If I hadn’t been in a band in the late 90′s that needed to have things like posters made I may be doing something different today. It was that need that made me take on those duties and thus sparked the idea of “Hey I might not be so bad at this.”
But now, if I go back and look at design I did a measly few months ago it’s easy to wonder what I was smoking. That’s why this postcard, which I did in either 1998 or 1999, cracks me up.
Let’s see what’s going on the front here:
Clip Art? Check. Oddball, slightly techy, font? Check. In this case it’s Eurostile. I had quite the affinity for it for a while. Clever ‘joke’ set in Comic Sans? Check.
How about the back?
So it appears that I’ve used 2 more fonts on the back, for a total of 4 for the card. Also notice that there’s not a capital letter in sight. I probably went years without using anything from the uppercase. All in all, just awful.
But hey, at least I was trying. Oh, and the band was The Verna Cannon. It was pretty wimpy.
Even though it might be noon at the flea market and people are already shutting down, if you look there’s always cool stuff to be had. I got this neat RCA Type 77 knock-off for $5.
Does it work?
Eh.. No. The cable was just a long dry mess with a nub at the end. So I took it apart and lots of crusty junk fell out.
A sacrificial cable and some soldering and it’s time to test it out.
All we need now is a test subject
Luckily, Molly is willing and is a great singer and songwriter to boot. Here’s a song of hers called “My Heart’s Not Safe With Yours” recorded with the revived mic.
I talked in the post about the first version of Petridisc that I like using real objects and textures. There are plenty of places online to find those but sometimes you just want to make them yourself. So I did. This is an amp on a scanner.
If you like the looks of that, feel free to download and use them however you want from the link below.
Amp Texture Zip Download (3.7mb)
In February of this year, I decided to do a talk for the local Refresh group here about @font-face.
Although I was familiar with @font-face I hadn’t really tried to put it into production. I entered this project with the hypothesis that it was a great new thing but not ready for prime-time, but after building the site and testing it, I decided that it really is time that we can start using it.
What the heck is a Petridisc?
The word Petridisc is something Molly came up with years ago as a name for our basement recording studio. It’s where we record all of the music for Lunch Money, and up until then I had never gotten around to working up a site. This was the perfect opportunity.
I wanted to make something that was an actual site with real content, while also using some newer HTML5 and CSS3 techniques. I was also trying to avoid using any javascript and applying transitions using things like ‘-webkit-transition’ and ‘-webkit-animation’. This wasn’t out of any aversion to javascript, just more of an exercise. Check it out in Chrome or Safari to see these in effect.
Choosing a font
I decided to use what I thought was a great font, Titillium. It was lightweight and just has a nice shape to it. It turns out it has some issues, mainly rendering between browsers and OSes. But the opportunity to use something besides Helvetica and Georgia was a fun exercise.
Textures
I also am a big fan of using real objects and textures, so all of the background images were created by scanning in this small Danelectro guitar amp.
This version is now moved to the studio page. I plan on keeping this version of the site up in the event I ever want to really start telling people about the studio. If you want to check out my Refresh presentation, it’s up at unmatchedstyle.
