jeffrey + upstairsloft

I spent my first “unemployed” week setting up for freelance work to trickle in and I started freelance work that I held off on while I was at Loomis Group. I made great headway, caught up on my RSS feeds and spent quality time with the wifey. It was productive and relaxing.

I also decided to catch up on some design reading. While Rob and I begin to expand Majorminor, I purchased a couple of books to read that will help me bridge the gap between being a full-time designer at an agency to a double full-time life of being a designer and art director at Majorminor and my own freelance work.

Never Sleep, by Andre Andreev and Dan Covert
I’ve been waiting for Never Sleep to come out for a while. I’ve had the two authors under my radar of cool design kids to follow since I was in design school. They’re only a few years older than Rob and me and they are uber talented, graduating from CCA in San Francisco, which I’ve always wanted to attend, working at MTV off air and MTV on air in NYC, to starting their own studio in Brooklyn. See dress code. A year before I graduated design school, I emailed Dan to check out my portfolio. He called me and had great advice and insight to offer. I remember telling him, “Dude… thanks! You should write a book.” I can tell he was smugly smiling at the other end, a few moments of silence passed before he replied, “I am.”

The book chronicles the life of two super talented design folks who know what they want and are still open to life’s surprises. They’re the type who finds inspiration in old school french boudoir photography to grimy ass hip hop. They live, breathe, eat and fcuk design. The book documents their bridge between design school to being design professionals. Their adventure highlights their struggles and successes and helps shed light on some of the issues Rob and I will encounter, and what red flags and green lights to look out for. Two words to describe these cats and their book: real talk.

Copywriting: Successful Writing for Design, Advertising, and Marketing, Mark Shaw
I’ve always been a fan of writing. Not the physical act of writing, but looking at writing. I love the shapes that make up words. I was the kid growing up who always loved staring at other people’s handwriting, flipping through their journals and not to read what they wrote (sometimes) but to geek out at how neat or sloppy their writing is. Something about pages filled with words and letters tickles me. Remember that scene in Se7en when the detectives are flipping through John Doe’s journals? I do. Enough said. I love the pattern of what shapes make to create what the humans calls words. So naturally I fell in love with typography in design school.

After all these years of geeking out over people’s handwriting and letterforms, it was a natural progression that I start to have an affinity for language. This books helps me focus on message for its purpose and sensitizes me to look out for it. It’s a pretty important tool for a designer to have. And well, it’s marketed towards people like me, to help break down and simplifies the structure of writing.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 14th, 2009 at 12:46 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.