Me and Ming-En have been creeping round campus in search of our sartorial shots. Harder than you think, but no-one declined, and most were genuinely flattered by our photo proposal. More to come later in the week!

We haven’t done ‘fashion on campus’ in any issues yet, even though Melbourne Uni and Monash Clayton regularly do them. But, if we do it, we gotta do it shitloads better than them, because that’s just how things work. I want to use a 50mm lens, go out on a nice day with ming-en or scott, and start shooting! (photo vis the sartorialist)

Issue 4 is out! (actually it came out yesterday) but it’s out!

Building my first second iso-typeface (just making a word not the whole alphabet), for an article about lego. Got a nice photo for it as well. I’ve been inspired by a few art-directors recently: (I watched Art & Copy) and also Ben Purvis. The latter guy was on board the last few years at Seattle Met and before that Las Vegas Weekly. I think it’s cool when art directors go nuts on free city mags, which I’ve found a lot of the time (Oregan, San Fran, Japan) have been better than 50% of commercial magazines. 

Anyway, I’m really trying to do as much original stuff as I can-literally make art that relates directly to the story.

Banners are ‘now’ in a big way. I could dig up maybe 20 recent examples of them in use but im at a cafe and the internet is treacherously slow. Just take my word for it. 

For the design of Esperanto V.4 (the 90’s edition) I was all set to design it like David Carson took to Raygun in the early 90’s. I did my homework, read the books, worked out what fonts he used, how he treated type-but when I actually got down to doing it myself, I couldn’t. It’s like if you’re good at backstroke suddenly forcing yourself to swim breastroke (that you hate, not that good at, and don’t think it looks particularly good). So I apologise. Esperanto 4 won’t be grunged up and have ridiculous letterspacing and a thousand different fonts on one page. Because that ‘postmodern’ graphic design (~’88-‘99) was basically a failure and i think a response to the pc getting introduced in the mid 90’s. Design went to far. It was all about the limits of legibility, and imho i dont think thats what (good) editorial design is about. 

but There will be lots of banners, and more illustrations throughout. And just to make it a bit harder for myself i’m only using one colour (a soft red), and of course black, so the Cyan ink won’t be used in the print. A really vivid spot red will be used on the cover. that with a lot of different weights of h&fj’s knockout, the design is starting to look really constructivist. Think El Lissitsky, lightly referencing russian propaghanda posters.

‘The third dimension is terror’ - Jaws 3D

Should I make the next cover of Esperanto in  3D? Now that Samsung has gone bananas with the whole 3d tv thing, basically tearing down youtube and releasing 3D butterflies everywhere (yes batshit insane), and then Sony rebutted with an advert directed by Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast), to slightly lesser effect (no, i won’t upgrade my tv), I feel like I should join the gang!

Remix magazine gets on board.

JULY EDIT (If anyone back reads this blog)-just found the mag nation blog post. (siamese blog post).

“Outline type with interior photographic detail and copylines set at speedy angles .”

-The Eye (1995) on how the ‘street style’ pioneered by “dancefloor designers’ in the mid to late 80’s like Phil Biker at the Face and Stephen Male at I-D, melded into the mainstream of advertising and popular culture in the mid 90’s. (for better or worse). 

“The dilution of the punk aesthetic”

Here’s a solitary spread from the travel issue of Esperanto, out June 1. On Friday we did the first print out, 44 pages, scrambled through the whole thing picking out typos, inconsistencies and what i need to re design. Looking at something on paper for the first time is crazy, all the photos suddenly look duller, type looks too tight, etc etc. It’s a major part in the process, and when magz are only on i-pads i guess we’ll forget this bit.