May might be my favorite month of this project. I cut, stamped, folded, doodled, stitched, photographed, experimented and played. This month’s group really shows the variety of my interest and the range of ideas I was experimenting with. I really enjoyed letting myself explore and see how far I could push these concepts.
I particularly like the theme of mail and stamps I had going on, and the photographs of the crumpled lined paper. I borrowed Lisa Congdon’s Collection a Day idea, and photographed some of my own collections while I was visiting my parents in Massachusetts for a weekend, which I also really enjoy.
May 1: Pen and ink doodling.
May 2: A snake sheds its skin to allow for new growth. It hides while molting and goes temporally blind. The beautiful talk I heard by Elle Luna at MoxieCon has me thinking quite a bit. Along the process of ‘Finding Your Must,’ one must take the leap.
May 3: Some more notebook doodling.
May 4: Saw an interesting sign today that used a mix of weights, so I thought I’d try it as well.
May 5: Some nonsense incorporating yesterdays design.
May 6: Tonight I am playing with paper. I wove together this little thank you note from a couple of monoprints I made earlier this year.
May 7: Looking at postage label designs.
May 8: What a difference fonts and hierarchy make.
May 9: Some little cards.
May 10: Noticed I had a sort of mail theme going on, so I though I should finish off the week with another related post.
May 11: Cleared off my bulletin board and made this A using tacks and string.
May 12: Xerox gelatin monoprints.
May 13: Crumpled lined paper experiment.
May 14: Some nonsense using yesterdays photographs.
May 15: I pulled elements from various designs encountered today and this is what happened.
May 16: These lines just keep getting better and better. Today I cut one of the pages into strips and played with it on my photocopier; this is what emerged.
May 17: I continue to enjoy these linear elements.
May 18: Embroidering the beautiful F37 Bella lowercase g.
May 19: Finished the outline of my embroidered F37 Bella g and have decided that I liked it better as a simple running stitch.
May 20: I’ve always had my eye on the librarian’s date stamp. Today I bought my own.
May 21: More fun with stamps.
May 22: Random label sketches created using my little movable type stamp and some May design elements.
May 23: Doodling at the airport bar. Heading back to Mass for a long weekend.
May 24: This is sort of what I had in mind when sketching yesterday at the airport.
May 25: Borrowing Lisa Congdon’s Collection a Day idea, I plan to shoot some of my own this weekend. Shown here is a very small sample of my keychain collection: favorites and best design/typography.
May 26: Miscellaneous pins.
May 27: Childhood buttons that I’ve held onto over the years.
May 28: Pins still on their original packaging. It was interesting to sift through these over the weekend. I found some designs that were simple and beautiful, carefully thought out and well executed, and many others that varied in quality and design.
May 29: I saw these numbers on a clock in an episode of American Pickers that I was watching with my dad over the weekend — have been thinking about them ever since.
May 30: I printed out the alphabet in some of my favorite fonts to hang around my desk at work and started to notice beautiful little subtleties in certain characters. Shown here are some favorite Gill and Bella features. The slant of the lowercase t, how the serifs of the lowercase w overlap, the smooth loops of the 8, etc.
May 31: This is an idea I was working on for an app of sorts, but I’m not really feelin’ it. I like the wordmark, specifically how the space between tx make an arrow, but also how the slant of the second t relates to the x.
June 1: Still not really sure why, but I’m not quite diggin’ this idea yet. (Thought I'd include June 1 here as it kind of goes along with May 31's idea.)