Be sure to take a look at the C.C. Stern Typefoundry for yourself if you like these shots at www.ccsterntype.org

Recently I had the unique opportunity to visit the C.C. Stern Type foundry. My wife, the evil genius of the family, met some of the owners and was invited to help out for an afternoon. Being the typography nerd I am I just had to come along… and when she told me a little more about the place I just had to bring my camera. We spent a nice morning in a solvent smelling, matrix cleaning, good conversation, and some photography. This is what I got…

Most of the time I write about things taking place in my life or my most recent photography. I spend a lot of time looking at the right now. I try to keep up on current and in most cases fleeting design styles. It can be exhausting, and often ends in misdirection and frustration. I find that when looking for design inspiration I almost always find myself paging through designs from a past era.

Today though, I thought I would take a chance and write about a major influence on my design work. I first encountered Josef Müller-Brockmann in a history of graphic design class taught by the enigmatic Margarete Richardson of U&LC and Print Magazine fame. When encountering his work I was, as most are, struck by the simple, refined, grid-based typography. The information was the star in his work and it left me with a real desire to learn more about Swiss typographic systems. I was in awe. Up to that point I believed that design was all about image. I had never occurred to me that type could take center stage in a design. The hierarchy he created in his work was just amazing and gave me a really good understanding of how to use type effectively. I then became increasingly interested in letter forms themselves as art and started taking apart type to create images. When looking back through the catalog of Josef Müller-Brockmann’s poster work at www.moma.org is started to see once again why he had such a strong influence on my design. I find that in my work I see clarity of the message being conveyed of the utmost importance. I believe, unlike some, that typography should have order and let the message contained within the words be expressive rather than the typeface used to express those words. David Carson would hate me.

It is just very refreshing to revisit a body of work that at one point had such a strong influence on my design work and see that it still has the same effect on me years later. Today after looking through countless posters and reading biographies I once again find myself craving a rigid typographic grid and simple sans serif type. Check out some of my favorite Brockmann posters below. Lovely lovely work.

At the digital agency I work at we have a lot of fun. The culture at eROI is very important to those of us that work there day in and day out. Being a worker bee is tough sometimes but we really know how to let off the steam. Work hard, Play hard just like daddy taught me. Last week we did a little event called ignite eROI. If you are not familiar with the ignite format it is where people sign up to do short 5 minute talks about a random subject. Very good stuff here. Not long enough to get boring but just enough time to learn something new… like the migration patterns of Narwhals. I was armed  with my camera as usual and got some pretty good shots. This is what I shot.

A little while back I wrote a post for www.welikeitfresh.com the design and development blog at work. I was asked to look around and shoot some photos of the toys around the office. There are literally hundreds of them so it wasn’t all that difficult. I wanted to share the shots here as well because many of them came out so damn well. It is fun to look at objects that I see almost every day with new eyes. It turned into an exercise in color, composition, and depth of field and I am very proud of the images that I was able to come up with. Have a look.

A few weeks back the family took a short weekend vacation to Newport Bay. It was nice to get out of town and see something different for a change. I have never been there yet but my favorite brewery, Rogue Brewery, is based there so I know at the very least I was in for some good food and beer. I always bring my camera with me on trips and I was able to take some great shots over the weekend. As a designer I try to find some kind of inspiration in everything I look at and this was no exception. I just love the weathered textures and the typography on the boats. Once again… I was glad I brought my camera.

When I first learned photography, I did so in a dark room. Digital photography was in its infancy and achieving interesting looks was all done in the dark room with chemicals. It smelled so good. There are some really great memories there. One of my favorite ways to create a little visual interest in an otherwise lackluster image was to cross-process the film. This process is when you shoot color slide film and process it as color negative film. The chemical process of each type of film is slightly different and when done incorrectly creates dramatic color and saturation shifts in the images. These color shifts often times create very interesting images. It has been quite some time since I have cross-processed a negative, but it has also been quite some time since I shot an entire roll of film as well.





Photoshop has taken the place of a darkroom for me. It is one of the main tools I use on a daily basis. I do almost all my photo editing there, but while I am on the go and armed only with my iPhone, I like to have the ability to edit and publish images as well. There are a few good apps out there that can take a good image and make it into something just a little more interesting. The two I use the most are the Photoshop Mobile app and the Crossprocess app. Both can take a less than stellar telephone image and turn it into something worth taking note of. The images in this post were all done on the go with the Crossprocess app which you can find out more about here. I will follow this post up with another that focuses on the Photoshop Mobile app as it has way more settings and choices. Both work great…try them for yourself.