Book of the Month

June 2010 – The Whimsical Works of David Weidman

Up for the book of the month this month is a winner by David Weidman called The Whimsical Works of David Weidman and also some Serious Ones. Mr Weidman has one of the best styles I’ve ever seen & this book is amazing. Every page turn has more & more to astonish.

The man at work…

A small collection of the awesomeness.

These guys look ready to rumble!

Can’t go wrong with elephants in my book and these are some of the best I’ve seen!

When a guy makes vegetables look amazing, you know he’s got something special.

Weidman has multiple prints available on his website, click on one of the pictures above to go to his site.

Here’s the man again. I hope I’m like him when I’m his age. Making great prints & having an amazingly badass rooster above my name. This book’s $23 on Amazon right now and it’s really quite amazing. If you like Charley Harper’s work (what, you haven’t heard of him?!?), you’ll like David’s as well. It’s a great book featuring an amazing artist. If you want to rear more about David, check out this article in Swindle Magazine.

May 2010 – Logo by Michael Evamy

Coming around this month for our Book of the Month series is Logo by Michael Evamy. It’s quite possibly the most complete logo collection / reference book ever produced. It’s as thick as a dictionary and chock full of every remarkable logo from the thinkable past. The cover’s not necessarily thick and there’s no fancy treatments on it, because it doesn’t need it. We’ll just show a few examples from the book because it could easily turn into a 300 photo affair which wouldn’t even scratch the surface. Check it out the next time you’re at the bookstore and you’ll find it hard to put down.

The photos from the book could literally go on forever. There’s so many amazing logos and their stories in this book, it’s ridiculous and worth every penny.

April 2010 – 10 Years of T-Shirt Graphics

Up for the book of the month this time around is Upper Playground: Ten Years of T-Shirt Graphics. The book shows, well, exactly what the title is – the last ten years of t-shirt graphics by SF’s finest street culture shop & clothing line, Upper Playground. If you’re a fan of the latest street art, t shirts or just cool stuff – this book is definitely worth checking out.

Another fine cover this time around. The main cover has a photo of a screen with the UP walrus & the number 10. There is a spot UV gloss over the “inky” parts of the screen giving it a very screenprinted feel. Nice touch.

10 years in this culture is forever, even if you don’t count that they’ve been leading the pack that entire 10 years. To the right is one of the many awesome pieces by Mike Giant.

The book’s little bit of typography has a nice look to it. Very bold and in step with UP’s status in street culture.

Talk about heat. Each chapter / year shows a list of the artists / collaborators that UP worked with. Pretty much a who’s who of current Beautiful Losers era artists. It’s interesting to see how the beginning of the book they only worked with a few artists and by the latter years / collections the number was ridiculous.

Yeah, yeah. I know, get to the good stuff. Well, here are a few shots from the book. This is literally like 2% of what’s in it, the book’s thicker than the bible in the nightstand at the hotel.

Amazing. How funny is the OJ target with the bag of loot?

Not really any explanation needed. Biggie + KISS = Chang chang chang, winner.

David Choe

LOVE Jeremy Fish’s work

Sam Flores is well represented and his work is awesome.

We’ll leave it off with Alex Pardee’s awesome Walrus shirt.

March 2010 – New Skateboard Graphics

I know, I know – another skateboard graphic book? Well to put it frankly, yes. This book is amazing, by far the best I’ve seen in some time. What’s nice about this one is it’s filled with a TON of newer skate graphics. Yes, the old graphics are amazing to see (we’re going to do a feature on Jim Phillips book soon) but the new ones aren’t slouches either. My favorite part about working with skate companies is that they’re always looking for new & fresh things, and thusly their skate graphics are always amazing canvasses for people’s art & design.

What’s amazing about this book by Hardinsky is that just about every variation of skate graphics is included. You want the crazy line art of Zero or Mystery? Covered. Kittens? Yep. Graff / Wallbombers like Flying Fortress? Uh huh, seriously everyone’s covered The thing’s chock full of skate graphics from cover to cover with nice featurettes on various companies & artists. This book is well worth the price of admission, especially when you figure that Amazon has them for like fourteen bucks.

February 2010 – Helvetica Forever

This time around we have a brief review on what may be the best typeface ever created, none other than… Helvetica. In the book Helvetica Forever : Story of a Typeface by Victor Malsy & Lars Müller. Published just last year, the book gives a very in depth history of the great typeface. Everything from early samples of the typeface from it’s trade show brochure release to historic finds like the original notes on the creation of the typeface from Hoffman’s original notebook.

As a typical design dork, I notice things like weird / interesting covers. How Helvetica is this cover, a screenprinted canvas? It doesn’t get more utilitarian than that, I’m in!

Is there really any comment needed here? This is about as mid-century Swiss designer as it gets in my book.

Examples of prior use are featured in the book. I particularly liked this really basic notebook.

Some more examples of the book from Robin Benson’s Amazon review of the book including Haas’ trade show poster for it’s release (top right) and Massimo Vignelli’s 1962 poster for Knoll (bottom right)

Notes from Hoffman’s original notebook used during the creation of Helvetica. The date on the upper right side of the left page says 1957! Talk about something standing the test of time!

The book covers the history of the great typeface from it’s beginning with countless historical examples provided. It also has an entire section dedicated to comparing Helvetica to other sans serif typefaces. All in all, if you’re a font dork or a helvetica junkie (such as myself), this is a very interesting read which is definitely worth checking out.

January 2010 – Wacom Tablet

While we plan to continue our Book of the Monthseries, possibly even this month, I couldn’t hold off on Wacom Tablets much longer. I was really, really late to the Wacom Game, I’d seen them used and even bought & tried one out a few years ago but now that I’ve given mine an honest chance I’m a complete 100% backer and really don’t have any idea how I designed without one for so long.

I’ve used a lot of wacky things throughout the years in regards to design on my computer. I only wish that I’d picked up on these years earlier.

December 2009 – Vans “Off the Wall”

In case it isn’t obvious, the group here at We Design & Conquer has a long history with action sports, all stemming from our love of skateboarding. While at the bookstore recently, we were able to dive into a book which gets pretty close to summing up what we’re about.

As a product of the 80′s, the day you picked up your custom ordered Vans from the shop was one of the best days ever. I don’t know how many pair of Vans shoes I’ve had in my lifetime, I know it’s a lot. Reading this book appealed to me on many different fronts.

There was the obvious association with my childhood and the different Vans I owned but that was only the tip of the iceberg. The book was essentially a history of Vans shoes, starting out with Paul Van Doren (hence the name Vans) shoes being built to order and growing into the massive brand that it is today.

Covers are usually the first thing to catch anyone’s eye, hence the name Cover. The Vans book cover did exactly that and then some. The whole feeling of it is very “Vans” covered in a canvas checkerboard pattern with the customary vans patch, it’s very hard to miss.

The inside doesn’t disappoint. Van Doren the entrepreneur was (and is) impressive. From 12 shoes ordered & delivered on his first day to the 80′s where he was scouting, building out, hiring & opening a shop a weekly, it was amazing to read how smartly & effectively he made Vans what it is today. All this while he and a handful of other pioneers were essentially creating the action sports industry.

There is also numerous features on the people who helped catapult Vans to the position today. Skating legends like Tony Alva, Steve Caballero, Chris Miller and Geoff Rowley. Artists like Wes Humpston, the book’s just good and definitely worth checking out.

This photo looks strangely familiar…

There’s a cool feature of the book over on the Vans Site

For our initial installment of our Book of the Month section, we are featuring Gestalten’s Los Logos 4. Coming in at 508 pages, it’s full of considerable amount of logos from various industries from recent years. This fourth book in the series is different than the initial offerings in the series which seemed to be pretty web / “tech” based. While it’s more of a flip book than “What’s the story behind the logo?” like many other logo books, it’s definitely worth a look by anyone studying logos or interested in graphic design.