Uncle Sam Goes to the Big Parade
Brush Drawing with Watermelon Accents © Iskra Design
Alphabet Road Trip | the blog of Iskra Design
Category: Recent Posts
Talking Covers
This just landed in my box from Liquid Treat and I couldn't resist posting. A blog where you can talk about book covers and see the design process, who can resist? Edited by author Sean Manning.
(I hope this is considered fair use, since it is solely posted to send you to the site. If not, Sean, send me an email and I will remove it.)
Brush Icons on the Theme of Theater: Work in Progress
© Iskra Design
Part of a series of iconic images for an art center, to be used in signage and in print. How do you say something new about the human condition with 3 to13 brush strokes? Laughing or crying, not much room in an icon for what's in between.
Breathing Calligraphy: Book Cover Project
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
Something Wonderful from Typographyshop
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!
About Iskra
Designer, calligrapher, lettering artist. Read more 