Andy Mangold

My most tangible new years resolution is to begin participating in the “Make Something Cool Every Day” project, wherein I will make something — cool — everyday. The idea is to give myself a break from all manner of projects for 30 minutes to an hour everyday and just make something. I expect to do a lot of lettering (quick sketches turned quickly digital) and hopefully some random editorialey illustrations.

I will be posting these on the internet, and I expect you people to hold me to my resolution.

A few thoughts on ideas and brainstorming to close out the year:

It seems to me pictures have become a much bigger part of the way we communicate these days, largely due to the internet, methinks. Of the 95 RSS feeds I am subscribed to, only two or three ever have the backbone to post content free of pictures, and a solid five or six only post images. While I may agree with the ol’ adage “A picture is worth 1000 words,” I hope people aren’t forgetting how valuable and powerful a word can be.

With this time between semesters comes not a break, but rather a frenzied attempt from me to finish, or at least start, all of the self initiated or otherwise school-unrelated projects I have piled up for myself over the last six months. This means I have been doing a lot of brainstorming recently, and with some reflection I have come to realize that my methods for working through ideas are almost completely based on words. While I think most people sit down and start sketching to hash out ideas, I tend to start writing. (Probably largely due to this exercise from earlier in my education at MICA).

Words hold such power because they are a hot medium, as McLuhan would say. An image is flat and tells the whole story; if it is crisp and in focus, it leaves little to no room for interpretation (of the image itself at least, the “concept” that produced the image is a whole different matter). A word however, is completely unique, not just to other words, but to every individual person. In reality, there are no true synonyms: big, huge, gigantic and massive may be more or less interchangeable, but each evokes a slightly different feeling. I have found these nuanced differences between words to be the best way for me to represent, sort and generate my ideas. Once I have found a set of words, maybe two or three, maybe twenty or thirty, that I think represents the idea I have, the sketching process becomes an investigation into what these words look like, both in and out of context of the words surrounding them. You’d be amazed at the scope and scale of visuals that can spring from something as simple as “What does authenticity look like?”

May your 2010 be even better than your 2009! I have a lot of stuff coming down the pipes, including a lot more activity on this ol’ blog. Stay tuned!

I created this impromptu business card for a good friend’s father, who is currently “transitioning” from his previous job with an oil company to something… sandier. I wish you the best of luck, Tony!

As a young designer, my web presence is an important aspect of my personal branding, my best method of marketing myself, and a strong reflection of the designer I am, or want to be. Since I started putting my work online three years ago, this domain has had six different designs, only three of which I am not completely ashamed of (a good sign I am growing as a designer). Keeping to my unintentionally established six-month website life cycle, I will be redesigning my portfolio and blog for launch sometime in early 2010.

I have been spending the last couple months accumulating bookmarks of portfolio and blog designs that I find to be highly effective, compelling, or interesting for any reason, and I thought I would share my thoughts. These are some of the best websites out there in the portfolio/blogosphere, in my humble opinion.

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I have conducted the first few rounds of interviews and photo shoots for my “Heirloom” project that I am getting pretty excited about. I figured I would post some shots from today’s work in hopes of enticing more of you to participate! THIS COULD BE YOU!

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I spent most of yesterday in the Letterpress Studio making sweet, sweet love to Dolphin Press’s SP20. I printed some calling cards for the lovely Kailie Parrish as well as some post cards from Baltimore, both from polymer plates. I am finally starting to get the hang of this letterpress business, and I must say it is very exciting.

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For the CDP project I am fortunate enough to be a part of this semester, we are tackling injury prevention in the home and must speak to a multi-lingual and otherwise diverse audience. I have been developing some IKEA style diagrams to address specific instances of injury that can occur in the home, and I thought I might post my modest progress thus-far.

I have adopted this gray, genderless, raceless, and more or less ageless character into all of my diagrams and affectionately dubbed him “Nubbins” (inspired by his doughy construction and a particular episode of This American Life).

We are experimenting with Cyrillic in my lettering class with Ken Barber of House Industries this week. We have to make a bilingual hang tag for some manner of plush toy in the spirit of Moomins, Cheburashka, etc. I decided after some sketching to try and handle both the latin and the cyrillic in some super-fat(phat) script lettering reminiscent of a chunky shoelace or some squeezed out toothpaste.

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I have synthesized what little knowledge I have gleaned from studying Flash and Actionscript over the last month into this little educational interaction on the subject of simple machines. Enjoy!

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