We continue our work on the Working Girls series of illustrations. Today’s post is sponsored by the letter F. While this is a pretty straightforward idea, it took a while to decide upon the details and on how to incorporate the letter into the composition.
Among all sorts of things we’re trying (and failing) to do on time, we’re still working on the Working Girls, though slowly. Today we’ve reached letter E. There’s probably a metaphor somewhere there.
As a belated celebration of Labor Day (that we celebrated laboring, of course), here’s the next one in our series of Working Girls: D is for Dog Walker. This is such a fun project but it really has to take a backseat to all the actual work and so the progress is slow. But we’re doing it.
We’re falling behind stuff again but here’s the missing C from our Working Girls series ABC that we showed last time. The other letters are coming when we catch up on either work or sleep (we don’t hope for both). C is for Carpenter, of course.
And this is the logo of the series.
Happy International Women’s Day!
Hopefully, you’re celebrating it with some great women.
And we’re using it as an opportunity to share a small intro to our new self-commissioned illustration project titled “Working Girls.” Because women can do anything.
Those of you who’ve been with us for a while will have seen this project but we’re reposting both for the new guests and because of the special occasion: the 25th anniversary of the first emission of Friends, which remains just about the most popular TV show in TV history (we go by impression, not data, here).
For us the show was certainly an important one (well, for one of us; the other one only watched it much later). We celebrated 20 years of Friends with a poster in which we designed an icon for each episode: that was a lot of icon-designing and a lot of Friends-watching and both of those things were so much fun.
If you like the poster, it’s available for sale here.
And for those who only like a particular season or would like all the seasons separately so that they can cover the entire wall with bigger Friends icons, we also made 10 posters for 10 seasons.
Season 1: The One Where They Get a Monkey, a Fussball Table and Rachel (buy here).
Season 2: The One Where Joey Moves Out and Back In (buy here).
Season 3: The One with All the Drama with Ross and Rachel (buy here).
Season 4: The One That Ends in London (buy here).
Season 5: The One with Monica and Chandler’s Secret (buy here).
Season 6: The One Where Monica and Chandler Get Engaged (buy here).
Season 7: The One Where Monica and Chandler Get Married (buy here).
Season 8: The One with Rachel’s Pregnancy (buy here).
Season 9: The One Largely about Babies (buy here).
Season 10: The Last One Where They All Become Adults (Except for Joey) (buy here; all posters can also be bought here).
Original post with a bit more of our Friends story and sentiments here. (And yes, we’re Monica and Chandler fans.)
And on an unrelated note: did you know there’s a Friends Lego set? You probably did. It seems quite fun.
On August 15th 1969 Woodstock music festival started. It featured some of the greatest musicians of the era and became a legend of the counterculture of the 1960s. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the festival and we already celebrated it with a poster. But because we like the subject matter so much, we also created a series of small illustrations depicting some of our favorite Woodstock musicians.
Day 1.
Richie Havens opened the festival and played for almost three hours, waiting for other performers stuck in traffic to arrive. The performance built his career.
Melanie Safka is known for her energetic, lighthearted music and enthusiasm. Woodstock performance inspired her to write a song “Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)” because people lit candles during her set.
Currently famous mostly for her cooperation with Bob Dylan, Baez has been a great folk musician and one of the most significant female voices to appear at Woodstock.
Day 2.
Not yet well-known, the band Santana with its front man Carlos Santana became huge after their Woodstock performance and went on to be one of the biggest names of the ones that appeared then.
Creedence Clearwater Revival performed late at night but still managed to energize the crowd with their catchy, powerful music.
One of the greatest legends of the 60s music, Janis Joplin was a star of the festival. A wonderful performer and an icon of her era, Joplin died tragically a year later.
Day 3.
A huge band at the time, Jefferson Airplane performed on Sunday morning. The band epitomized the philosophy and lifestyle of a 60s rock’n’roll band.
Like Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix would burn bright but short – he also died a year later. His Woodstock show was the last of the lineup and technically took place on Monday.
Who are your favorite Woodstock musicians?
(First of all, this post is so late – sorry about that. Our son is back to preschool and this means back to the onslaught of all sorts of cold viruses like you wouldn’t believe. But we’re powering through.)
A long time ago we started Project Doolittle: both a tribute to the Pixies’ great album and an experiment in tangible type. By the time we finished the project, that is designed all 15 covers for all the songs, it is (already a bit past) the 30th anniversary of the release of Doolittle so the project becomes even more of a celebration of this record.
Each cover is a different attempt at tangible typography: letters made of various materials, crafted by hand, sometimes designed by us and sometimes based on existing typefaces. We didn’t mainly focus on the connection between the material and the song, going more for an impressionistic, poetic if you will, relation between them (though in some cases the connection is more obvious than in others). We wanted to experiment with 3D typography to see how much using actual, physical objects rather than a computer adds to typographic designs.
This project started as one of our very first forays into handmade type and in the period between its beginning and ending we managed to do quite a few such projects (including a PhD thesis) but we are happy that we chose to return to this series and finished it because it’s one of those string-free projects that are very fun to work at. Hope you enjoy it as well.
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