My silkscreens and letterpress art prints (available for sale at cuantogarabato on Etsy) are currently on display at STUDIO Gallery in San Francisco. They are part of the SFetsy art show, featuring works from over 65 local artists and craftspeople (check out the full list of Etsy shops).

When? There’s an opening reception happening this Saturday 5/12 (between 2pm–6pm). A lot of the artists will be there.

The show is already on display, running from 5/2 until 5/27. You can see it on Wednesdays–Fridays between 11am–8pm, and on weekends between 11am–6pm.

Where? STUDIO Gallery is located on 1815 Polk Street, San Francisco.

More details about the show, from the gallery’s news release:

In the brief seven years since it was founded, Etsy.com has become an on-line powerhouse for buying and selling handmade goods, both arts and crafts. (Think eBay for artists.) When the folks from the SFetsy Street Team, a group of over 600 local members, approached us to curate a show, we were definitely intrigued.

Several of our gallery artists have shops on Etsy, and we loved the idea of bringing a new group of local artists out of the virtual world and into our little brick and mortar universe! And once we saw the work, we knew the show would be a hit: stunning jewelry, witty mixed media pieces, etchings, beautiful photographs, ceramics, paintings – you name it, it’s here.

The range of work in the show is huge, the quality is high, and prices are very competitive. We hope you’ll come by to see the show and meet some of the artists, too.

The community that makes up SFetsy is a very talented bunch, and Jen and Rab who run the gallery are great people. Please stop by during the month of May and support local artists!

Today I mark another year as an independent design director, another year which has brought a lot of exciting opportunities. I’ve experienced a shift from working on a few long-term projects to a large variety of shorter-term ones across multiple industries, everything from high tech to health care. For a second semester, I’ve taught graduate students at the Academy of Art (one of my students won a Brand New Award for her work in the class). I even opened cuantogarabato, my Etsy shop.

But besides working and teaching, through freelancing I’ve rediscovered a passion for learning. In the past 12 months I’ve taken classes and workshops in diverse subjects, including type design in Italy, Portuguese (making my visit to Brazil here, here and here twice the fun), Processing programming, watercolour painting, finance, sign painting, even cooking.

Looking forward to the next twelve months!

Last weekend I attended a sign painting workshop at New Bohemia Signs. If you’ve been to San Francisco, their work can be seen everywhere and is part of what makes the city unique. Last year, I attended a show where they featured non-commercial work and made me wonder if they offered classes. Fortunately, they did.

The workshop was run by Damon Styer and Heather Diane Hardison, and took place both Saturday and Sunday. On the first day, we practiced lettering techniques through two alphabets, a casual and a grotesk (seen below).

The next day, each of us (we were about ten, all designers in our professional life) brought a design to implement in a 24″ x 10″ board. I chose to paint some words in Rantifusa, the typeface I’m currently developing. We practiced on tracing paper, then  learned how to transfer our designs to the board, and after that it was go time.

I don’t know if it was the paint fumes or what, but I had a ton of fun! So nice to do something by hand instead of on the computer. It’s a little bittersweet to think that some time ago, sign painting was the norm, and not so obscure. Still, it’s great the skill lives on, and people like Damon and Heather from New Bohemia Signs take time to teach it to others.

If you want to learn more about the workshop or the sign painting process, check out the slideshow below, or better yet, take the workshop yourself! You won’t regret it. Contact New Bohemia Signs for details. I believe they try to have the workshop about once a month.

I just returned from a lecture featuring Slavoj Žižek, a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic, organized by City Arts & Lectures. It was incredibly thought-provoking and revolved around many topics, but I was mostly drawn towards his thoughts on the status of ideology and cynicism in today’s society.

He made a very interesting observation on the genius of Starbucks, one which is so obvious I’m embarrassed not to have noticed. How does this brand get away selling a commodity at a high price? You may think it special to order an Iced Venti Americano with 1/4 shot of Espresso or a Grande Coffee Frapuccino Light with 2 shots blended, but really all they are is a combination of coffee, dairy or soy products, and sugar.

So how do they do it?

Partly, by answering consumers’ yearning to do good. Check out Starbucks Community page on their website. Some of their current initiatives include:

• Global month of service. Throughout April, join Starbucks friends and partners as we give back to communities across the globe.
• Vote, Give, Grow. Help us direct $4 million in funding to nonprofits in the U.S. Vote each week with your registered Starbucks Card.
• Create Jobs for USA. Create Jobs for USA gives you an opportunity to help support job creation across the country.

By drinking a cup of their coffee, look at all the problems we can solve! It’s quite incredible. Starbucks charges extra for their coffee so we as consumers can feel better about ourselves.

Of course they aren’t the only ones. Other examples abound, from the Join (Red) campaign to Whole Foods. I believe Whole Foods does it even better than Starbucks. When you bring your own bag to their supermarkets, you are asked if you want the credit or to donate it to charities (until recently they made you choose between three different foundations). As an action, it feels great… but it’s only a couple of cents! And they know it.

As they know how much we yearn for a time when the food-growing process was simpler. When you visit their produce section, the fruits and vegetables is presented in wooden crates. The symbolism is evident, and helps us avoid thinking how the produce was transported (through trucks, planes, ships), or that is was handled by labour or machinery, and quite probably refrigerated at some point.

What intrigued me about Žižek’s point of view was on why this was so effective, and it’s because of the particular period of time we live in. Back in the mid-20th century, one answer to resolve the flaws in a capitalist society was through activism. But nowadays, and here is the genius of Starbucks, activism is just included in the price of the product. We pay more, so we can feel good we are doing something by doing nothing. He even made a parallel example with culture, and how sitcoms don’t even require people to laugh, since they provide a laugh track.

In this excerpt from a lecture he gave at CUNY last year, you can hear him speak about this same topic, as well as ecological concerns.

I’ve recently started taking watercolour classes at CCSF, thinking it can be great way of adding colour to my drawings. The class, called Intro to Watercolor Workshop, is taught by Francesca Pastine.

The three classes so far have mostly been about mastering different techniques, as well as an overview on colour theory and composition. Considering we met only a handful of times, I’m fairly pleased with the results. Here are some examples I’m not too embarrassed to share.

The setup is quite simple: a big palette, some paints in various colours, buckets of water, good brushes and paper.

Now all I need is patience and lots and lots of practice: it’s a challenge to paint with watercolours. It must be done in layers, starting with softly vague blurs of colour, then building up to detail and sharpness. But at the same time, it’s great to be doing something where “undo” doesn’t exist. I’ll post some more as I get better at it.

Last year, I taught a graduate class on branding called Nature of Identity at the Academy of Art in San Francisco, together with Hunter Wimmer. This post showcases one of our student’s work, recently selected as a winner in the Brand New Awards student category.

Dara Weinberg, a student in our fall semester, decided to work with a defunct brand in the fashion space, Members Only. Popular in the 80s, it’s a brand best known for their jackets and their tagline “when you put it on, something happens.”

During the first month of the course, students are tasked with uncovering the essence of the brand they chose. To find out what makes their brand unique in the marketplace, they are asked to research the company history, its mission and values, targeted and potential customer profiles, who the competitors are, as well as to map out brand attributes through brand grids.

Through the research Dara uncovered that the best way to reinventing this brand would be through a satirical approach, raising the stakes of what’s possible with an outrageous brand promise: to be the epitome of exclusivity and cool. In a world governed by image, Members Only sets the rules.

Members Only thus stopped being a mere fashion brand, to become an opulent gentleman’s club and secret society complete with its own secret coded language, loosely based on one used by the Freemasons.

The next two months of the semester are devoted to visualizing the newly defined brand strategy. It begins with a logo exploration, which in Dara’s case culminated in the one seen above: a series of glyphs, which only “those in the know” can decipher, spelling out the society’s inaugural year and a coded “M” in the center of the hexagon. The logo and its guidelines are explored and presented in a brand book, with various examples of applications. The examples below illustrate how the new mysterious Members Only brand would go about setting rules on exclusivity and cool modernity.