Signage: The Brain

The Brain is a bar/coffee shop on James Street here in the Hammer and the proprietor is one Jeremy Greenspan. If you’re into groovy Canadian electronica acts, you’ll recognize the name as being one half of Junior Boys.

This is definitely one of the more unique signs I’ve seen in a long time. Not painted, not carved from stone, not cut out of vinyl, but knit. Designed by Courtney Lakin, and worked on by a dozen individuals who are part of the Beehive Craft Collective who gather once a week at the Brain to hang out and knit. The piece has a proper name: Knit Night on the Brain.

S.o.t.D. - A World To Forget – Lojik

A World To Forget – Lojik


Nice atmosphere.

Bibliophilia: Tintin: The Complete Companion – Michael Farr

Tintin: The Complete Companion – Michael Farr

Grew up reading TinTin and it was cool to learn a little more about what all went into them, and how Herges imagination was sparked by his extensive library of reference photos he collected over the years.

S.o.t.D. - Toasted Dub – Tino’s Breaks

Toasted Dub – Tino’s Breaks

Toasted, nicely toasted. A different guise of Jack Dangers of Meat Beat Manifesto.

S.o.t.D. - Monster – Bushwacka

Monster – Bushwacka

Monster of a tune indeed. That bass line alone!

S.o.t.D. - Mermadium Palladium – Ju Ju Space Jazz

Mermadium Palladium – Ju Ju Space Jazz

A track I had heard on a friends mixed tape many years ago, but never knew what it was called or who the artist was. While hanging out at the tattoo shop the other night, it came over the sound system. Hot diggety. 

Typeface Design – Cosmodrome

This is an old typeface I started in late 92. Originally it was for use in ads for a college radio show. Playing around with very orthogonal forms - a line and a circle. I had a bunch of ideas for forms and I spread the different ideas out over two weights - one set of ideas in the bold, one set of ideas in the regular. They looked somewhat similar....but different. Some of the characters I liked, and some I didn’t. These are a few of the old characters. Some okay ideas there, but some of them are just too obtuse. I ended consolidating the two different sets into one bold weight a while later. I took all the characters I liked and if they were in the lighter weight I made them bold. Over time I would still use it for a headline or try it out in a logo, but found myself drawing whole new characters (in that style) when I thought they just didn’t work.

Now that I once again have the means to work on type, I decided to have another crack at this. There was still something I liked about it, and decided to take it in a different direction. Namely to standardize it a bit, have lots of alternate characters, have sans-serif and serif versions, and maybe if I have no life, a semi-serif version, and have a few different weights, and maybe even wide and condensed variants. I still have a bunch to do on just this font and weight before I even move on to any other aspects of it.

I spend my days trying to wrap my brain around learning HTML code and all that, then when I go home I spend hours trying to figure out the intricacies of OpenType coding. I am just a barrel of fun.

Like I said, lots that will still change about this, but I was keen to generate this as an actual font so I could play around with it a little bit. Even though it’s not entirely ready, it is still valuable to use it in page layout or illustration program and type it out, see how it all looks as lines and passages of text, etc.

And I’ve gotten close to completing a bold serif version as well.

I think what I’ve come up with is the logical result of tossing DIN, American Typewriter and Lubalin Graph into a crock pot and letting it stew to create this. Or, to be all type geek about it, a globose adnate unmodulated geometric modernist typeface.

Another variant a good chunk of the way done. Decided to go back to a naming convention I’ve used before This one will be Micromum, the ones I did before will be Maximum, and in between that will be the Minimum and Medium, and I’m also going to do an even heavier version which will be called Megamum.

S.o.t.D. - All In – Martin Léon

All In – Martin Léon 

Great, kind of a loungy gypsy jazz track from this Quebecois artist.

Bibliophilia: The War of Art – Steven Pressfield

The War of Art – Steven Pressfield

Who involved in creative pursuits hasn’t faced a blockage at some point? I found this a very useful read.

Smoke & Draw Night

Little flyer for a weekly drawing night. Everyone smokes....cigars and draws. Used some old drawings I’d done of drawing implements, that I jazzed up a little with some gradients. Mainly it gave me a chance to use an old/new typeface: Cosmodrome SansSerif Bold. One I did initially 20 years ago, and altered over the years. Now I’m reworking it all again to be a serif/semi-serif/sans-serif with four weights in each, OpenType typeface. As if learning about HTML coding all day isn’t enough, I then go home and in the evening build type and delve into OpenType coding. Generated it this morning. Still a whole lot to fix up and perfect here, but I was itching to fiddle with it in something other than FontLab Studio.It’s unfinished, but at some point you need to actually see it in use, whole pages of text to check the colour of it, how everything works in conjunction, that sort of thing.

S.o.t.D. - Namaste – Syzygy

Namaste – Syzygy

Did a logo design for this act years ago, but I think it was only a very short lived project. Never saw the light of day.

Bibliophilia: The Influencing Machine – Brooke Gladstone

The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media – Brooke Gladstone

I had never heard of her or her show before this, and I found this a very enjoyable look at the history of the “media” and the supposed bias of media. In short, her assertion is that most times media biases are not nearly as pronounced as some would claim.

Identification Label Vending Machine

Quite a few years ago I helped move these two monsters out of the basement of Rath Art into the basement of the tattoo shop. Good times, let me tell you. They’ve sat there for years, escaping the best intentions to get them up and running.

They dispense metal identification tags. Like a big, floor mounted Dymo machine in essence. The tags are actually really cool and very useful. I think that if I saw one of these and it was a functioning unit, I’d immediately think of a bunch of uses and pop out a slew of  labels.

Big dial on the front.

Nice lettering and everything.

And these are the labels. No choice of typeface, but, whatever.

Instruction panel.

Where you insert your dime and where the finished label is spat out.

Crank on the side.

According to Sandra Kiemele from the Dundas Museum, the company was in business from 1955-1960. The address on the name plate is the address for Dundas Town Hall, which has been on the same site since 1847. Her guess is that there were post boxes in the Town Hall which Canadian Vending Machines used. This points more in the direction of  CVM being in the distribution of the machines rather than the manufacturer. Typing this into a search engine is futile. It just brings up every modern company that sells or leases or fixes or services vending machines in Canada. Not very helpful.

Instructions.

A mere 10¢ for 6". Step right up for the finest bargoon to be found anywhere!

And all those suggestions are still just valid today.

I’ll spin the wheel Pat!

Turn it to “start”, pull down on the handle on the side, then the first letter, pull the handle, etc., and finally, turn to “finish”, pull the handle and that cuts it.

And some shots of the interior.

You can see the spool of feed stock here.

Closer view.

 And a view into the top.

Very cool machine, that would be really great to get going. I can’t be the only person who could think of a few things to label with these tags. My friend is thinking of selling them, maybe for scrap, but that seems a shame.

Sadly, I can’t find out the first bloody thing about them. Hours of searching on the internet have turned up nothing. Not who made them, what era they’re from, etc.

If anyone knows anything about these, we’d love to know. A Mr. Ken Durham of GameRoomAntiques was kind enough to send me this article with some information. Thank you sir.
http://gameroomantiques.com/Feature/MetalStamping.htm

Well, they’ve been sold. An antique dealer friend bought them. I hope he’ll fix them up and someone, somewhere can get some use out of them.

Sleeping Cat

Bryce’s Melons

Bryce, the apprentice at the tattoo shop has been practicing on oranges and melons. Don’t think this is one of his designs, but mainly he just wanted to practice doing lettering.

Only his first melon, but he shows promise.

S.o.t.D. - So What – Miles Davis

So What – Miles Davis

From what many consider the best album ever, and I’m certainly one who regards this album very highly. Hell, entire books have been written about it. I’ve owned several copies of it since lending it out, often means it never returns.

Stefon

I only catch SNL once in a while, but this skit always has me in stitches. I gather Bill Hader never really knows what he’s going to be saying until he gets out there, and watching him crack up is part of the hilarity.

http://eater.com/archives/2011/02/13/snl-stefon-recommends-valentines-day-nightclubs.php

http://eater.com/archives/2010/12/12/saturday-night-live-snl-stefon-12-days-of-christmas-blitzen.php

http://eater.com/archives/2010/10/24/snls-stefon-recommends-more-hot-nyc-nightclubs.php

S.o.t.D. - Zeros And Ones (Aphex Twin Reconstruction #2) – Jesus Jones

Zeros And Ones (Aphex Twin Reconstruction #2)  – Jesus Jones 

Sounding absolutely nothing whatsoever like the original, I recall reading somewhere that Richard James would often not even bother with a single element of the original track and just put out whatever he felt like. Essentially an original Aphex Twin track, rather than a remix. As if the title of the record this came out on, 26 Mixes For Cash wasn’t evidence enough of his cheekiness.

Signage: Today‘s Hair Cultre

Shouldn’t the ability to spell, or at the very least knowing how to look a word up in the dictionary be a prerequisite to work in a sign shop? The fact that the client can’t spell...well...okay. But the sign painter? Or should I say, the plotter operator? The upside down apostrophe and the pointless upper case S, are a moot point beside that.