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.

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 created a micro-site to house my modular type experimentation. It is nothing ground-breaking, but I think it is successful. Check it: modulartype.andymangold.com

I am in the midst of creating a modular letter set; our first assignment with House Industies‘ Ben Kiel. This is simply a skeleton I have created to construct the alphabet with as few pieces as possible. Now, I am actually planning on putting this into Flash, creating a symbol in the library for each module, and then editing the individual modules one at a time and watching how they affect the entire alphabet. Hopefully with this process I can create a unique, balanced, and dynamic letter set.

Perhaps I will look into an interesting way to publish the dynamic Flash file, allowing other folks to create their own modules and plug them into the skeleton I have made. Let me know which of the multiple/alternative letter forms are most successful? Let me know in the comments.

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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I got lots of feedback on the “Fat Script: An Exploration in Cyrillic and Latin Script” post from yesterday concerning the legibility of my Cyrillic. (Special thanks to Robin, Colin, Alexey, Ken, and the internet) Hence, I have updated the script to hopefully be more legible. The old is on top and the new is on the bottom; let me know!

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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Soooooooooo for my Experimental Lettering course we had to expand on our monogram/cipher sketches from last week and apply the finalized design to some medium. I chose to create a letterpress wood block I can use on any typesetting things I tackle in the future. So, I got up real early on Saturday, went down to the wood shop, cut a piece of wood to the perfect size, went over to the lasercutter/etcher and waited my turn in line, and etched the design into the end grain of the block. The result was this:

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