[design] Return To OryCon: The OryCon 37 Souvenir Program

3446.

I return to revisiting my program design work for OryCon with the design for OryCon 37. Coming away from its dark period, I re-entered the fray with a con that had a SF, adventure-y feel: The Quest For The Ultimate Artifact.

Tanya Huff was the Author GoH, and Alan M. Clark was the Artist GoH. As anyone who's seen Alan's work weill recognize, there's an atmospheric quality to it as he lets some of his materials play a chaos game in the background while he lets intelligence guide the foreground. The combination usually imparts a near-incomparable air of mystery to all his works, be they SF, horror, fantasy, or anything else he does.

The cover illustration, Buckets of Bad Weather, is a thing to get lost in:

The steampunk-y construction is inscrutable, it keeps its own counsel; it appears to be siphoning something off and sending it somewhere else, but while it's guessable, it's unclear what or where or why. It may be an unwelcome thing, taking from the local environment but giving little or nothing in return, and you might think otherwise, but the title has a sinister note to it. Also, it seems rather ancient; the parchment revealed seems to imply that but it, like the construction, holds its secrets well.

The portrait of Alan illustrates the sense of mystery, stress, wonder, and tension which seems to be his main art materials.

The idea of a quest inspired me to find a "Raiders of the Lost Ark" style font, and that may seem an uninspired, perhaps even lazy choice, but the type used for that movie is a brand that connotes intriguing, mind-expanding, crazy and just-dangerous-enough-to-be-interesting exploration. The Creation Station people really went to the wall with that one.

It's an example of type supporting the message, and again, the type and the art merged to create an atmosphere and feeling for the rest of the book.

[art, design] Forward Into The Past With John Muir's "Idiot's Guide"

3329.

Before there were "Idiot's Guide"s and "For Dummies" books, there was "The Idiot's Guide."

The Idiot's Guide. Classic VW owners know and love this well.

Back in the 60's, see, the VW was more truly lived up to its name "the People's Car", becoming a badge to the hippie culture as much as owning a Subaru strongly suggests one lives in Portland. Being an automobile, of course, the array of end-user maintenance options are more or less like they are today ... take it to a mechanic, take it to the dealer.

You could also fix it yourself, if you knew how. Not so much today; the engine in the modern car is more like a computer center; sometimes you feel if you so much as look at it, you void the warranty. But back then, the shade-tree mechanic was a valid functionality, and if you knew enough about your beast, you too could fix your own prime mover. And nowhere was this more true or accessible than with the classic VWs of the 60s and 70s, before the brand went uptown and yupscale.

The 'hippie' ethic deserves a close, hard look. One side of it was the casual, come-as-you-are-lifestyle, which may or may not have something to teach the individual assayer; the other side was a quick-witted, nimble DIY intelligence that coped with maintenance and repair with a cool, fierce aplomb that MacGyver would value. The properly-enlightened hippie only looked like a generally feckless will'o'the wisp; inside, he or she hid a savvy systems thinker that would slog courageously through lows that would leave most of the rest of us curled up in a foetal ball, crying softly over the wreck of our life.

This brings us to John Muir, who is a legend amongst classic VW lovers. And thence hangs our tale.

The legend of John Muir, 60s counter culture auto mechanic, runs something along these lines; a distant relative of the namesake American naturalist, he worked in the American defense industry during the Fail Safe/Dr. Strangelove days of the Cold War, until he'd had enough of it and decided to drop out. In the late 1960s, he moved to Taos, New Mexico and became a VW mechanic. I don't know if he intended to become the best there ever was, but his legacy certainly suggests that.

In 1969, Muir, Tosh Gregg, and artist Peter Aschwanden collaborated to create a timeless and valuable bit of 60s magic and a book for the ages. Fully titled How To Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual Of Step by Step Procedures For The Compleat Idiot, and known by lovers of the book and the car as simply The Idiot's Guide, the book is indeed a timeless gem. Right, the reader will find the cover of the copy I own. It is as compleat a manual of how-to-maintain it as the idiot it is intended for, but an idiot, it will not treat you as. As you are not an idiot. It will not treat you. It won't make fun of you, is what I'm saying.

It's so steeped in the 60s self-reliant hippie-esque counterculture, it's surprising it doesn't come tie-dyed and with scratch'n'sniff patchouli. The impression is that of a crunchy friend guiding you through a difficult subject with love. At the top of the section "ENGINE OVERHAUL",  for example, I find this tale of wisdom:

"Back in the Red Dog Saloon era, there was a garage in Carson City run by a sympathetic super mechanic named Muldoon. When you were pushed into Muldoon's, he looked and listened to your sick engine, asked how far you needed to go and how much bread you had, then he nodded and showed you where you could work on your engine out back. When you ran into problems, he left his profitable highway trade to give you a hand. You made it to where you needed to go, but God help you if you tried to go fifty miles further. We tell you about Muldoon because he has the type of genius an indigent VW owner needs when it comes to emergency time - the ability to balance the available bread and labor agains the immediate mileage requirement. 

In an emergency, the Volkswagen reacts well to any scrambling on your part to keep it going, but you really have to keep your promises to it. Muldoon's last words as you drove away where, "Don't forget to get that fixed right when you get there." You're on the road from New York to L.A., seventy-five bucks is all you got, you're near Santa Fe running on three cylinders with an engine that's overheating badly - like that. Don't give up and thumb, but do a compression check. 95 pounds in three cylinders, but No. 3 tests zero? Sounds like a burned valve, so find a place and go to work. Pull the engine, take off the tin, remove the heads and carry them to the machine shop (do both heads even if you go hungry the rest of the trip). Have the valves ground and a new valve put in. Reassemble and install the engine and you can probably make it to L.A. I figure a little over a penny a mile for the Bug and a cent and a helf for the Bus for gas and oil."

Adjusting the costs in the narrative for inflation to the current day is an exercise left to the reader, and I wish you well. But do you see what the above did there? Not only is it a capsule of a time, but it's casual-yet-witty prose both evoke that time, provide you with a single memorable character, and deliver a bit of technical know-how, illustrating what I meant when I said that the core of a hippie is a systems-oriented DIY problem-solver.

It's hard not to kind of fall in love with this book, whether or not you actually have or hope to have a classic VW, it's fun to read, and enlightens as it takes you under its kindly wing.

That's not to say it's all laid back tale-reeling. Muir was trained as an engineer, and the procedures, while warmly worded, are actually quite precise and methodical. Reading this book will teach you many of the fundamentals of how works a VW, but it focuses on two essential functions that every mechanic must fulfill: diagnosis and cure. The book is organized into sections simply titled by manifest symptom (RED LIGHT ON! (Generator or alternator), GREEN LIGHT ON! (Oil Red light), VOLKSWAGEN DOESN'T STOP (Brakes), and SLIPS AND JERKS (Clutch) are just a few), and each procedure identifies itself to you in language that is accessible to the tyro.

What really pops in this book is art, though. Peter Aschwanden illustrated technical details with whimsy and seems straight out of the Underground Comix school; he's what R. Crumb would have been if he did illos for auto manuals. The art (excerpted here and there in this article) are gorgeous, witty things, clearly drawn. I've used this book to diagnose electrical problems in the late Red Beetle, and I'm, if anything, mechancially declined. There's clarity and humor there, and the satisfaction that is naturally derived from seeing the work of an artist who was in solid command of his medium and his tools, and who loved his work and his subject. If Muir and Tosh got the 60s DIY ideal of owning a VW, Aschwanden (credited at one point in the book with his nom-de-guerre, Amanda B. Reckonedwith) similarly got the gestalt idea of the serious whimsy which comes with the ownership of the classic VW (which wasn't actually a classic in the full sense, yet).

You can still come by this book; sadly, both Aschwanden and Muir are no longer with us (Muir died of a brain tumor in 1977 at age 58, Aschwanden made it to 2005, and died aged 63. Even John Muir Publications is a thing of the past, his works still being published but The Idiot's Guide now belonging to Avalon Travel Publishers and The Velvet Monkeywrench, his socio-political manifesto and proposal, being published by Oceantree Books.

My particular copy is the 1981 edition, and was given to my by the legendary east Portland VW mechanic, Bill Trafton. If you knew Trafton and his generosity and his gift with VWs, you'd know that he was the equal of Muldoon, and why I consider the book such a treasure.

Even in a 35-year-old copy, it's as current as it needs to be.

It's a love letter to the best car every made, a book that everyone who loves a classic VW should have - even if you don't plan on touching the insides. It'll make you an enlightened owner, and is just damned good fun to read.

[pdx] Portlandness Is The Atlas Portland Needed.

3316.

There's a section, near the front of the book Portlandness: A Cultural Atlas, (David Banis and Hunter Shobe, $24.95, Sasquatch Books, www.sasquatchbooks.com) which tries to define just what 'Portlandness' is, and then goes on to illustrate just where that Portlandness is thickest. In it, the book's authors, faculty in the Geography department at Portland State University, surveyed students in one of their courses to find out what qualities define life in Portland. The list of answers were largely what one would expect – things like green energy use, breweries, liberal politics, food carts – and they then related these qualities to things that could be measured via GIS and then, plotted the density of these qualities individually and then combined them all into an infographic that illustrated the combined density of all these statistics. 

The results  come off as one might expect: the more you go toward the center of Portland, the more Portland Portland is. Or maybe the more Portlandia. And the assaying is a valuable thing, because it represents a moment in time for Portland, one which our hometown has gone from adorable regional town to the west-coast's 'It Girl'. 

Latterly, Portland has become painfully fashionable and the subject of a national love affair which, if it may be levelling off, shows little sign of abatement very soon, for better … or for worse. Is there a Portland state-of-mind? Is there a way to objectively look at  that peculiar state of being that seems to be Portland and, here in the 2010's, and lay it all out for you, comprehendably? If there is, Portlandness: A Cultural Atlas  comes as close as anything can at the moment ... a witty, earnest look at what it means to be Portland right here, right now

Portland, for all its reputation and buzz, is still on a cusp of sorts. We're still at a place in the national consciousness where we can get either even more popular or pass the crown of the new cool on to another city (sorry, in advance, new city, if we do). But we weren't always this way. There is a story, a context, to how Portland is now and what that's made up of. Portlandness tries to tell that story, as it is now. If 'Portlandness' is a thing, this atlas does its best to describe it as it finds it. In the first part, as mentioned above, it tries to quantify that. 

Portlandness is divided into seven sections, after the introduction which sets the Rose City into a Cascadian context, which group maps and infographics according to overarcing themes: Urban Landscapes, The Once and Future City, Wildness, Views of the City, Social Relations, Food and Drink, and Popular Culture. Amongst them, there's scarcely a base that hasn't been touched, from historic street names to the hauntedness level of various areas of town; one map that combines all the historic plans of how Portland could have grown into one clear-yet-detailed graphic that makes you think of what may have been; the geography of the invisibility of our city's homeless; the interface between the coyotes of Portland and its chickens; a comic on geek culture and its spatiality; another demonstrating how far one is from the nearest indie coffee shop and plots that against Starbucks; a set of set tables demonstrating how long you're going to be waiting for that food at the Screen Door cafe; Chinatown then, and now; the evolution of the Guilds Lake area; a sorely-needed 2-page spread on how the city's annexations have created its shape (my favorite); soccer culture (would you ever doubt? - there's even a set of diagrams showing the loudness levels of various sections of Providence Park during a Timbers/Sounders match), even the story of Maywood Park. One section relates how children see the city, another composites how a group of students in a PSU course made mental maps of the town, characterizing it with their impressions. There's even a map of downtown that shows you the route you must take if you wish to be surveilled by the fewest cameras. And it even tries to answer the question does Portland have more strip clubs per capita than anyone else, making smart side-stop at the reason why that would be.

The design is a tight, disciplined, visually delightful thing, which herds all these infographic cats into something with a grand sense of order. Typography is beautiful, and the infographics are well-done and diagrams you can get lost in. By starting with a strong introduction (which even compares the Portland of Oregon to the Portland of Maine and finds more similarities than you might think) to give a regional setting and context, this book goes beyond mere interesting (and well-designed) fact presentation via infographics and does what a solid reference atlas should do … behave as a snapshot of a moment in time of an important time in the story of the place that is Portland. 

This is a fine book that I really can't put down for long, and anyone who loves, is intrigued by, aggravated by, or loves from afar Oregon's biggest town really should find a space on their shelf for it. 

The Portland of 2015 is a curious thing. Portlandness: A Cultural Atlas is the atlas Portland needs for this time. I'm kind of hoping that the authors decide to do a 2nd edition sometime down the road. 

The comparison would be epic.

Portlandness: A Cultural Atlas, (David Banis and Hunter Shobe, $24.95, Sasquatch Books) is available via Sasquatch's website (http://www.sasquatchbooks.com/book/?isbn=9781632170002&portlandness-by-david-banis), which also has links to other places you can purchase the work.

[design] Dept of "You Had ONE Job, Designer!" Dept.

3000.

Yes, friends, this is post number three thousand. Celebrate, yay, streamers, party favors, okay, all that, now back to the show.

A couple weeks back I checked out, from the mighty Multnomah County Library, the Artists and Graphic Designers Market 2014. This is part of my middle-term plan to restart my art career. Truly necessary, this book is, if there's a place worth selling to, it's in there and there are some articles about career strategy and tactics. Also … look! … a free one-year's ride on the publication's website! Such a deal!

This is the front of the book:

The premium is located on a card inside the front cover. So, remembering that this was designed by designers and laid out by layouters, let's turn to inside the front cover to find …

D'oh!

I'll be that was one awkward meeting, after these books came in.

No, I didn't take the free year. I'm snarky, but I'm not shady.

[design] Books We'd Like To See: I Am Not Claudius, By Derek Jacobi

2703.Of course, the character Claudius never was as big for Jacobi as the signature character of the inspiration of this photoshoppery:

[graphic design] Harlan Ellison, The 70s, The Dillons, and Classic Paperback Cover Design

2162.The 1970s stood at a peculiar place in style and design. The sensibility of the Summer of Love was coming right up against the comparative Sobriety of the Nixon years. It was a curious time for design; as I remember it, if you wanted a certain worldview, all you had to do was find a suitable graphic treatment, one which appealed to your aesthetic sense, and it led you right into you wanted to know.

Harlan Ellison was one of the hottest members of what some critics call science fiction's New Wave, and had a reputation for taking on things in his stories in a very unafraid way. I think people regarded him as iconoclastic and some of the covers to his books seemed to be designed to take advantage of that (I have some training in marketing. Yeah, it kind of messes you up for life).

During this period, Pyramid Books released a series called the Pyramid Uniform series, which was designed to take advantage of the author's "brand" perception. This is one from Harlan's Memos From Purgatory:

View bigly at Posterous

This became a template for other designs. Notable here is the author's name in a distinctive, designed type which, in it's curves, evokes Hobo, and seems to echo psychedelia style. Each book in the series was numbered as part of the series, and featured the volume number as a numeral replacing the counter in the O in ELLISON.

The illustrations were created by a famous American illustrative partnership, Leo & Diane Dillon. Two-time winners of the Caldecott Medal, they produced many SF Cover illustrations during the 60s, 70s, and 80s, and are still active in children's book illustrating to this day. The artists, personal favorites of Ellison, had a talent for distilling the mix of wonder, hope, disquiet and dread as well as delight that one typically finds in reading Ellison's stories into a illustration that represents the essence of the work in ways both indirect and obvious. The perception that must be involved to do this kind of staggers the mind.

Another feature of the Pyramid series is that the illustration has a hidden picture of the author embedded. In the one above, it's probably obvious. In this one, for the collection Partners in Wonder:

Embiggen at Posterous

There appears to be a face in the middle of the amazingly-layered and evocative illustration, which doesn't really look like Harlan, although the hair-part is on the correct side. The use of the word "dyn-O-mite" in the cover blurb is charmingly dated, but the design sense overall remains timeless because it's such a strong one.

The last one I have here isn't from the Pyramid series; it was published by Signet in 1974. Harlan Ellison's Approaching Oblivion is, withought a doubt, one of my favorite books by anyone anywhere. It even includes a witty foreward by Michael Crichton (this was back when he still had something to say and wasn't guaranteed eighty gazillion dollars just for getting out of bed and turning on his computer). The illustration, again by the Dillons, captures the sense of wonder, hope, apprehension, and dark joy I got from reading it. It opened up this big wide lens on the world to me that showed both the good and the bad, and somehow, the cover illo displays this emotionally to me:

Get up close and personal at Posterous

It evokes the cover of the original SF Book club edition, but is in brilliant color rather than monochome, with this neat, meaty type that I rather enjoy. I dont know per se if Harlan's face is hidden in there: there's several faces, and at least two of them might be him, but pareidolia is a tricky, tricky thing (just ask anyone who still thinks there's a face on Mars).

All for now …

Technorati Tags: Harlan Ellison, Leo & Diane Dillon, The Dillons, Signet Books, Pyramid Books, Memos From Purgatory, Approaching Oblivion, Partners In Wonder, Science Fiction