General updates
Virtual tour of the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile
The Oscar Mayer Wienermobile came to a parking lot near me today, and I was fortunate enough to sneak in a PictureBubble° panorama (click to view) before it headed off to spread joy and hot dogs to other parts of America.
Graphic Artists Guild LA Meet & Greet Follow-Up
The Graphic Artists Guild LA Area Meet & Greet went swimmingly, thanks to everybody who attended! I’ve created a Flickr group for Graphic Artists Guild events:
LA Graphic Artists Guild Meet & Greet
On Friday, January 8, 2010, at 7:00PM, the Graphic Artists Guild is holding a Los Angeles Area Graphic Artists Meet & Greet at Dinah’s Family Restaurant1 near LAX. Guild membership is not required; in fact we’d love to have graphic artists of all kinds attend. A round of complimentary appetizers and non-alcoholic drinks will be provided. Additional food and beverages (including booze) are available for purchase, since Dinah’s is, after all, a restaurant.
Location information and directions:
Dinah’s Family Restaurant
6521 South Sepulveda Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90045-1592
(310) 645-0456
Google Maps Link
If you have any questions, leave a comment!
- Some of you may remember Dinah’s from the “lingonberry pancakes” scene in The Big Lebowski. [↩]
My visit to House Industries
Josh Korwin at House Industries.
Photo: Ben Kiel
Last week, I was lucky enough to pay a visit to House Industries in Yorklyn, Delaware, my favoritest type design studio ever. On Friday, they held the first day of their “tag sale,” but I first stopped by a day early to scope everything out and meet the team. It was an absolute pleasure to talk with everybody there and to see how the company works. And before I left, I was stocked up on goodies; some were House Industries products and others were items they had laying around the office, presumably used as inspiration for past font releases.
Even better, I ended up on their “Show and Tell” blog!
You’re probably wondering to yourself, “what’s in the bag?” Well, thanks to the wonders of modern technology, I can allow you to take a peek inside of that attractive (and eco-friendly) ampersand tote to see the gifts I bought myself inside.
Wordles Rule!
three steps ahead Wordle
Looks like someone finally figured out how to make tag clouds attractive! The end result, although automatic, looks as though someone spent hours typesetting. This one took me five minutes, and is based on the most popular words on this blog as of today. Word up to Wordles.
Happy New Year 2009 from three steps ahead
Another January First has come and gone, and in the spirit of commemorating round trips through the Gregorian calendar, we at three steps ahead would like to wish all of you out there a happy, peaceful, and design-filled year.
Why the Swiss-Army-style pocketknife, you ask? Well, over the year I’ve realized that one of the most valuable qualities that three steps ahead brings to the design world is our ability to provide just about everything design-related in one place. It’s great to be able to bring our clients the benefit of “one stop shopping” for a variety of different design goals. With our expertise in branding, identity design, print design, web design, photography, virtual tours, video production, audio engineering, 3D design (as seen above), environmental signage, and more, there’s very little that you can’t accomplish with us (we’re not adept at fine chocolate confections, for example; very sorry).
2008 was a good year. Most of our 2008 news was covered in a previous post, but I’ll fill in the September to December gap with some portfolio updates in the near future.
In the meantime, here’s another New Years greeting that didn’t make it past the final cut:
Alternative three steps ahead New Year design
Influenced by the gorgeous and impeccable work of Scott Hansen as well as my awesome new Diesel wallet, the design doesn’t seem to feel as memorable as the Swiss Army knife does. But I still dig it a lot—especially the completely from-scratch lettering—so I didn’t want to scrap it altogether.
In any case, the finest of 2009s to all of you!
Austin Sans
Austin Sans typeface preview
For over two years now, I’ve been working on a new typeface that I’ve named Austin Sans. Based roughly on the geometry of my previous release, Bauer House, Austin Sans feels quite a bit more contemporary, without losing its Art Deco residue. I finally have enough ready to at least show a preview here, but given how neurotic I am about perfecting it, it could be a while before it’s released. Still, if you like what you see, drop me a line through the contact form—encouragement will probably accelerate the process!
Updates and ramblings
One of the biggest challenges that I and probably many small business owners face is the inherent conflict between running a full-time business, and being able to zoom out to document and self-promote. To get even more specific, it takes a certain amount of discipline to be able to add to one’s own website when one is creating websites for others! Every so often, I take stock of what’s happened in the past weeks and months and put together a few new pieces for the three steps ahead portfolio section. But recently I decided that a three steps ahead blog would be a great way to supplement the new content we display on our portfolio with additional commentary, interstitial updates (such as works-in-progress), and related links, such as other artists or pieces by which we are inspired.
To that end, let’s get caught up on 2008, now that it’s more over than not!
This year we’ve worked with a bunch of great new clients as well as our loyal regulars. We kicked off the year with a site for David J. Williams, a science fiction author whose new book The Mirrored Heavens was the focus of his site, www.autumnrain2110.com. We helped to launch Jennifer Uman’s spa business with a simple, effective new site and “apothecary-inspired” visual identity, which you can see at www.jenniferuman.com. We’ve continued to create a vast amount of design for New York University’s various colleges and departments, including new initiatives for The Gallatin School of Individualized Study (my alma mater) and NYU’s Stern School of Business. We’re in the process of creating a web “facelift” for Gallatin’s main presence, and a new PictureBubbles° venture to announce and describe their new home’s upcoming LEED certification.
But wait, there’s more! We have several new projects that I have not yet had a chance to add to our portfolio:
We’re now working with Star Waggons, the leading provider of movie production trailers to the film industry. If you’ve ever passed by a film or TV set (not exactly a rarity for those of us here in Southern California), it’s pretty likely that you’ve seen their Star Wars inspired logo on the side of their trailers. To date, we’ve updated their branding and we’re in the process of creating an altogether new site for Star Waggons, complete with a series of PictureBubbles° panoramic interior shots of the trailers (similar to our PictureBubbles° work for Smashbox / Quixote). I’ll be posting more details about our Star Waggons projects in the coming weeks and months.
We’ve also started a long term business relationship with Drayton Hall, an exemplary 18th-century plantation home in South Carolina which has been turned over to the National Trust for Historic Preservation to be preserved (not restored) for the public. The site is an invaluable historical resource for learning more about life in the region from antebellum times to the 20th century, both for the Drayton family who owned the property, and the African-Americans who were brought there as slaves and whose descendants continued to be employed by the family after emancipation. We’re in the process of designing site signage to aid the museum’s interpretive mission, and we’ve created a new print identity for their marketing pieces as well.
FireFly Events logo
Firefly Events came to us for design consulting while they were in the process of launching their new business, which helps create extremely unique and memorable (in a good way!) events both for bachelor/bachelorette parties as well as team-building corporate retreats. Stuff like paintball, bungee jumping, beer making, Zorbing, and “divorce parties,” to name a few. We’ve designed a logo and a set of business cards for them to help get the word out about their new enterprise.
FireFly Events business cards
All told it’s been a magnificent three-quarters-of-a-year. I’ll be posting more updates soon!
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Recommended Reading |
- Ed Rondthaler's Life with letters …as they turned photogenic
- House Industries: The Book
- Iron Fists: Branding the 20th-Century Totalitarian State by Steven Heller
- Meggs' History of Graphic Design
- The Alphabet Thesaurus, Vol. 2
- The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst
- The Graphic Artists Guild Handbook