Lure & Cast

Summer update

2010-06-30T14:43:27Z

Letterpress business cards, Cambridge University Press ESL site

If you've visited me here before, Lure & Cast has a freshened look! The slight redesign is based on a series of spirograph circles that I drew for a set of business cards and letterpress printed at the Center for Book Arts. I just happened to pick Jos Buivenga's excellent Museo font for the design and only discovered later that the free license includes web use. It gave me an excuse to try out embedding fonts---the variations of Museo and Museo Sans should show up for anyone viewing the site on an up-to-date web browser.

Other recent work includes the new Cambridge ESL website, which features a system of page banners that coordinate with an annually updated page header. I contributed many design touches throughout the site, though the bulk of the work was project managing parts relevant to the ESL market during the extensive launch, from managing the migration of content to the new, dynamic CMS to testing to post-launch tweaks.

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New Work: Letterpress business cards

2010-06-29T20:20:33Z

It had been a few years since I'd done any physical printing when I realized that I could use a new set of business cards. I signed up for a project-focused class at the Center for Book Arts and planned...It had been a few years since I'd done any physical printing when I realized that I could use a new set of business cards. I signed up for a project-focused class at the Center for Book Arts and planned on a relatively simple design utilizing metal type in the studio when I started playing with shapes in Illustrator and ended up with a series of spirograph-like structures. My simple design became a three-color job with a tight registration, but the challenge proved to be fully within scope, even with my slightly rusty skills. I printed just two of the four designs for now and hope to get back to a press again soon.

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New Work: Cambridge University Press

2009-10-07T16:36:39Z

website bannersThe Cambridge University Press ESL website launched March 2009 features a coordinated system of page banners across the major sections of the site which all spill from the main page header down into the content area below. The graphics of the header and page banners are updated annually from the design of the print catalog.

On the homepage, the page banner is a flash element that shows a series of major products and their corresponding methodology titles, illustrating the history of scholarship behind Cambridge's English teaching products. To maximize site performance and make updating this feature easier, it will most likely be replaced with a jQuery slideshow.

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New Work: Grammar in Use

2009-10-06T16:26:23Z

website redesignCambridge's ESL books usually feature bright, energetic designs, and their corresponding marketing sites often go to town with the striking color schemes and fun design elements. This site redesign in honor of a new edition makes use of transparent PNGs to lay a variable-height, shadowed, rounded box over the radiating background image.

This standalone site was replaced with the launch of the CMS-driven ESL site. The banner and CSS styling of the new minisite retains the character of this version.

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New Work: Cambridge School Shakespeare

2009-10-05T16:16:16Z

website redesignThis site was created to mirror the content of the UK site with small changes for the US market, and we took the opportunity to update the design. I brightened up the color scheme and highlighted the dramatic cover art of the new editions, adding an arc of quills flowing toward the logo for some movement on the pages without any images.

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New Work: Whistler Cave

2009-10-04T20:07:09Z

wine identity and packagingIn this exercise, we began by creating a stories for our fictional vineyards. Drawing on my story of two music industry expats shifting gears to return to their childhood roots and live from the land, I looked to playful inspirations of old jazz cover albums to create their wine labels. The swooping shapes suggest the kites soaring on the wind or particularly innovative jazz solos, two aspects of the background story. The logo incorporates a non-traditional ligature representing the underground caves in which their wines are aged.

The swooping labels expose more of the contents of the bottle to the eye; the breezy illustration is printed on the inside of the label to reinforce the image. Playing with type as a form, the back label mimics the shape of the kite on the front label via the arrangement of the blurb and government warning.

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New Work: PNCA Course Catalog

2009-10-03T16:49:23Z

sample redesignBeginning with the existing PNCA course catalog, I endeavored to keep what was working and improve on what wasn't. The cover features a kaleidoscopic treatment of a student artist at work.

My main focus of improvement was to create spreads that acted more like spreads rather than individual pages next to each other. This first page has information on the Continuing Education program on one side and the table of contents on the other --- I brought them together through a strong grid with similar platter-like structures as those featured on the cover.

The hierarchy of the existing course listings is successful, so only the specific typefaces used changed in that aspect of the the design. The classroom image is separated on opposite ends of the spread to situate the courses into the classrooms.

For the Spotlight feature, I created an inset that could stand on its own outside the page, but yet it is still maintaining the grid of the containing spread.

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New Work: Hennessy Financial Group

2009-10-02T16:10:08Z

a new look for a fictional investment companyExecuted as a typography class assignment, I tried to think of the most unexciting type of company to develop an identity for as a challenge, as so often students invent businesses that are themselves creative and therefore easier subjects for them to tackle.

This financial company is a smaller investment firm wanting to promote a contemporary image while not alienating their established clients. The serif face is somewhat conservative but set in small-caps italic slips closer to a daring edge. Paired with a sans-serif face that gives both a solid number-crunching yet friendly feel, it communicates a company in a traditionally prosaic industry poised for the contemporary market.

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New Work: Portland Zine Symposium

2009-10-01T16:46:15Z

poster designThis poster design was submitted as an entry for the contest of an annual Portland event for self-published media. I wanted to create a clean and bold design that would stand out posted around town but still included an element of handmade. The theme for that year's event was "Building Bridges," and my design features one of Portland's bridges as inspiration for a striking representation of connections. The roughly rendered illustration is placed among the type set as if cut and pasted into place.

Each year the chosen design is adapted onto the website, t-shirts, and other items and while I didn't have the opportunity design the full series, the elements of the illustration, colors, and type would have been carried out nicely to a variety of usages.

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New Work: uncapitalized

2009-09-30T15:45:47Z

personal website/online sketchbookThis site acts as my online sketchbook: I use it to document through photography, books read, and miscellaneous bits of writing. Over the years, the different needs of each of these sections had always resulted in different designs for each, especially as I wasn't always maintaining each section concurrently. Finally bringing together the image- and word-focused sections under one design led to having two versions of the header, with the same footer throughout.

One set of text formatting styles for the entire site --- including a consistent baseline grid and footer design throughout --- helps uphold the equilibrium as well.

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New Work: Yoga Bhoga

2009-09-29T19:26:38Z

Yoga Bhoga studio website designThe owner of Yoga Bhoga provided me with the logo and striped graphic, and I sat in on several classes to take photos from these I created a colorful and playful site. Every page features several of the photos, showcasing the studio's community and the space itself.

The challenge in maintaining this site is adding new features without dissolving the existing design. Initially the workshops page was built with the two-column layout seen on the home page, but in using the site, the client realized she wanted to be able to pair the photos with the workshops, which was largely impossible. I updated the page with a graphic border kept in the feel of the site, allowing more room for workshop listings to be designed inside the page.

This site was eventually replaced after my work on it ended.

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New Work: Murder of Crows

2009-09-28T16:08:24Z

digital photomontageOriginally produced as an isolated work for a class, I am slowly working on expanding beyond this one image to a series tentatively titled "Street of Empty Houses." Using original film photographs and physical objects scanned flat, I create a digital composition from tactile objects as a practice of maintaining a connection to analog media as well as an exploration in pairing antiquated and contemporary processes.

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New Work: image & text prints

2009-09-26T19:22:19Z

letterpress printsIn the letterpress studio at Pacific Northwest College of Art we explored different techniques for creating photopolymer plates, which are light-sensitive plates that are exposed similar to a silkscreen emulsion process. Then we constructed a pairing of text and image from these plates.

In "Oh, Former Renter," the text of the haiku itself is printed over the photographic plate, while the author's name sits just outside the image yet still within the bounds of the irregular frame. In "You Lose Twice," the illustration was scratched into coated film as a negative and interacts with the (well-worn) type below through the action of the arrow.

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