Behold, vegan four-berry (dare I say, JAMpersand?) pi:

This would probably be the right opportunity to reveal the ampersand cookie cutter I made recently:

The cookie cutter is only one of several Very Exciting Things I’ve been making in the Lemelson shop lately for my project; others include pillows, windchimes, a lamp, a sponge, & so forth, all in the form of the ampersand.  More photos to trickle out soon as I finish things up!

I wanted it to be celebratory, and representative and unique to this year’s graduating class.  I hand wrote as many Division III titles as I could collect in the background.  The guy jumping is a first-year friend of mine, Devon, who’s a ridiculous tricker/acrobat.  All of the text is hand lettered – a lot of work, but  I’m so happy with how it came out!

Also recently I designed a t-shirt for Admissions, that they’re going to send to accepted students.  I’m really psyched about how the 2010 roots turned out.

I seem to be slowly rebranding Hampshire with my personal hand lettering style… I think I’m also going to submit a signer sweatshirt design in this style as well.  With these projects and several others I’ve done recently, I’ve become far more confident in hand lettering, and doing things by hand in general.  My process for these was to do a few quick pencil sketches of the design, then do a layout on the computer for more precise placement of text, do refined drawings of the design, then scan them back into the computer, clean up the drawings, and composite everything together.  I like this FAR better than designing 100% on the computer, as I used to! (Even though it’s more work…)

Speaking of doing things by hand, I’ve got some very exciting projects in the works for the rest of my Division III, and I’m going to be spending a lot of time in Lemelson, plasma cutting, blacksmithing, and welding…

Peanut butter, jelly, coconut, M&Ms.

Inspired by this.

**UPDATE JULY 2010: Posters of ALPHABIKE are now for sale on Etsy!**

It started with these two books I found called Graphic Design: the New Basics, a guide to design principles illustrated primarily with student work, and Teaching Graphic Design, a collection of syllabi from undergraduate and graduate design courses all over the country.

I noticed a project being done in a lot of intro to typography classes was creating an alphabet out of random objects, ranging from banana peels, to army men, shoes, food, bodies, some physical, some photographic.  I thought, well, what do I love as much as I love typography and photography?  BIKES!  Hence the birth of the ALPHABIKE.

I spent a couple days taking photos of bikes (and am now intimately familiar with most every bike on Hampshire’s campus).  G, R, K, and F were the most difficult to find.  I had to think a lot about distinguishing letters from shapes, what the essential lines of each letter are, and many of the photos are all about perspective.

People have already been asking me about getting a poster of it, so I think I’m going to sell prints as a fundraiser for my circus troupe’s bicycle tour next summer.  So let me know if you are interested, and I’ll have them available some time in the next few weeks!

Throughout our many long train rides around Europe, we put our heads together to craft a mission statement, begin envisioning a summer 2010 tour (by bicycle!), and slowly start inviting people to the troupe.  All summer I’ve been working hard on a logo, visual identity, and website for the circus.  Tara and our other co-founder Victoria have been hard at work planning out finances, applying for grants, and other business logistics.

Probably most of our online energy these days will go into the upkeep of the Downside-Up website and blog, SO to find out about all our super exciting plans, head on over to www.DownsideUpCircus.org!

<3,

Molly

What is an ambigram?  According to Wired, ambigrams are the hottest trend in typography since Helvetica.  An ambigram is a word-image that can be read from multiple vantage points, most commonly by flipping it 180 degrees.  Ambigrams were popularized a few years ago by Dan Brown’s book Angels and Demons, which features several ambigrams as plot points, including this one to the left.

Now, the complex gothic ambigrams from Angels and Demons were the only ones I was very familiar with, and I believed them to be for advanced artists, mathematicians, designers – not for amateur typographers and doodlers like us.

ambigram in progress

NOT SO!  Ambigrams are fun AND easy to make!  Tara and I made loads of them on our many long train rides around Europe.  It’s pretty simple – I just start with writing the word below itself upside down.  Then look at each of the letter pairs, think about the key components in each letter necessary to define it, and start doodling different ways those letters can be combined.  Think about how to turn necessary letter strokes into decorative elements.  It also helps to consider both upper and lower case letters, I thought ‘SEATTLE’ would be impossible, until I thought to try it with lower case letters.I’m in the process of digitizing the Downside-Up ambigram for a logo now, but meanwhile here’s another one I’m working on.  Try making them sometime!  And don’t go looking for any lame ambigram generators on the internet – get out a pencil and pad and do it yourself.   It’s like solving a logic puzzle.

For more on ambigrams, check out:

http://www.johnlangdon.net/ – the website of the Prof who’s one of the leading ambigram scholars, he also made all the ambigrams for Dan Brown.

http://www.ambigram.com/ – online magazine about everything ambigram.

ALSO: check out the rockin’ website I have been working on for my talented friend Shira, who is currently on a national tour.

Here is a list I started working on a long time ago and just recently finished writing:

30 Things to do Before I’m 30
1. go on a cross country circus tour in a bus powered by veggie oil [check]
2. be published in adbusters
3. explore the grand canyon
4. spend one month entirely off the internet and computers
5. go on a flying trapeze
6. design a font
7. intern with mcsweeney’s
8. spontaneously travel with no plan
9. make a feature length documentary
10. write meaningful letters to all the people I admire
11. culture jam mill creek (my hometown)
12. seattle to portland (STP) bike ride
13. learn to juggle (seriously, with all the time I’ve spent around circus people, you might think I would be able to juggle by now, right?  no.)
14. learn a musical instrument
15. design an 826 publication
16. grow my hair out long enough to braid it
17. learn to swing dance
18. build or help build a treehouse
19. design a playground
20. plan a heist
21. make an elaborate meal using only things I’ve grown myself
22. win a baking contest with my muffins
23. teach graphic design with open source software to a community in need
24. design and publish at least 6 issues of a new magazine
25. go camping in the hoh rainforest, the oregon coast, and the redwoods with my friends
26. learn how to design websites well
27. acquire (and use!) a typewriter and a sewing machine
28. spend time in scotland
29. take beautiful portraits of everyone I know
30. open a café/bookstore/circus space/community media center/letterpress printing studio/bike shop/urban garden in seattle with all my friends!

-Molly

]]> http://mightycyclemedia.com/2008/10/197/feed/ 0 http://mightycyclemedia.com/2008/08/magazine-fun-time/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=magazine-fun-time http://mightycyclemedia.com/2008/08/magazine-fun-time/#comments Thu, 21 Aug 2008 20:14:34 +0000 Molly http://makeshiftmedia.wordpress.com/?p=114 Okay, so you know how there are self-publishing printing-on-demand websites like Lulu, for books? 

Now there’s one for publishing magazines!  All you have to do is upload a PDF, and they’ll print it, ship it, and manage subscribers for you!  for free!

Do you understand what this means?  I am so very excited.  I love video and animation, but I seriously miss publication design so badly.  Just wait.  I will design magazines like there’s no tomorrow and one day you’ll look in your mailbox and say “oh!  why, what is this shiny new thing?”

-Molly

- You don’t see what I see.

- I am in a hurry.

- The hot air balloons drifting over the cornfields at sunrise…

- I am tired.

- The horses, sheep, cows, winking as you glide by.

- …

- Endless farmland and gracious meadows, rolling green hills. Twisty tall trees, vines hanging down to create a tunnel of green. The birch groves, where, when the early morning sun hits just right, you can very nearly catch sight of where the elves live. On the bridge crossing the Connecticut, squinting a little and tilting your eyebrows just so, the bridge disappears and you are flying into the sunset on your bike, ET style, through the viney green canopies of Never Never Land.

- I am sorry.

- Just think about biking next time.

Also: 20 miles a day X 5 days a week X 10-ish weeks = 1,000 miles! Yeah!

And: Today I got caught in the rain on my way home. It wasn’t so bad at first, the only thing that’s hard about biking in the rain is when my glasses get clouded. But then it started getting really vigorous, and maybe hailing, so I took shelter under a little tunnel because I knew it would pass soon.

After a few minutes, the sun came out, but the rain was still coming down hard core. A rainbow appeared in a perfect arch over the path, lined with trees stretching off into to the horizon, and it was just about the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

This is not my image, but I included it just so you could get a general idea. Sometime I’ll take my camera along and document the beauty myself.

- M