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.

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.

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.

This weekend at the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, I finally began learning something I’ve been wanting to for a long time: Processing. What is Processing? It’s an open source programming language and environment for people who want to create  or manipulate images, animations, and interactions. I have my friend Ken to thank for introducing me to Processing and generative design a few years ago.

I was a bit intimidated, since my last experience with coding was back in elementary school when used to play with LOGO and BASIC, but the two-day workshop conducted by Matt Ganucheau patiently walked us through the basics needed to code some sketches.

After an overview of the concept behind Processing, we were asked to code a critter. As we learned about functions, variables, arrays and classes, we made our critters move and react to events.

These are applets (not animations), and look different every time you reload the page. The only graphics not drawn from scratch within Processing are the mouths.

I just scratched the surface with the workshop and probably know less than 0.01% of what’s possible with Processing, but I left very inspired to continue learning. I’ll be posting more experiments as I make progress. I’m particularly interested in ways to automate mundane tasks during my design process, like exploring colour palettes

I’m opening an Etsy store! At cuantogarabato.etsy.com, I intend to offer many of those scrawls, squiggles and doodles I’ve put on paper over the years. For now, you can find my Drawn Quijote letterpress prints, as well as a series of silkscreen prints I’ve made a few years ago. More items will be added in the near future.

Last week, the AIGA SF invited Marc Català and Pablo Juncadella from Mucho in Barcelona  to present to design students who they are and what they do. Besides showing some amazing work Mucho has done over the years that was both conceptually sound and superbly executed, they also shared 20 insights as to what they have learned as professionals along the way. Meant to inform and inspire the students in the audience, they went as follows:

On ideas

• It’s all about ideas
• Working hard pays off
• Be open to things you hate
• The best attitude is faith
• Experiment brings true originality – and some weird shit too

On a design career

• Working for others teaches you a lot at no cost
• Teaming up helps
• Teaching is the best way to learn
• Asking questions never hurts – but asking stupid questions makes you look bad

On the studio

• It’s all about being efficient, not about being quick
• Clients come and go, relationships are forever
• Don’t work for free, work for a dollar
• Count the hours when budgeting, don’t count the hours when you’re at it
• Designers need a creative space to work properly

On the client

• Talking to the person who can say yes makes all the difference
• The client needs creative space
• Make it personal and don’t make it personal
• It’s wise to choose the fights you can win
• You are never better than your client
• It’s all about service, service, service

All in all, great advice on par with their great work. Be sure to check out their website. Big thanks to Rob Duncan for bringing international talent of such caliber to these lectures!

Two rebranding projects have been recently featured in the book Relogo: Re-designing the brand, published by Sandu Publishing Co: a proposal re-branding for Pizzeria Delfina in San Francisco (developed in combination with Andy Baron and Ken Frederick), and the logo for Qval (a service that helps investors and companies transform private market data into private market intelligence).

As the Chinese publishing house explains,

Rather than presenting a new logo from scratch, Relogo aims to tell the story behind a brand, offering you a valuable resource on how to create something new from old. The ‘logo’ is an essential aspect in the design of branding. It plays an important role in presenting the visual identity and philosophy of a company, attracting audiences through shape or form. The book is divided into three sections – transformation of image, typeface and those of all-around. Relogo is a precursor into styles and trends in logo design and the perfect companion for the designers.

The book is available for purchase here.

In between the two beach towns I visited while in Brazil, I squeezed an afternoon in Salvador. The Pelourinho neighbourhood (historical center of town) is as charming as it is scary, because of some of its inhabitants. Even with all the police presence, I didn’t feel very safe. Still, I managed to take some nice pictures of the place with my cellphone. Enjoy.

This small beach town which I visited for a week in January, is located near Natal, in the northern state of Pernambuco, in Brazil. It has some of the most scenic coastlines I’ve ever seen.

Walking distance from the town, the closest beaches are Praia do Amor (great surfing spot), Praia das Minas (completely deserted, sometimes visited by marine turtles), Praia dos Golfinhos (no waves, visited by dolphins!), and Praia do Madeiro (it has some waves, and is also visited by dolphins). Nearby, by van or boogie, one can access lagoons (one with water the colour of Coca Cola!), an ecological sanctuary, cliffs… the list goes on.

I stayed at the Pousada Pomar da Pipa owned by a great paulista named Mario, and became friends with some cool Brazilians who were also staying there. At night, while the bar scene was very small, the culinary choices were quite varied, considering the size of the town. We tried lots of different restaurants, and even grilled some meat on the last night of our stay.

It’s a place I definitely want to visit again!

During my recent trip to Brazil, one of the highlights was a day at Inhotim, the open-air museum and botanical garden in Minas Gerais. If you’ve never heard of it before, you are not alone. I first read about this 3,000-acre ranch a few months ago in an article from The Guardian:

Located in Brumadinho, a sleepy mining town around 40 miles from the state capital Belo Horizonte, Inhotim began life in the 1980s when Paz bought a 3,000-acre ranch with part of his fortune. He transformed the site into a stunning botanical garden with the help of his friend Roberto Burle Marx, a landscape architect.

In the late 1990s Paz began building galleries at Inhotim to house his growing art collection. In 2006 it opened to the public, rapidly becoming a reference point for the arts in South America: 300,000 people visited this year.

A cross between Tate Modern and Kew Gardens, Inhotim is home to nearly two dozen art “pavilions”, housing work by giants of the Brazilian arts scene such as Hélio Oiticica, Cildo Meirelles and Vik Muniz and international names including Doug Aitken, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Steve McQueen.

Getting there was no picnic. I had planned on staying three days at Belo Horizonte, so I could visit Inhotim one or two days (it’s located 1.5 hours away by bus). Unfortunately, for many days prior to my arrival, torrential rains had soaked Minas Gerais. Many towns were covered by floods. So much so that Inhotim didn’t open to the public the first two days I was in Belo Horizonte. Fortunately, the last day I was there it opened, and I got to visit!

The photos in the slideshow should give you an idea of the place, the botanical gardens, sculptures and pavilions. The buildings contain the private art collection of Brazilian magnate Bernardo Paz, the man behind Inhotim. The sculptures are in-situ installations, specially commissioned for the space.

Thanks to the useful circuit suggested at the Vambora blog, I was able to see everything in one day. Some of the highlights for me were:

• Narcissus Garden, by Yayoi Kusama
• Penetrável Magic Square, by Hélio Oiticica
• Galeria Miguel Rio Branco
• De Lama Lâmina, by Matthew Barney
• Sonic Pavilion, by Doug Aitken
• By Means of a Sudden intuitive realization, by Janet Cardiff
• True Rouge, by Tunga
• Através, by Cildo Meireles
• Desvio para o vermelho, by Cildo Meirelles
• O assassinato dos Corvos, by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller
• Cosmococas, by Hélio Oiticica and Neville d’Almeida
• Beam Drop, by Chris Burden
• Galeria Adriana Varejão
• Forty Part Motet, by Janet Cardiff
• Viewing Machine, by Olafur Eliasson

The institute’s website has photos of the artworks created by the different artists. While many of the pieces are interactive (sounds installations abound at Inhotim), they will help you get an idea of what you’d encounter.

If you love modern art, visiting Inhotim is a must. To me, it was as unique an experience as going to the Venice Biennale for the first time. Only that instead of canals, I was surrounded by Brazilian tropical gardens!

Earlier this year I submitted the above illustration to Hamburg-based firm EIGA Design to be considered for inclusion in their Eat! 2012 calendar. I received a copy of the calendar recently and it’s a nicely printed piece. It features 54 artists, illustrators, designers and architects, and it’s full of inspiring art and design on the topic of food.

Find out more about the project by reading reviews on Centurion Magazine or by Nadine Roßa (in German).

If you’re interested in purchasing a copy (for yourself or as a holiday present for the artsy-foodies in your family), it is available through the publisher NBVD.

Below are a few images courtesy of EIGA’s Flickr page.

Is the brand the logo? Is the logo the brand? Is a logo also a logotype? Is a logo a symbol? Is the wordmark the brandname? Is the mark the wordmark? Is the brand the corporate signature?

Confused? Unless your company is called Brand, answers to those questions don’t come easy. If you’ve heard those terms before but aren’t sure what their exact meanings are, you’re not alone.

The reality is that there’s no consensus as to what the above terms mean, or what is the proper nomenclature for the things we create. For an industry that considers problem-solving a key objective, design has created a confusing array of terms to describe its end products.

Unfortunately, the discrepancies in assigning the same meaning to those words is not just between professionals and clients, or professionals and the general public. It happens even among professionals! This is a problem, because it creates barriers in the exchange and discussion of ideas. A recent post by designer Andrew Sabatier serves as a perfect example. In the course of making excellent observations on the merits and viability of companies dropping their names and just using symbols, he has to go into great detail explaining what he means with every term he uses.

How did we designers get to this point? Do other professions share the same problem? Do musicians debate the meaning of “song” as much as we do with “logo”? Do mathematicians do the same with “number”?

I remember going through college and not getting a straight answer. Instructors used different terms. As I began working I noticed that studios were more coherent in their use of nomenclature. As confusion can result in extra work, the description of deliverables in contracts tended to be very specific.

In time, I adopted the language used by my peers at Landor, which I find very straightforward:

• A wordmark is a visual representation of a company name composed of letters that read like a word, and stylized in a distinct way (typically through an interesting use of typography).
• Symbol is a graphic element, and can be abstract or figurative. Monograms are a subset of symbols that use a letter or letters in a graphic way, but don’t read as a word.

And logo?

• Most times, a logo is composed both a wordmark and a symbol (e.g., AT&T, Continental Airlines, Goodyear, Taco Bell).
• Sometimes a logo is just a wordmark (e.g., Banana Republic, Crate&Barrel, Fedex).
• A symbol by itself can become a logo (e.g., the Nike Swoosh, the Apple logo, Target’s Bullseye), but it’s very rare. Establish a symbol on its own to represent a company name requires time, patience, and massive amounts of marketing dollars.

What about brand?

• All the experiences provided by a particular company, product or service create impressions in consumers minds. Those impressions (thoughts and feelings) constitute a brand. It’s part promise, part reputation, part personality.
• Since it’s inside other people’s heads and hearts, companies try to influence it. Design is a vehicle for that shaping to occur.

A logo is only visual. A brand is not just visual. Why all the confusion between logo and brand then? Maybe because a logo acts as a reductive visual reference to a brand, and when a consumer sees a logo, it can trigger some of those thoughts and feelings for the brand it is referring to.

Sadly, I don’t see an effort by the industry to simplify and consolidate terminology. We are all after the new thing. I was surprised how various speakers at this year’s Brand New Conference argued that logos where not very important, it was “stories” that mattered. The most memorable slide of the day said that “branding is for cows, stories are for people.”

Topic for another post.