Alphabet Road Trip | the blog of Iskra Design

Script Lettering for Romance Book Jackets

Jun 2, 2009 | Book Covers, New Work

Elegant_Calligraphy_BookCover_Balogh
 
These two books by Mary Balogh have been on the best seller list in recent weeks. Here I created the title lettering for art director Lynn Andreozzi at Random House.  Lynn is wonderful to work with: she has a great eye for type, and the covers I do with her are always tasteful and beautiful. Illustration for this series by Herman Estevez.

Wild West Beauty Shoppe Gothic

Jun 2, 2009 | Signs I Like | 1 comment

Wakn'YakSat

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This sign from a small town in the Okanogan demonstrates a unique blend of pen-made Gothic with the sensibility of Blondie and Dagwood. Note how the sign maker became reflective and doubtful at the end, forming a k with a completely different serif, lifted no doubt from a manuscript in the Newberry Library. Consistency is one of the greatest challenges of the letter arts: how exactly DO you get to the end of a sentence in the same style you began? Here the work is unified by soothing wood grain which flows from the hard-edged and somewhat brutal content of the words into the mind of Blondie as she dreams of being wak-ed into beauty.

This comes to me from Jake Seniuk, Director of the Port Angeles Fine Art Center. His hair was salt and pepper at the moment of documentation, and in spite of urging from his young sons, he chose to get his hair cut farther down the road.

Hotel With the Moon on Fire

May 28, 2009 | Signs I Like

HotelMoonIMG_1823

It's hard to tell if this sign was planned, or vandalized by an astute graphic artist. But that crazy truncated O seems to be both a devil's crown and a moon in perfect horizontal to the earth. The morning light tells you sleep was in short supply in a strange bed, and the antenna shoots from right field like cupid's arrow.

From Ernest Hilsenberg, sculptor and ceramic artist.