When All You Have is a Hammer

When All You Have is a Hammer… This is the Andy-Kaufman-moment of this book. Kaufman was a comedian often criticized for comedy that was thoughtful at the expense of actually being funny. This design is really thoughtful at the expense of being aesthetic…at all. But hopefully you wondered why the hell you were seeing random […]

Space Case

Space Case At the time of this design, our daughter was 8. I’m not sure about your 8-year-old, but ours had very selective hearing, and remembering, and reasoning—often conveniently spacey. So when playing with mirrored photography on an iPad we made this base image. The alien, almost futuristically religious visual felt like something out of […]

Iggy Pop

Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell Iggy Pop is a hardcore/punk icon known for his subversive attitude. This song lyric from his time with The Stooges screamed to be visualized with an underground, DIY, garage band, music flyer style. Dirty xerox collage and lettering along wth an unexpected, somewhat disturbingly ironic image takes a […]

Shakespeare

These Violent Delights Have Violent Ends Yes, it is a bit shocking. Yes, it will make many people uncomfortable. And yes, I considered not including it in the book for fear of it being labeled as “smut”. But it is not gratuitous. It has meaning. And, unfortunately, rather appropriate meaning in context of how dark […]

Speak for Yourself

Speak for Yourself A simple twist, symbolically and literally, for a somewhat jarring effect.

Party Like a Rockstar

Party Like a Rock Star If I wasn’t a graphic designer I would be a rock star. Aside from the inability to sing, and complete lack of musical talent (I’m working on rectifying that with electric guitar), the flashy, rebel lifestyle was something I daydreamed about endlessly in junior high. Looking through music magazines, I […]

Great Minds Think Alike

Great Minds Think Alike A great example of backwards thinking. While sitting in the dentist chair for my 6-month checkup, my x-rays were displayed in front of me to search for cavities or wisdom tooth problems. The bold, graphic nature of the imagery struck me as being useful for something–but what? Here were the beginnings […]

Chewing a Wasp

You’ve Got a Face Like a Bulldog Chewing a Wasp A great phrase that’s full of personality felt like it needed to be big, bold, unafraid, and un-subtle. Large swaths of loudly collaged images juxtapose in order to visually exaggerate what is so viscerally verbalized. Then hit with the rhythmic yellow line that emotes the […]

The Quick Brown Fox

The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over The Lazy Dog This pangram is a famous sentence used by designer’s and typographer’s to display every letter of the alphabet so they can see how the font they have chosen stylistically looks. So…letterforms, letterforms, letterform. Obnoxiously–I mean, exaggeratingly–so, because we’ve already established this is all about fonts.

Angus Young

Angus Young A little AC/DC anyone? “I’ve got the Blues in my heart and the devil in my fingers” is such a colorful way to express the frenetic guitar playing of Angus. He’s all fingers. Messy fingers everywhere. And a tail.