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Eat My Words: Transit merch

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

Not only do I ride the bus, I wear the bus. In addition to the Naughty/Nice shirts they kindly donated for our GOOD events last December, the design team at Metro gave me a ton of flair-tastic pins emblazoned with fun illustrations of their fleet (everything from bikes to trains). I try to stick one on when I’m headed out to an event as a way to have a conversation about how I got there. The pins (which you can’t actually buy, but if you want one I’ll give one to you) are one of the many product offerings from the transit authority, and I was lucky enough to do a story about this trend in Print (who just got a fancy new website, congrats!).

picture-5 In addition to the great products being sold by my friends at Metro—including some really beautiful posters by Paul Rogers—you can shop some of the transit shops I talk about in London, New York, Chicago, Washington DC, and even Santa Monica (but you have to visit the actual store). Of all the stores, London has to be the best and most upscale—you can buy everything from wallpaper featuring morning commuters to really lovely china with Modernist landmarks (above)—but that’s no surprise knowing London’s design culture and the fact that the Underground’s been around since practically the beginning of time. Maybe someday we can buy 500 thread-count bedsheets with the Gold Line’s shiny new cars racing across them? A girl can dream.

You can read all about the incredible public transit branding from these cities in my story “Station Agents” [PDF—and a large one at that].

Posted in Print, advertising, designing, riding | Comments

Eat My Words: Lauren Dukoff, shooting star

Thursday, April 16th, 2009

family1 I’m so ridiculously behind in posting some magazine articles for you to read that this shall represent the beginning of a daily blitz of words sure to keep you nourished and informed for at least a week. The first piece I’d like to point you towards is in Print, the perennial National Magazine Award nominee (congrats yet again!) where I’ve covered one of their New Visual Artists: photographer Lauren Dukoff.

I browsed through Lauren’s portfolio before I went to meet with her, which mostly features bare-chested guitar-wielding men with beards the size of raccoons. So I was surprised to be greeted by a city girl in pumps, mascara and ink-black pigtails with a Prada bag slung nearby. She acknowledged that most people are similarly surprised to meet her in person: “I’m not a hippie, I’m a hippie synthesizer,” she laughed.

Hippies

It turned out all those photos in her portfolio of the King of Hippies Devendra Banhart and his merry band of musician friends—Joanna Newsom, Fabrizio Moretti, Isabelle Albuquerque and Jon Beasley—were not part of an assignment, but rather, Lauren’s own charmed existence, having met Banhart in high school. Those shots will be compiled into the book Family, out later this year from Chronicle Books.

Lauren’s easygoing, laugh-out-loud demeanor—and ability to synthesize all personalities, not just hippies—will certainly make her one of the great music photographers of our time; at 24, she’s already shooting people like Mary J. Blige and Adele for Rolling Stone and Spin. “The only downfall to rock’n'roll documentary has been the introduction of the laptop computer,” she told me. Those sexy backstage shots with singers strangling bottles of Jack Daniels? According to Lauren those days are long-gone: Now everyone just abuses their Nintendo Wiimotes. But leave it to Lauren to somehow make those look glamorous, too.

Posted in Print, advertising, creating, writing | Comments

Eat My Words: Print’s Regional Design Annual

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

Long, long ago, when I was hunting down dairy products in the concrete maze of Manhattan, I made a detour to the offices of Print for a day to help curate the magazine’s Regional Design Annual. I was responsible for the introduction to the Far West, which includes the Californias (north and south), the Northwest, and Rest of the West, which is everything west of Colorado’s eastern edge, including Alaska and Hawaii. (Don’t tell the other writers but the Print editors entrusted me with what is by far the largest geographic area in the annual.)

Watching how the awards process works was eye-opening (or perhaps Eye opening), to say the least. It involves the recycling bin far more than any other tool you can find in the office. But there was something remarkable about seeing all the work from the same region stacked and sorted together. Especially for me, being able to see, say, all the work from Los Angeles, whittled down into this tabletop and then some, and then being able to watch the same colors and patterns spill out from one piece onto another. You could watch one trend ripple west from Eagle Rock and another float north from Costa Mesa. And that made me really excited. Because even though you’d think we’re all operating in isolation, plugged directly into this world wide web, this was proof that the process of relating to where you live and knowing who you work near is very much intact. I could actually see that sense of community.

But one thing I will tell you is that judging design work is no cakewalk. We were on our feet, squinting at 6-point copy, holding people’s fates in our hands for eight hours straight (don’t worry, we were allowed to eat, but only uncooked fish). It was so excruciating, Print’s stylish creative director Kristina DiMatteo had to change her footwear to meet the strenuous demands of the day. I, of course, was wearing my TOMS.

Posted in Print, advertising, crafting, creating, designing | Comments

Eat My Words: Women in the City

Thursday, March 20th, 2008

If you’re in LA, you still have a week or two to participate in a very special treasure hunt that you might have already been participating in without even knowing it. The exhibition Women in the City dropped more than 50 large-scale public art projects around Los Angeles last month that blended in to the urban landscape so well, you might have simply dismissed one as yet another paid-for message competing for your attention.

I wrote a piece for Print about the exhibition and its adorable Italian curator, Emi Fontana, who was delighted when I suggested people pretend it’s a treasure hunt, complete with maps to help you find the art. A quick walk around Hollywood & Highland will give you a nice sampling, and if you’re driving down Sunset or Wilshire and know where to look, you’re in for a particularly hilarious show.

Of the pieces—which are by Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler and Cindy Sherman—the ones by Holzer are my favorite, simply because they mimic the text-heavy mediums they appear in so well. In addition to her famous Truisms posted in places like the marquee on the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel (above), she created wild-postings of her Inflammatory Essays (right) that got pasted over construction sites and put up in coffeeshops. They are hilarious and terrifying and just to make sure that even more people could puzzle over the meaning of these bizarre rants, they were even translated into Spanish.

Besides the reactions I observed when reporting the story, I didn’t hear much more buzz from people wondering what these were. Maybe we’re so used to seeing wacked-out messages around town that a video billboard telling us to stop texting while driving doesn’t even faze us? Curbed LA reported that a “hooligan—or a smart art collector” snatched the Holzer piece on the side of the Standard Downtown, but then a commenter claimed they saw workers taking it down. At any rate, it’s back up now, so read my piece and go find it!

Thanks to the fine people at Print (who were just nominated for an American Society of Magazine Editors award, woohoo!) and also to Melissa Goldberg at the very busy ForYourArt.

Posted in Print, advertising, creating, designing | Comments