Renegade SF: Brynn Metheney

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One of the best things about Renegade Fairs is that we get to meet our many contributors. In San Francisco, Brynn Metheney came by to say hi. Brynn's conceptual creatures are featured in the current issue #10 with an article written by Glen. Brynn's The Morae River project involved creating an entire world and its inhabitants; we chose to include her work for its imaginative quality and that it worked with two of our themes of this issues—animals as creative inspiration and visual story-telling. Read more about Brynn and the article on her blog. Thank you Brynn and Glen for a great article.

TypeCon2011 Recap #1

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Hi everyone! My name is Carolyn Sewell and I am super thrilled to be UPPERCASE magazine’s TypeCon2011 correspondent and guest blogger this week! I want to thank Janine for not only sponsoring this amazing conference, but also offering me the chance to attend my own version of Disneyworld (grits AND typography!) on behalf of my favorite magazine. I’m honored, geeking out, and extremely hungry.


From the first paragraph you can probably tell that I’m not Canadian. Although my in-laws live in Toronto and Windsor, Ontario, I was raised in the Deep South in a small Mississippi town and moved to Washington, DC almost 10 years ago. I am a graphic designer and illustrator (designistrator?) and July 11th will be the 3rd anniversary of me owning my own business!

Several years ago I started a blog called Pedestrian Typography, where I posted photos of typography spotted on the streets...similar to the photos featured in UPPERCASE Issue #6 (specifically Typography for the People and Steve Powers’ Love Letters). After a few years of doing that I became interested (read: obsessed) in hand-lettering and decided to start the project Postcards To My Parents, where I hand-drew and mailed a postcard to my parents every day for a year. And after that I couldn’t stop, so I started Postcards To My Peeps. Although I don’t send one every day, I’m slowly getting a card out to everyone I care about or admire. It’s gonna take a while.


And when I’m not designing for clients or sending postcards to my peeps, I’m taking sketchnotes at various design lectures and events. What started out as my anti-Twitter proclamation at the AIGA Design Conference in Memphis has now grown into a full-blown hobby (and now I tweet as well, @carolynsewell). So this week I plan to post my photos, sketchnotes and food ramblings from TypeCon2011. I hope you enjoy.

Now please pass the hot sauce.

Creative Business by Rena Tom (participate in issue #11)

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I am happy to introduce a new contributor to UPPERCASE, Rena Tom. I've been virtually following Rena's entrepreneurial career for many years and had the pleasure of meeting Rena and her family at the Collection a Day book launch in San Francisco earlier this year. At that point, Rena and Lisa Congdon had just sold their shop Rare Device to a new owner. (Rare Device stocks A Collection a Day and other UPPERCASE titles, by the way!)

"Rare Device was renowned early on for its carefully edited collection of design objects, books and fashion, and for supporting small and innovative designers and artists whose work was not easily found in stores. I sold Rare Device in February 2011 but the entrepreneurial bug has not left me. I have met so many wonderful designers, crafters, artists, retailers, buyers and bloggers and have learned a great deal from every one of them."

Rena has since harnessed her experience as an artisan, designer and shop owner and is passing on her knowledge on through retail consulting. She can help you start a new business, open a store, evaluate your product and help you get noticed by the right people.

After reading Rena's guest post "Too Much Success" on Poppytalk, I immediately emailed to thank her for a post that hit really close to home and invited her to extend her experience to UPPERCASE readers. For her first column (appearing in the fall isssue #11), we are accepting questions.

What would you like to know about starting or maintaining your creative business? In what areas do you need most encouragement or advice? Please leave your questions in the comment section.

(Please note that these are general questions, not specific questions or evaluations of your products.)

Contributor: Christine Chitnis

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Congratulations to UPPERCASE contributor Christine Chitnis on the release of her new book Markets of New England. We've been priviliged to have Christine's words and images grace the pages of UPPERCASE a few times—and in the current issue, Christine takes us behind the scenes of the making of her new book:

"Good things seem to come in pairs, so when I found out I was pregnant with my first, it seemed only fitting that an offer to write my dream book would shortly follow.

Combining my love of writing, photography, and travel, I set out to unearth the top fifty markets—both farmer’s markets and art markets—in New England. Although this was to be a travel book, I wrote it with a greater purpose in mind...."

"When we use our collective consumer power to support artisans—beekeepers, cheese mongers, weavers, and woodworkers—we are insuring that our communities remain unique, thriving places to live. In this age of big-box stores and mass-produced items, it has become all the more important to invest in our local economy. . . one artist, one farmer, one shop at a time."

Markets of New England is published by The Little Bookroom, a fine publisher of travel guides, journals and notebooks. Coincidentally, we also have a profile of Louise Fili in issue #9, the design director for many of The Little Bookroom's lush typographic covers.

Christine Chitnis is a writer, photographer and environmental educator. She lives with her husband and son in Providence, Rhode Island. Her writing has appeared in Country Living, Time Out New York, ReadyMade and The Washington Post. She has a degree in Environmental Science from the University of Colorado. 

A look at the next cover

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And there she is, a cover design-in-progress for issue 8, out in early February! Thanks to Sarah and Ryan at Lab Partners for the illustration. I love the simple concept and the play on the notion of a type slug (a strip of metal used to space lines of type).

(Lab Partners were previously featured in the magazine, as part of our dynamic duo column. Below is the illustration that they made for that article.) Quite the dapper pair!

In addition to the usual topics, the issue explores themes of small and miniature, as well as articles about letterpress. Each issue will have an actual letterpress sample inserted within its pages and subscriber copies will include an authentic vintage european matchbox label.

Feeling Bookish...

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I am so impressed! We have received about 60 submissions for the latest open call in which we ask our readers to interpret themselves as a book cover. This was a challenging concept, but you took me up on it and did an amazing job. The majority of them will be published in the forthcoming issue 7 of UPPERCASE magazine (alas, a few people forgot to follow our size requests or otherwise have unpublishable files—please note that when creating work that might be printed, it is important to build the file to the proper specifications: web resolution doesn't work for print. Print = 300dpi).

We invited some very talented professional book designers to participate as well, and I am thrilled with their work. I will be printing out the best of everyone's submissions for an impromptu exhibition in the gallery for the month of September, so please join us this First Thursday for the show!

Vancouver-based artist Andrea Armstrong did a great cover illustration and even made a mockup:

Andrea writes:

I am a picture book. Not too wordy; likes to hang out with kids; colourful but simple. The thing about a picture book is you can read the words quickly, but to get to know the story well, you have to keep coming back to it to spend time with its images.

I am a picture book about a girl and her chickens. The girl is an introvert; she would rather hang out with chickens than real people most of the time. She’s creative – now don’t laugh, but she invents songs to sing to them, and even wrote a poem about them once. She has a favorite chicken, whose name is, in fact, Favorite. And she’s a little bit odd (hello, she’s best friends with chickens and writes poetry for them.)

I am an autobiographical picture book about a girl and her chickens. True story.

There's a nice mix of illustrations, design and typography in the submissions. Great job, everyone!

By the way, check out Andrea's blog for some great depictions of a drawn version of herself interacting in the real world. Love it!

Today at Rare Device

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Leah Giberson's solo show at Rare Device (San Francisco) opens tonight!

"I begin each piece with photographs of seemingly ordinary and mundane scenes, which I then paint directly upon to distill and reveal the visually poignant moments that exist all around us, but are usually overlooked," says Giberson. There is a quiet anxiety and loneliness in her images of isolated houses, empty chairs, abandoned pools and vacant streets. Shadows loom from unknown/unseen sources, horizon lines become uncomfortably close, people are absent and clues about time and geography are obscured."

We're pleased to have a Work-in-Progress Society feature about Leah in the current issue. Also in the current issue is a great piece about Molly Winzenberg (Orangette) and Brandon Pettit written by contributor Victoria Smith. Victoria will also be at Rare Device this evening for a Pinterest meet-up. (Here's my Pinterest.)


Oh you lucky people in San Francisco! But soon, the UPPERCASE gang will be in your amazing city. The Renegade Craft Fair is on the horizon.

Blanca!

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The best part is that my work was on the cover of a fantastic magazine, but I feel honored more than proud.

—BLANCA GOMEZ

There's an excellent interview with Blanca Gomez of Cosas Minimas on Grain Edit today. (She even takes us through an illustation from start to finish.) UPPERCASE is forever grateful that Blanca's work graced our first magazine cover.

"Cosas Minimas got its start several years ago in a very curious way. I was working for another graphic design studio at the time and was in the habit of constantly drawing on post-its. Most of the drawings ended up in my wastebasket and my boss would tell me that I should do something with those drawings, but I never paid much attention. One day he simply told me that he had chosen a name for my website and purchased it for me. So it just naturally morphed out of what was once merely a hobby at work…"

Ask Frank Chimero

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The creative smarts of Frank Chimero continue to amaze and amuse! Here's his latest project, available through his shop:

"It’s simple: when you buy a print, ask me any question you'd like. I’ll write your question and its response on your print and try to answer to the best of my ability. Sense and nonsense are welcome. Let’s consider this a little social experiment and as a way for you and I to make a more meaningful interaction through this crazy internet thing. It’s a letter and it's art. You’re creative, I’m creative, so let’s collaboratively make something cool."

Watch for Frank's "Spot Thoughts" in each issue of UPPERCASE magazine. Go here for a smile.