Category: Recent Posts
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.
Mar 9, 2012 | Book Covers, Recent Posts
Here are samples of different ways contemporary script calligraphy can be integrated into book cover design. Most of these books are ongoing series, in which the hand lettered book title becomes part of the brand.
Casual, fun brush lettering integrated into the illustration
Monoline pen handwriting for Sophie Kinsella's "Shopaholic" series
Brush calligraphy that flows with the curves of the illustration
Script as illustration, a visual pun
Contemporary brush script designed to play off of a font
A long title treated as a text shape for Laurel House
Elegant contemporary pen calligraphy in two different styles
Feb 24, 2012 | Recent Posts, Signs I Like
"Signs I Like" has been on a long vacation. But today I saw something I could not resist outside the Lighthouse coffee shop. I did the lettering for the Seattle Times masthead about twelve years ago, in association with Landor Seattle. Coincidentally the logo was featured in Logo Reviews a few days ago. The true test of a logo is how well does it stand the test of time? Here it is on a newspaper kiosk, rotated so you can compare it with the way it is used in the paper. I had nothing against that eagle, but I do like how abstract (and even more Gothic) this becomes without it. Perhaps someone liked it so much they tore it out to sew on their jeans:
My task was to look at every other Gothic newspaper masthead in America and come up with a subtle, very legible, fresh variation. Here is the before and after:
(I do not know who did the eagle, so unfortunately I can't credit them here.)
Masthead typography is uniquely challenging. Gothic is by its nature very difficult to read. It may look traditional and authoritative, but it is based on a completely zen principle: the space between letters and that magical yin/yang balance of darkness and light. This was a dream project. My father was publisher for eight years of the paper he started, The Auburn Citizen, which also had a Gothic masthead. This assignment connected me back through time to the long tradition of the small- town newspaper and work in the original public sphere. Websites, as convenient and up-to-the-minute as they are, do not age well; we will never admire their distressed and curling edges or how the wind transformed their serifs.
See more typographic logotypes at Iskra Design.
Designer, calligrapher, lettering artist. 