In December, John and Hank Green asked me to put together some designs for the 2012 Tour de Nerdfighting. I knew that I wanted the designs to reference the 2008 Tour de Nerdfighting map, which was one of the first things I designed for John and Hank. So first I got to work on the t-shirt design, which actually ended up being the cover of the exclusive tour CD.
(Click to see larger)
After the map was finished, I got to work on the poster. Right around that time, I had just read the book Sterographics: Graphics in New Dimensions, which inspired me to use photography and real world elements, rather than doing the whole thing digitally. I decided to gather up all the nerdfighter memorabilia I’ve collected over the years to make just a big colorful explosion of awesome. I cut the map outline out of a cereal box and painted black, while the red 2012 is made from paper which I then painted. You can see a behind the scenes look at the photoshoot in this video (starting at 1:40):
We took a ton of photos from all different angles. This was literally just set up on an IKEA table in my bedroom – design doesn’t have to be fancy and expensive!
After I chose the photo I wanted, I printed it out at full size and penciled in all of the city names and the title (doing a test version first to make sure the concept wouldn’t look completely awful). After trying way too many types of black markers to find one that didn’t bleed on the paper, I inked the whole thing, scanned it in, and composited it in Photoshop. As you can see from the photo of the title, I ended up changing it around in Photoshop a bit, in order to make the poster feel cleaner and more balanced.
(Test drawing, done on a letter-size printout of the photo)
I hope you guys like the poster and CD, and managed to grab a copy from the merch table if you went to any of the tour stops. You can also check out my video from the Redwood City tour stop at the end of this post. It was a fantastic night and I’m so happy to be part of such an awesome community!
A few weeks ago, I finally made it over to the Cable Car Museum in San Francisco. The main part of the building is where you can see the cables turning which then run under the streets. Then there were some nice displays about the history of cable cars, as well as some gorgeous old typography I couldn’t resist sharing. If you ever find yourself in San Francisco, it’s definitely worth a visit!
A few years ago, I had the idea to make a miniature copy of the book Paper Towns by John Green, and film the process of creating it. John’s newest book The Fault in Our Stars was just released about a week ago, so I decided to redo that video, except with a copy of TFioS. I hope you enjoy watching, and check out more photos below!
Thanks again to kaysyconundrum for allowing me to use her gorgeous original song in the video.
A few months ago, I got an email asking if I wanted to design the first official t-shirt for Elmify. Seeing as how her channel is one of my absolute favorites on YouTube, I could not pass this up.
We went through a bunch of different designs and color combinations before settling on the final one, a typographic imagining of her famous No! FRODO! video clip.
I also wanted to make a handwritten logo for her name, which meant writing her name over and over in my sketchbook until it came out right. Anyone who looks through it will probably think I have the biggest elementary school crush on her.
This is the final design we settled on, which is now available for purchase on dftba.com. You can see more photos of it below as well as the video Elmify made when it was released. Thanks for reading!
While I was in Toronto over Thanksgiving, my friends Andrew and Andrew brought me to a department store called Honest Ed’s, which you might also recognize from Scott Pilgrim. It was…quite the experience.
These were actually from a different store, but look! Scrabble mugs!
Ok, back to Ed’s. The thing about this department store is that they sell some really strange things. There seemed to be a department for anything you could ever possibly need, from clothing to hardware to toys to pianos to…mannequins and creepy Elvis sculptures. There’s even a hair salon and dentist. By far the best part though, were all the handpainted signs and lettering on all the walls. I tried to take photos of my favorites, but definitely make your way there to check it out for yourself if you ever get the chance.
