Designed by acclaimed graphic designer, Kit Hinrichs, an AIGA medalist whose work is included in the permanent collection of MoMA, LACMA, and the Denver Art Museum, has created the 2020 365 Typographic Calendar. It features 12 unique type faces each designed within the 21st century. The calendar also includes descriptions about the typeface, a biography of each type designer and every major United States and Canadian Holiday.
Read More »At the start of the school year, kids used to worry about fitting in, looking and acting cool, becoming one of the “popular” kids, and, oh yes, their grades. But with the increasing number of shootings on school campuses, those worries are overshadowed by larger fears. Just since the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School seven years ago, which took the lives of 20 children as young as six and seven, more than 400 people have been shot on U.S. school campuses, and many more at public venues like concerts, shopping malls and local fairs.
So along with the usual back-to-school product pitches, this public service ad was timed for release at the start of the school year. Sponsored by the gun-safety group, Sandy Hook Promise, and produced by BBDO ad agency, the PSA has no voiceovers on gun control or violence, but leaves a powerful message on why something must be done NOW.
Looking back, the days when school kids practiced getting under their desks and covering their heads in the event of a nuclear bomb attack seem so innocent. All we had to worry about was the bomb, not an active shooter on campus.
Experiential street ads are the “sneak” attacks of advertising. They invariably occur in unexpected places and times, and they usually cause viewers to do a double-take and chuckle. Relative to major ad campaigns, guerrilla marketing is much less expensive, but its reach is also narrower, mostly limited to people in that proximity. But such targeted sight gags and visual puns enliven passersby experiences and generate goodwill toward the business, although it also disallows lengthy sales messages. You either get it or you don’t.
Still, guerrilla advertising is catching on with major brands who are discovering that you don’t have to be there to enjoy it. Really clever spots are being captured on smart phones and spread virally on social media, and some brand marketers are starting the buzz themselves by posting a photo of the “street art” on social media.
A constant struggle for editorial artists is the search for a way to capture the essence of a story in a single powerful image. Unfortunately, picturing a semiautomatic assault weapon, as sinister as it looks, no longer shocks readers. In fact, guns and even images of crying survivors of mass killings feel cynically banal. That’s why this week’s Time Magazine cover stopped us in our tracks. San Francisco Bay Area artist John Mavroudis simply hand-lettered the 253 locations of mass shootings in America so far this year and added the word “ENOUGH.” The crude lettering is crammed onto the page with city names shown vertically, sideways and at a slant in large letters and small, filling every nook and cranny. Mavroudis calls his drawing “a frightening portrait of a country drowning in gun violence.” Indeed, the effect is chilling and memorable and gives perspective to our epidemic of domestic terrorism.
A decade ago two San Francisco Bay Area architects Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello reflected on the trade and labor imbalances between the U.S. and Mexico and imagined an art installation that would serve as a thought-provoking metaphor for how actions on one side of the border had direct consequences on the other. The discussion led them to create architectural drawings and models for a “Teeter-Totter Wall” interactive display. The work drew the praise from both the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, but the actual installation remained just a concept until this week.
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