A Thousand Pinpricks

I Bleed, the fifth Project Doolittle work, required a purchase of several boxes of sewing pins and about two hours of sticking them into a felt cushion. We’re happy to inform you that it was mostly painless.

Obviously this time the relation between the title and the material was not very complicated – though we are glad to have avoided oozing liquids. Instead, with the cushion and the script-y lettering combined with the words themselves, we venture once again into the feminism-related territories. At least, that’s a hint for those of you who like to get deep into the meaning of visual works. For the others: rainbow colors!

I’m not sure how many pins exactly we used but I pretty sure it was over 500.

And close-ups:

Design That Has Grown

A while ago we showed you the beginning of Project Doolittle’s Gouge Away. We planted the title in garden cress and waited for it to sprout, grow and finally wilt, patiently capturing the process, which looked something like this, except not that fast:

Of this we picked two stages for the covers of the record: the fully grown one and the mostly wilted one. This project surprised us on a few levels. First of all, it was something completely different to work with vegetation rather than with our more standard materials. It simply called for a different approach when we couldn’t speed anything up. As you can probably tell from the previous sentences, we’re not much of gardeners on daily basis and so we enjoyed the novelty.

But the second surprise came in the legibility of the piece. When we started we half-expected to end up with a mass of leaves in a general shape of the lettering. Instead it remained legible almost all the way through and didn’t even require post-processing to improve legibility.

Front cover.

Detail.

Back cover.

Tame as a Weaver

For Tame, our third Project Doolittle work, we returned to our favorite material and one feeling most natural: paper.

The concept for this work is simple: we created a grid by cutting two paper squares into 5 mm stripes. One square is black and the other one white (with that marble texture they use for home-made business cards which we always found intriguing but not very useful until now). Then, according to a pre-designed square grid we weaved the black stripes through the white ones to create the word “Tame” and a cross pattern. This turned out a meditative job and way less frustrating than wire-shaping we showed last week.

We chose a (loosely) black letter typeface because it seemed more interesting to fit it into a square grid but also because the patient (and taming) work fit somehow with our idea of medieval monks. To my mind, it’s almost impossible not to take the word “tame”, Pixies’ lyrics and weaving and not think about feminist-related issues but we’ll leave (over)interpreting to you, should you feel so inclined (we’re always happy to discuss, though, if you want us to).

A bonus point of this idea is that the back side creates a perfect negative of the front.

Silver Wiring

Silver is another design in Project Doolittle. For a while we wanted to do something with a wire because its pliability inspired us and we used to play with forming wire shapes as kids.

Well, what we remembered as fun childhood pastime turned out to be much more challenging when applied to typography. We based letters loosely on Didot design and getting the wire to twist in the right places and curve smoothly proved frustrating. But, strangely enough, straight lines were hardest to form and we needed plenty.

In the end we accepted the kind of clumsiness as part of the project and maybe even a value testifying to the hand-made character of the letters. Then we stuck the letters into a base (backstage trivia: we used flower pots) and photographed them over a background of silver foil to arrive at this cover:

And you may take our word for it that none of the shapes were fixed in post-production aka liquified (well, then again, maybe it’s obvious).

A Mystery to Finish

After iconic painters and TV series we are now working on a third group of iconic posters, Iconic Cartoons. We’ve had this idea for a while (actually, it was suggested by one of our commenters – thank you, Ammon) and we made sketches a long time ago, but only got down to it now, prompted by a friend’s request to make a game for children. More on that some other time and we’ll show you all the posters when we finish them. Today just a preview: the first show to guess.

It’s as much a classic series as they come, started in 1969 and still popular. And yes, we do realize it’s a tad obvious but you’re probably older than the target audience will be.

We got some work to do now.

Design That Will Grow on You

The second installment in Project Doolittle will only appear as a preview today for the simple reason that it needs time to develop. I don’t know about where you live but here it’s a tradition that for Easter you put garden cress seeds on wet cotton and after a week of diligent watering you have a spicy and (matter of taste, of course) rather tasty addition to a dinner salad or a sandwich. As Easter just went by we still had leftover seeds and decided to use them for another lettering composition with the Pixies’ song title.

Day One.

Day Two.

Detail.

In a week or so we expect to have a green version of the lettering and then we’ll tell you more about the process and the idea.

Cardboard Mutilation

We have started a new project in the tangible type series (to work on simultaneously with the Theatre of Literature). This one is more focused on form: we intend to experiment with various materials and lettering compositions without worrying so much about how they illustrate literary themes.

Each work uses one song title from the Pixies’ album Doolittle, starting with “Wave of Mutilation”, to produce typographic posters or potential record sleeves. We choose this album because we love it, of course, but also as a sort of tribute to Oliver Vaughan.

When we studied at the arts academy, especially during first years, designing a poster always ended in a trying challenge. We had to stick a printed poster onto cardboard and then cut out properly to achieve the required size of required firmness. Those moments of carving away at 3-mm thick cardboard with enough force but also care not to ruin the costly printout were stressful and we hated them (also, we sometimes did ruin the printouts, which we hated even more). But not only did they give us a pile of stiff posters to cover our head in rain but also a way too intimate knowledge of cardboard structure and how many layers you have to cut through to get from one surface to the other. Back then we always thought how this layered structure itself could be used in a project but we didn’t care for more cardboard carving. After a few years though, the time seemed right.

After coming up with the concept we sketched it into the cardboard with a needle:

and then proceeded to cut into the cardboard, deeper and deeper, removing unnecessary layers of paper with a variety of tool designed for different purposes (most of them for building stuff or at least for knitting).

By the way, we still find little bits of gray paper floating around the room.

We also designed a logo for the project to bind all the compositions together. It was one of those really quick jobs that are fun to do because no one wants anything to be bigger or redder.

And here is the finished project:

With close-ups.

I now realize how “Gouge Away” was an even more appropriate title to choose for this one, but it’s good we didn’t because that would require too close a relation between the technique and the title in the future works – precisely what we don’t want to do.