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).

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.

Domino, but with Dogs

For R’s birthday last week I wanted to get him something homemade to add to our board game collection and realized that we did not have a single game of domino. I loved those as a child and particularly when they had pictures of something else than dots so that’s what I picked (bonus: there’s probably not a single simpler game to make).

I designed six canines on a geometric grid, in a limited number of colors, printed them out of home printer and then realized that it wasn’t the simplest game to make after all, when I had to cut the tiles out (or carve them out, more like) of three-millimeter-thick cardboard. Long and painful story short, I only ruined about eight and had to run a small reprint of those.

Compared to the tiles, the box was a piece of cake (or a piece of pre-made packaging, to be precise): I used a gift box and only designed the cover to put onto it.

Fourteen Books to Love for February 14th

Here at re:design we heart many things – LEGO blocks, huskies, bacon, The Good Wife, Christmas Eve and I could really go on – but books are definitely in our top three. And now that Valentine’s Day is upon us again we profess our love for literature with a series of (literally) heart-centered covers.

Heart is a fun shape to work with and surprisingly versatile. Each cover uses the shape as the center of the composition around which a symbolic illustration and typography are arranged. The books range from pulp romances through venerable classics to postmodernist experiments but all feature some version of the eternal love theme.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, an ambitious and rather pervy, if read literally, take on love.

Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding, a decidedly unambitious take.

The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler (a more physiological interpretation of the theme).

Fatalistic view of love and life in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo.

Quo Vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz.

In Search of Lost Time or in love with the past, by Marcel Proust.

Cider House Rules by John Irving.

Ireland by Frank Delaney.

A Good Year by Peter Mayle.

Homer’s Daughter by Robert Graves.

Nana by Emile Zola, a socially critical anti-love story.

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Another classic, The Gambler by Dostoyevsky.

Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden, love in Japan.

Title page for Lolita, with the logo for the series.

Series of spines. For typography we chose a combination of Scala and Stag. We picked a limited color palette of reds and grays with some greens and yellows.

The logo of the series, consisting – predictably – of 14 hearts.

And we wish all of you a happy Valentine’s Day (either spent with your beloved person or with your beloved book).

Garden of Graphic Delights

Today we have finally gotten down to cleaning up all the post-Christmas decorations (which we know is late-ish but we just love having Christmas lights around) and decided to do some creative recycling of the dried up holly leaves littering our room because we found them quite pretty and intriguing. What precisely we decided to do is another typographic poster to include in the Theatre of Literature series.

Unlike with the previous posters, we didn’t have a selected novel title to use and couldn’t think of one so we actually resorted to Google once we came up with the ideas that this book should include. We wanted something about old age and nature, nostalgic and on the serious side, and found a seemingly perfect match. In Her Garden by Jon Godden is a 1981 novel about an elderly widow who falls in love with her young gardener and dies under suspicious circumstances, a cross between a psychological and a gothic story – at least according to the Internet sources as we’ve yet to read it. (Again, this is not how we normally work but since the perishable material was ready, we seized the opportunity.)

We built simple, cursive-like letters from the leaves so that the leaves’ curves reinforce those of the letters. We used the rest of the leaves to make an ornament, the kind whose structure can be found on a wallpaper in an old house. We picked a somber color that does not contrast strongly with the design to create a rather melancholy atmosphere.

With the Christmas decorations gone, at least we have the satisfaction of having turned a part of the chore into more enjoyable work.