Sneak Peek: Indiana University's MFA catalog 2012

One of the nifty opportunities I've come across in my MFA career is the chance to design the catalog for the Henry Radford Hope School of Fine Arts' 2012 MFA class. I presented three ideas to the committee in charge of the publication last week, and based on that meeting, they picked their two favorites. I got the final decision today, and I'm pretty pleased about it.



I recently shared a bushel of sketchpad ideas at Flickr, and this was present in a slightly different form. I don't do a ton of custom letterforms, but as I've been fairly typographically obsessed for the last year or so, many of my better ideas sprung from the sheer pleasure of playing with the letters M, F, A and seeing what interesting shapes I could conjure. Looking back at the last few years, I wanted something that differed quite a bit. In color palette, it's close to what my friend (and graduating MFA) Gatis created two years ago. The big "MFA" staring from the front seems to have my flavor in it. I've been favoring pure, flat color lately, departing from a long period of experimenting with blending modes and textures in photoshop. The typeface accompanying the artwork is U-bahn by Manfred Klein.

Next, I'll be laying out the rest of the book, which is a 10" x 8" landscape format, to be printed by World Arts in nearby Spencer, IN. I'll be sure to share photos of the final product here.

Illustration: Crikey the Turkey Vulture

On my first visit to the Indiana Raptor Center's Nashville HQ, I met Crikey, a turkey vulture. Turkey vultures are some of my favorite birds, so pretty soon I started illustrating her. Part of an ever growing series of birds, dino-birds, and bird-dinos.