Tee shirt design in for CalArts’ Graphic Design Department’s 2015 T-Shirt Show.

We just re-launched a responsive redesign of Klein Dytham architecture’s website.

New responsive website for Tokyo-based architecture and interior design practice Klein Dytham architects.

We just released Raker, a new 40-member family of typefaces.

Raker was born out of a love for retro science fiction aesthetics as evidenced in films like The Clone Returns Home, Moon,and Alien, while simultaneously being a text typeface with a humanist influence and solid spacing.

The family includes 4 cuts: Raker, Raker Display, Raker Stencil, and Raker Display Stencil. Each cut includes 5 weights of Roman and italic characters—Light, Regular, Medium, Bold, and Heavy.

Each weight of each cut has been lovingly spaced and kerned, and all weights support Western, Eastern and Central European languages. Hidden pattern glyphs are included, as are standard ligatures.

All italics are true italics and extensive currency support is included. All weights of all cuts have been extensively hinted for the best performance on-screen.

Raker was designed to function as a fun, futuristic family of typefaces that will suit a wide variety of applications. And even better, it’s on sale at Wordshape until March 1st for $49 for all 40 weights!

We just hit the button on a responsive website redesign for John Mullin, professional photographer and art educator. We’ve worked with John for years and were excited to relaunch his site with webfonts, some snazzy javascript, and a few CSS tricks. John is one of the United States’ great contemporary photographers, as well as the protegé and former assistant of Henri Cartier-Bresson.

We also just launched a responsive website design for Kozue, a new luxury building project in Niseko, Hokkaido being managed by Nisade. The Kozue website features webfont implementation, some fancy javascript, adaptive CSS, and solid, sedate design. You can check it out here.

We also just published our annual round-up of what’s been happening in Japanese popular culture over at Néojaponisme. 2014, we hardly knew ye!

Responsive website design and development for Kozue, a new luxury condominium project in Niseko, Hokkaido being managed by Nisade. The Kozue website features webfont implementation, some fancy javascript, adaptive CSS, and solid, sedate design. View the website here.

Responsive website redesign for John Mullin, professional photographer and art educator. We’ve worked with John for years and were excited to relaunch his site with webfonts, some snazzy javascript, and a few CSS tricks. John is one of the United States’ great contemporary photographers, as well as the protegé and former assistant of Henri Cartier-Bresson.

When Whole Foods needed to brand their 2014 holiday “Values Matter” ad campaign with a personality-rich, hand drawn font, they chose the often-imitated-but-never-duplicated YWFT Hannah, YouWorkForThem’s own in-house champ.

In this case, their choice was specific to YWFT Hannah Narrow, which begged their question: could we design two additional weights for this individual font, which existed only in a regular weight? Their answer was “yes”.

Then, YWFT called us. We’ve had an amazing working relationship with YWFT for the past chunk of years—we speak the same languages: OpenType, Python, CSS, and just being stoked on type.

Working closely with the team at their advertising agency Partners & Spade, we designed and refined Semi-Bold and Bold weights of YWFT Hannah Narrow, and offered specialized technical support to the Whole Foods art and marketing departments at their request.

Plus, we added alternate characters galore and iterated the new Whole Foods typeface family into the ground.

It felt good. Really, really good.

Whole Foods Values Matter TV Commercial: Produce
Learn More – http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/valuesmatter

Whole Foods Values Matter TV Commercial: Beef
Learn More – http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/valuesmatter

In big news, we updated Kimbo, our plug-in for Illustrator so that it is compatible with Illustrator CC 2014. There’s a free demo on the site, and it’ll make any hardcore user of Illustrator breathe a sigh of sweet, sweet relief with its combination of vector cutting, mirroring, and pattern design tools.

I have an story in issue #24 of Slanted, an issue devoted entirely to Istanbul, Turkey.

Istanbul – the city on the Bosphorus – is famous for its countless minarets, magnificent palaces, colorful markets and traders, seagulls and stray cats. Istanbul is the only metropolis in the world that unites two continents. Traditional crafts collide with a young and blossoming art and design scene, which is slowly changing the face and image of the city.

Slanted takes a close-up look at contemporary design work and all the tumultuous developments in this cultural melting pot city balanced between the Orient and the Occident. On their one-week-trip the Slanted team met 15 design studios and produced comprehensive studio portraits which provide a vivid and up-to-the-minute picture of the scene. Thanks to Augmented Reality and the Junaio app, readers can easily watch embedded videos of the Istanbul turu on mobile devices.

The story I contributed is called “The Martyrdom of Ivram Islander” and is the tale of the future of a world where both humankind and graphic design education are in stasis—a form of suspended animation that pervades culture as much as is representative of it. The story is part graphic design criticism and part science fiction.

An excerpt:

Evrim Aslaner was listening to a collection of murky live recordings of a seminal, late-1980s hardcore band from the American Midwest via headphones on the crosstown train. Some songs were clearer than others, though the differentiation was marginal at best. It was obvious that none of the recordings utilized the mixing boards at the VFW Halls and crappy, tiny venues where they were recorded—perhaps just a handheld tape recorder, or on the more clear ones, a condenser mic, fed into a tape recorder precariously situated in the back of whatever club a fledgling promoter had happened to acquire for the night, 130 years ago and on the other side of the world.

The sound itself was a vaguely polyrhythmic, distorted dirge — all low-end rumble with the occasional Skexis-like feedback squeal overriding momentarily. The vocals—a muffled, staccato Chewbacca-esque cadenced war rant — were delivered unintelligibly, though with the mealy mouthed venom of so many young men of that bygone age that Evrim was currently fascinated with. The only clearly identifiable instrument was the reverberating crash cymbal, the rest was reduced to a two-minute-long semaphore-like aural wet fart of dissonance and rumble.

Evrim’s immersion in the dense music was sharply interrupted by a figure entering the hovertram at the Bestiktas Square stop. Anyone at all riding the hovertram was an anomaly these days. Same with the library. Ditto for the food vendroid stands. The last of the humans, still venturing out-of-doors, were trickling out. Good weather, civic events, “live” music, none of these drew more than a handful of malcontents anymore. That being said, Evrim was continually surprised that the city’s hovertram continued to run—one of the last remaining symbols of the final administration’s promise that auto-piloted public transport would run 24 hours a day for the rest of eternity, with no need for cleaning, maintenance or repairs. He was glad it hadn’t stopped; without it, he’d be forced to sullenly walk halfway across Istanbul to the library. 

This was the third time that Halil Ergün’s facsimile had gotten on the same train as Evrim. It was weird. When the previous administration had deployed its convoy of cyborg replications of movie stars, television personalities, and other historical figures of note, they were wildly popular with the then-ambulatory populace for a few months, but quickly fell from prominence. When members of the human public asked the replicas of the stars about their inner feelings, the cyborgs would quip something nonsensical or re-quote a well-known snippet of history. It became obvious that their personalities were merely cross-indexed databases of suggested behaviors, based on their media personas, not the original stars’ true personalities. It didn’t help that their “faces” were internally projected in a Tony Oursler-esque fashion within their ovoid heads much, either. Real people found that they had little to gain from the simulacra, most already being innately familiar with retro culture due to telechip implants. Otaku-like super-fans were able to stump the cyborgs by grilling them with intense amounts of trivia and barrages of detailed questions about covert activities of the stars’ lives that occurred during their original, wholly organic incarnations. 

I have an story in issue #24 of Slanted, an issue devoted entirely to Istanbul, Turkey.

Istanbul – the city on the Bosphorus – is famous for its countless minarets, magnificent palaces, colorful markets and traders, seagulls and stray cats. Istanbul is the only metropolis in the world that unites two continents. Traditional crafts collide with a young and blossoming art and design scene, which is slowly changing the face and image of the city.

Slanted takes a close-up look at contemporary design work and all the tumultuous developments in this cultural melting pot city balanced between the Orient and the Occident. On their one-week-trip the Slanted team met 15 design studios and produced comprehensive studio portraits which provide a vivid and up-to-the-minute picture of the scene. Thanks to Augmented Reality and the Junaio app, readers can easily watch embedded videos of the Istanbul turu on mobile devices.

The story I contributed is called “The Martyrdom of Ivram Islander” and is the tale of the future of a world where both humankind and graphic design education are in stasis—a form of suspended animation that pervades culture as much as is representative of it. The story is part graphic design criticism and part science fiction.

An excerpt:

Evrim Aslaner was listening to a collection of murky live recordings of a seminal, late-1980s hardcore band from the American Midwest via headphones on the crosstown train. Some songs were clearer than others, though the differentiation was marginal at best. It was obvious that none of the recordings utilized the mixing boards at the VFW Halls and crappy, tiny venues where they were recorded—perhaps just a handheld tape recorder, or on the more clear ones, a condenser mic, fed into a tape recorder precariously situated in the back of whatever club a fledgling promoter had happened to acquire for the night, 130 years ago and on the other side of the world.

The sound itself was a vaguely polyrhythmic, distorted dirge — all low-end rumble with the occasional Skexis-like feedback squeal overriding momentarily. The vocals—a muffled, staccato Chewbacca-esque cadenced war rant — were delivered unintelligibly, though with the mealy mouthed venom of so many young men of that bygone age that Evrim was currently fascinated with. The only clearly identifiable instrument was the reverberating crash cymbal, the rest was reduced to a two-minute-long semaphore-like aural wet fart of dissonance and rumble.

Evrim’s immersion in the dense music was sharply interrupted by a figure entering the hovertram at the Bestiktas Square stop. Anyone at all riding the hovertram was an anomaly these days. Same with the library. Ditto for the food vendroid stands. The last of the humans, still venturing out-of-doors, were trickling out. Good weather, civic events, “live” music, none of these drew more than a handful of malcontents anymore. That being said, Evrim was continually surprised that the city’s hovertram continued to run—one of the last remaining symbols of the final administration’s promise that auto-piloted public transport would run 24 hours a day for the rest of eternity, with no need for cleaning, maintenance or repairs. He was glad it hadn’t stopped; without it, he’d be forced to sullenly walk halfway across Istanbul to the library. 

This was the third time that Halil Ergün’s facsimile had gotten on the same train as Evrim. It was weird. When the previous administration had deployed its convoy of cyborg replications of movie stars, television personalities, and other historical figures of note, they were wildly popular with the then-ambulatory populace for a few months, but quickly fell from prominence. When members of the human public asked the replicas of the stars about their inner feelings, the cyborgs would quip something nonsensical or re-quote a well-known snippet of history. It became obvious that their personalities were merely cross-indexed databases of suggested behaviors, based on their media personas, not the original stars’ true personalities. It didn’t help that their “faces” were internally projected in a Tony Oursler-esque fashion within their ovoid heads much, either. Real people found that they had little to gain from the simulacra, most already being innately familiar with retro culture due to telechip implants. Otaku-like super-fans were able to stump the cyborgs by grilling them with intense amounts of trivia and barrages of detailed questions about covert activities of the stars’ lives that occurred during their original, wholly organic incarnations.