My good friend Ryan Myers has opened up his new San Francisco-based creative space THINKMAKE Studio. Some amazing stuff going on over there, check it out. He’s also put up a new blog as part of his site, so double-awesome from my neighbor to the north.

Pictured above is THINKMAKE’s screen-printed poster for Kiddo which I also have hanging on my studio wall. Looks beautiful framed.

Letterrheady is a blog that posts interesting letterhead throughout history up to present day. Somehow they even got letterhead from the Third Reich…scary.

Living in the same city as the second busiest container port in the United States I get plenty of shipping containers to look at as I’m driving to and from Los Angeles every day. I’m always struck by the logos and the type that gets painted on the sides of these containers and the above are some of my favorites. I especially love how the logos and type get painted on the ribbed containers and create that fluttering effect, it feels so down and dirty but it’s visually awesome.

This set of posters by Ross Berens just kills it for me. It’s all very simple and perfect. Lately I’ve been a sucker for dark landscapes with stars so maybe that has something to do with it, but I really love how the typography switches up with each piece and it still feels like a very unified series. Check out the rest of the posters here and the rest of Ross’ excellent portfolio here.

I got the idea to do stenciled wine bottles from ReadyMade Magazine when I was trying to figure out what I would do for holiday gifts last year. The idea was doing letter stencils on cheap wine bottles after taking off the original label. These two were done for the two biggest wine lovers in my family (whose initials are on each bottle). Certainly they are more appealing than what comes on the bottle (Papyrus? Really!? Avatar!!).

Happy Holidays from all of us at Unmarked Vehicle (which means yours truly, Michael J.)…here are a few shots of this year’s cards, a pretty simple stencil/spray paint/marker combo.

2009 has been an incredible year! Let’s hope 2010 is all the better.

I’ve accepted a position working for the Los Angeles-based clothing company Grn Apple Tree and will be heading up the design department working on a variety of things including T-shirts, catalogs and branding. It’s a pretty exciting opportunity to be going to work for a place who’s aesthetics you really dig and have something going on you admire. I’m looking forward to being part of it! I’ll post more as things progress, but for now check out their website and look for their threads in stores.

I wrote about Bethpage Black before in this post, a band that recorded an EP before ever setting foot in the same room together. It’s an interesting way to approach a music project, it’s kind of the opposite of how things usually go (play together, write songs, book shows, then record). On December 10th we will release our debut EP Opéra-Comique with a show at the Art Theater in Long Beach, California.

The artwork started from a library of graphic explorations that I save for a time when they are appropriate. It’s almost like keeping a journal full of lyrics that eventually get used when the right song is written for them. We had discussed the concept of using a female figure to talk about some of the lyrical themes on the EP, and knowing that we were going to use a female model for the album artwork (more on that soon) I thought the use of an abstract version of a woman was a good connection and still different enough from the record. I like the colors on a dark field for this band, it feels appropriate and classy enough for the venue. We needed two posters, one as an art piece and one that had a bit more information on it, so I decided they should connect visually by being mirror images; if you hold them next to one another they create a sort-of Rorschach test image. The tickets were placed on a cut sheet so that the back of each ticket is different depending on which part of the sheet it was cut from.

The posters and the EP will be for sale at the show, the tickets are on sale now at a few places on the web or in Long Beach (you actually get a free EP when you buy a ticket to the show). You can go to the Bethpage Black website to find out more. Hope to see you at the show!

Here are a couple tracks from the forthcoming EP, including a cover of Chick Corea’s You’re Everything:

Bethpage Black-You’re Everything

Bethpage Black-Panic Attack

Created by the lovely Debbie G., I had seen this when it was in progress and wasn’t sure how it was going to turn out given all the different styles incorporated into one piece. After seeing the finished work I was blown away; something about how all the different elements come together seamlessly even though they are so different from one another, like the psychedelic three dimensional type vs. the sepia-toned chalk board with hand-written type on it. I haven’t heard the music yet so I’m not sure how it relates, but what’s tying this all together is her image being the focal point with these things going on around her. I guess I’m a sucker for very centralized compositions.

I love complete identity systems done well, and this package for the London Jazz Festival by the London-based studio IWANT certainly is. All of the vector line work is generative, meaning they used the wave forms of sounds associated with the festival and represented them visually, so the line work isn’t just randomly created. Superb type too, I’m intrigued by the way the let the ‘J’ in ‘Jazz’ hang its tail out to the left, my inclination would have been to push it to the right to keep a more strict grid. It looks like the reason is that the vertical strokes on the ‘L’ in ‘London’, the ‘J’ in ‘Jazz’ and the ‘F’ in ‘Festival’ all line up perfectly while the tail breaks out a little bit. It works formally because of the consistent thickness of the stroke and conceptually given the nature of jazz and how some notes or phrases can step outside of the lines and still be right with the music.

Via Brand New »