Sip is a yet-to-be-opened café in Washington, DC, looking to put its best face forward.

Kind of a dream come true: lettered, illus­trated, and letter­pressed chip­board coasters. What makes this even sweeter? We made the coasters as part of a benefit for the DC Abortion Fund — an endlessly compas­sionate group of people doing much-needed, yet completely unglam­orous and exhausting work. The coasters accom­pa­nied two home brews made espe­cially for the benefit: Sweet Justice, a hefeweizen; and Solidarity Ale, a black IPA. Both were deli­cious, and deserved to rest upon only the finest of chip­board coasters.

Printed at Pyramid Atlantic with Beck Levy of Astropress DC, who lettered, illus­trated, and printed the companion coaster. The non-hand-lettered text is set in the topically-named Liberator by Ryan Clark, from Lost Type Co-op.

A series of bicycle helmets for the Washington Area Bicycle Association, auctioned off at their Summer 2011 BikeFest!  More details on the blog.

So the weather is changing here in DC — my toes have been cold for the past few days. Maybe I should finish my crocheted slip­pers from last winter (the ones I haven’t made for myself yet)? As I start getting into the constant-cup-of-tea routine, my summer nostalgia begins. Not so bad, though, for two reasons:

1. The crum­mier the weather gets here, the closer I am to my early-2012 move to Austin(!!!), and
2. this is the perfect prompt to review all my undoc­u­mented summer projects.

This is the start of a series of posts high­lighting some of the funnest stuff I’ve done in the past few months, and first up are these totally radical bicycle helmets I made for auction at WABA’s Bike Fest!

I’m a humon­gous propo­nent of helmets: I even started & ran a small free helmet program for about a year in Richmond at one time, called HELMET YEAH! Plus I haven’t had many design oppor­tu­ni­ties to play with spray paint and paint markers in recent years, so this was an absolute thrill for me in all ways.

(more…)

In the Gallery Place metro on my way to teach auGDES200 (my pet name for it), I saw the On To Richmond logo I designed while at J H I on about a million pylons! How neat.

The pylons (designed by the nice folks at J H I) are meant to remind us of signif­i­cant historic anniver­saries during this very week, and encourage us to scoot on down to Ol’ Virginny to take in the historic sites & reflect on where we were only 149 years ago. There’s some­thing very inter­esting to me about seeing the people in the metro rushing along, with history — quite liter­ally — all around us. Today and every day, history to look back on, and history we’re living.