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’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.

Sadly all good things come to an end, and this workshop was no exception. Friday was the last day. Surprisingly, I was able to finish all the uppercase and lowercase characters in five days. While a lot more remains to be done (redrawing a handful of letterforms, designing the punctuation marks, setting spacing and kerning pairs, adding accented characters), I was happy with the progress made. I can’t call myself a type designer, but at least the workshop demystified the process and let me know some of the do’s and dont’s.

And getting to practice my Italian was an added bonus. Apparently I speak it very well!

More importantly, I made a lot of new friends not just in Italy but around the world. I was very fortunate to be part of the group that made the ISIA Urbino Type Design Week 2011, from Bruno Maag and Jonathan Pierini to all my fellow students: Yuko Sawamoto, Laura Pante, Emilio Grazzi, Mirko Balducci, Alessio D’Ellena, Sabrina Campagna, Riccardo Lorusso, Yotam Hadar, Kári Emil Helgason, Meir Sadan, Claudia Flandoli, Andrea Biagioni, Linda Armelius, Andrea Tolosano, Tomasso Torelli, Alice Ferrari, Alessia Paschetta, Jasper de Waard, Pierluigi Giglio and Nicola Caleffi.

We had a lot of fun each day, especially after class when we would go for spritz first then dinner. On the last night, all the cameras were out.

I think the week in Urbino left a mark in all of us. Just in case, we left our mark in Urbino as well.

On Thursday we were asked to print our designs and pin them up to the wall to share in a group crit. It was exciting to see how different all our projects looked, and how far along we were. Some students had chosen monoline geometric designs, which proved to be very difficult to pull off. According to Bruno, bolder designs leave more room for error, and so cheating or hiding imperfections becomes easier.

My font was the boldest of the lot. Four days into designing a typeface for the first time and I was already called a cheater. Excellent.

He was right though. A bold typeface did allow me to fudge things a bit. In the case of the uppercase S, a very difficult character to design, I was able to use Futura’s S as the basis for mine.

Wednesday was kicked off with an interesting lecture on legibility by a guest speaker who teaches regularly in the school, Luciano Perondi.

Then it was back to our designs. By the end of day 3, the alphabet was more than 80% complete. Problem was that most characters missing were the tricky ones.

The individual crits with either Bruno or Jonathan proved to be very helpful in terms of identifying potential improvements, as well as general guidance on how to approach the project. There was also a great atmosphere of collaboration among the students.