Brain Box

I've been working on the branding for a new pizza shop my buddy Brian Dwyer is opening up on Frankford Ave next year. Right now the shop is still in the planning and construction phase. So Brian and my roommate Auston, who's one of the chefs, have been cooking up pies and delivering them to small businesses in the neighborhood to get an idea of what people are thinking. So for fun Brian got ahold of a bunch of blank delivery boxes and we spray-painted the logo onto them with a stencil I made based off the logo. When the store opens in 2012 the logo and the branding will look much different, but for now, while everything is in the preliminary stages this DIY style is much more fitting.

If you haven't heard about Pizza Brain and you live in Philadelphia, I don't know know what you've been paying but it certainly hasn't been attention. The long and short of it is that Pizza Brain is an artisan pie that celebrates pizza as a food and pizza in pop culture. It also boasts the Guinness Record for "World's Largest Collection of Pizza Related Items."

Wild Implementing!

Yo, I never expected the Melting Bart with Diamonds that I drew earlier this summer to be used quite like this. Brain and Joel printed out a giant 5 foot tall, full-color copy and then rigged it to light up. This was all for their downstairs debut of Wildstyle at The Barbary. You can see in the image that they even made a huge backdrop of the logo to sit behind the DJ booth and then flanked the whole thing with back-lit, hole-punched boards. They really went all out. I wish I could have been there to see when all these great materials premiered a couple weeks ago. But I was in Ohio with my girlfriend, Brittany, salivating over the photos on Facebook from the night prior. They certainly took my images a step further than I could have ever dreamed. My hat's off to them.

The Streets Are Dangerous

This got posted on the Streets Dept blog last week. I gotta admit that I was pretty proud to see some of my work get the little attention it did. The truth is that I didn't even go out and do this. This vandalism was the work of Brian Dwyer and Joel Evey as part of a promotion for the DJ night at the Barbary.

Burger Zing!

Oddly enough my roommate, Ethan, and I both had a sudden hankering for Burger King last night. He had just eaten there while on a road trip to Chicago and had discovered some tasty burger with A1 sauce and fried something-or-others on top that he really wanted to try again. And I had been going through old iPhone photos earlier in the day and had been admiring a picture I took of their new bag earlier this summer while I was on out on tour. I really love this image; the symmetry, the rounded lines, the perspective. I just think its really cool. And apparently very enticing too, 'cause it made me want to drive 2.2 miles to the nearest Burger King in a city that offers some really tremendous food options.

"You know you can get a refill on any drink you want? It's a great restaurant!"

That's What's Up? That's What's Up!

Two weeks ago my buddy, Brian and I, got together to work on a flyer for a new party he's DJ at The Barbary here in Philly on Saturday nights called "That's What's Up!" Brian had this picture of Daryl Hall & John Oates from 1984 that he wanted to use and just make it say "That's What's Up!" instead of "Daryl Hall" and "John Oates." So I took it into Photoshop, did a little cropping, a little touching up, lassoed this, clone stamped, used Illustrator to try and mimic the type, and then added a couple flourishes of my own and it was done in a couple hours. The type was really the trickiest part. I don't think its anywhere nearly as striking as the original. I think that those specific number of letterforms in "Hall" and "Oates" are what make the original really work so well.

And even though most of the elements were already found in the original image Brian gave me. I was easily able to completely re-create them from scratch when I did this second image.
This was a quick, fun project for a Monday and DJ Def Janiels (Brian Dwyer) and DJ Hulk Hoagie (Daniel Pilger) really do an awesome DJ set together. It's a great mix of Hip-Hop, Soul, R&B, and funk. I don't even go to these sorts of things and I had a blast. Check out "That's What's Up!" every Saturday night upstairs at the Barbary (Barbarella).

Nina Shares The Blues

Last night, my roomate, Josh and I sat down and watched Nina Paley's wonderfully vibrant, beautiful and free-to-download animated feature "Sita Sings the Blues."


"Sita Sings the Blues" is a retelling of the Hindu epic "The Ramayana" and focuses on the story Sita, the wife of the deity prince, Rama. A story Nina Paley calls "the greatest break-up story ever told." For one reason or another Sita is removed from or rejected by her husband. Somehow, through it all Sita's love for Rama is undying.

To help tell Sita's story Nina uses songs by the 1920's jazz singer, Annette Hanshaw; songs she believed to be public domain. However, Congress had retroactively extended the songs copyrights and to as a result she ran into a plethora of legal issues and fees.

This lead Nina to release the film on the internet for free under the Creative Commons license. Below is a short 16 minute documentary on Paley, her film, and the Creative Commons license. It's pretty inspiring stuff, I think.



YOU CAN WATCH THE WHOLE FILM HERE.
Also don't forget to donate and support the artist.

The Map

My good friend, Michael P. Heneghan, and I were recently worked on designing the layout for The 2010 Map for Circle of Hope. The Map is basically a list of statements and goals that the community makes for itself to in the next year. It then gets printed up and distributed amongst the attendees and associates of the church. But like most of Circle's printed material it suffered from boring, unfocused layout.

So Joshua Grace, one of the church's pastors, came to Heneghan and I and set up a meeting to talk about ways to reinvent the look and feel of The Map. We looked at the The 2009 and pretty much threw all of its ideas out the door. It was basically your standard pamphlet; and two 8.5x11 inch pieces of paper folded in half with one placed inside the other.

So Joshua threw out his ideas for a booklet type layout instead of brochure, Heneghan put in his thoughts about a nautical theme and how he'd do the illustrations, and I just sort of sipped on cups of coffee and tried to mentally process how it was all gonna be put down on paper. I think I said something about the importance of typefaces hierarchies, I dunno.

We had a couple weeks to work on it but Heneghan and I really just sort of busted it out in the last couple days before it went to print. They were going to be presented at Circle of Hope's quarterly multi-congregational party, The Love Feast, so we had a pretty hard deadline. Kudos to Heneghan (and Daniel Pilger) who actually had to physically cut out and staple all the booklets together. I was out of town that weekend so I couldn't be there to help.

It was a real collaborative effort (Joshua, Heneghan, and myself) and I haven't really done a lot of those since my time at film school ended in '06. We strengthened each other and made a better piece as a result. And if that's not a metaphor for relationship, community, and life then I don't know what is.