern/global relationship with the internet. I especially like "Sometimes the feeling comes over me that I 'bad' busy. If the media reports about Facebook or Twitter goes, the tenor usually what I do poverty asset. "
From Sao Paolo Agency Moma Propaganda
Alpha
"Once we were not jumping. keep a blog, twitter, facebook. We are good at a leaf, but the rest, because we did not see the added value of. Meanwhile we are all about. For it is the combination platter with all those things makes it so fun. Direct comments from readers on things we write, we can not through the leaves, but on the Internet. That was last week Astrid very happy with all the sweet tweets and facebook and blog comments on her broken wrist (update: they must undergo surgery Friday) and we also found last week on the social site noticeboard pint rest. What another great discovery, pages full of beautiful, truly a virtual party there. Our freelancer Dorine wrote a story about social media (to be read in the next Flow – March 14 in the shop). She writes: "Sometimes the feeling comes over me that I 'bad' busy. If the media reports about Facebook or Twitter goes, the tenor usually what I do poverty asset. "She finished the article with a nice counter-voice:" Internet has given me much brought: an untold amount of inspiration that I gain through pint rest . com, handy and useful tips and offers I get if I had another place oproepje who has a good restaurant / recipe for chocolate cake / bike seat or phrase has to do with me at the flea market stand. The warmth of all the great comments after the birth when I proudly posted a picture of my child. "We agree, nothing no erosion of human touch all these social media, life is super cozy with much interaction! In the photo a funny campaign by the Portuguese agency 6B Estúdio / Moma Propaganda about new media.
*Note, I rarely if ever put images from other website on my own website unless I have contacted the website publisher first to ask permission. In this case since the topic is Facebook and virality and the above image has been posted many other places I think the producers at Moma this won't mind. And if they do, they can find me easily through…the social network.
Designer, calligrapher, lettering artist. 