Working on an updated cover for Ben Jacks’ forthcoming book A House and its Atmosphere via Culicidae Architectural Press with a blurb by David Leatherbarrow, Professor and Chair of the Graduate Group in Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania.
Client: Culicidae Architectural Press
Project: Book Cover
Miriam Zach, the Charles and Mary Sukup Endowed Artist in Organ, tasked us with the design for a poster of a lecture/recital at which she presents music by Roman composers to students who plan to spend the Spring semester 2018 in the eternal city to study architecture. The event will take place on Monday, 11 September at 4:00pm in the Martha-Ellen Tye Recital Hall in the Music building at Iowa State University.
The project had a fast turnaround time, so we had to work intuitively. The only reference that came to mind was a 1953 painting by René Magritte titled Golconda (see below).
Final version of cover as published.
This summer we were tasked by Culicidae Press to design a cover for a forthcoming book by Rachel Odhner Longstaff called In the Shadow of the Dragon’s Back: A Young American Girl in South Africa During the Early Years of Apartheid. The book is a memoir about Longstaff growing up in Durban, on the east coast of KwaZulu Natal between 1948 and 1960, before returning to the US. The book’s title comes from the Drakensberg which is shaped not unlike the back of a dragon.
After a series of cover iterations using some of the photographs that appear in the book, we settled—with the author’s input—on a colorized version of a black-and-white photo taken by Longstaff’s brother Pehr Hemming Odhner, that shows her sister Kirstin on horseback facing the Dragon’s Back.
Client: Culicidae Press, LLC and Rachel Odhner Longstaff
Timeline: two months
Culicidae Architectural Press is releasing a new English edition of Francesco Careri’s classic Walkscapes: Walking as An Aesthetic Practice this fall, and we were asked to design the interior and the cover. The book was republished in Spanish in 2012, and the original bilingual English/Spanish edition is no longer in print. The book is both text- and image-heavy, so we decided to use one of the interior images on the preliminary cover.
Client: Culicidae Architectural Press
This was a difficult cover to design. The author, Kristene E. Friday (pseudonym), whose book will be published through Culicidae Press, was sexually abused as a child but suppressed the memories until she was forty-nine years old and had a breakdown. In the text she describes her emotional state vividly, and based on some of the mental images I put together a collage of relevant photographs to create the cover.
Client: Culicidae Press, LLC
Version 1
For Hog Press we were tasked to design a book cover for a book by Vermont-based author Joseph D. Reich’s intriguingly titled How To Order Chinese During A Hostage Crisis: Dialects, Existential Essays, A Play, And Other Poems, to be published this summer.
I prefer the red one but the author had his eye on the one with the drawing, no doubt in part because his son did the drawing;–) The third version shows one of the last Robert Taylor homes being destroyed in Chicago a few years ago while I was driving to Michigan with an old friend from Hyde Park.
Client: Hog Press and author Joseph D. Reich
An unsolicited job. Working on the keynote speaker posters for the ACS 9 Forum at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, I noticed the lack of a logo for the organizer, the Architecture, Culture, and Spirituality Forum. With a weekend coming up, and a little bit of time on my hand, I created the following logo versions. We’ll see if the ACSF board agrees on one of these…
Version 05 is based on one of the Fisk drawings of the Mississippi. The others utilize various images of cloth. It seemed to me that combining architecture, culture, and spirituality requires a weaving of sorts, an over and under of threads that link and interlink different disciplines.
Client: Architecture, Culture, and Spirituality Forum (ACSForum.org)
Annie Finch Lecture Poster
Here are four posters (drafts) we designed for the keynote speakers that will present their ideas at the ACS 9 Forum on Deer Isle in Maine during the 2017 symposium from the 14th through the 18th of May. Nothing fancy, just straightforward typography, some logo design (ACSF), and blurred backgrounds, modded from media by the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts on Deer Isle.
Client: Architecture, Culture, and Spirituality Forum (ACSForum.org)
For the 21st International Festival of Women Composers which will take place in Ames, Iowa this year, we just completed the design for the main poster. It comes in two sizes, one 24 inches x 36 inches, and a smaller one (12 inches x 18 inches) that will be given to the individual performers on the day of the concerts.
This year, based on the instruments that will be featured during the performances, we used abstracted representations of a harpsichord (red), an oboe (orange), a pipe organ (yellow), a piano (green), voice (blue), trumpet (indigo), violin (violet), in order to show off the wide range (roygbiv) of the performances. Following the identity of Iowa State University, which is one of the co-sponsors this year, the fonts are limited to ITC Berkeley and Univers.
The background is a rather blurry detail of a photograph showing Helen Keller holding hands with Ann Sullivan.
Here are two ads I put together for The Scriblerian and the Wordsworth Circle to advertise Richard Brantley’s Transatlantic Trio book. It’s suprising how photogenious a book looks in the morning sun in Iowa outside the Culicidae Press offices…
Client: Culicidae Press, LLC, Ames, Iowa