REQUIRED READING
The last time STEP checked in with our 2006 Emerging Talent alumni Andre Andreev and Dan Covert, the two had launched dress code, their New York-based graphic design partnership, on top of their day jobs at MTV. But as Andreev and Covert left MTV last June to focus exclusively on their fledgling firm, they pondered a puzzling question: Where were all the books to help young designers like them get started in the real world? "Coming out of school, we found there was little material on getting a job and the transition to professional practice," says Andreev."Yeah, and the stuff that was out there was pretty boring or outdated," says Covert. So they took it upon themselves to make one.

Partnering with the publishing house of yet another STEP Emerging Talent alumnus, Giorgio Baravalle (2007), Andreev and Covert have written and designed Never Sleep: Graduating to Graphic Design. Chronicling their journey to founding their own firm, Andreev and Covert lay the foundation for an inspirational and often quite humorous story of two determined young designers who seem to have discovered a fast track to professional success. The narrative covers the basics-interviewing, interning, building a portfolio and the balance of life versus computer-but they then solicited essays from their mentors, from Michael Vanderbyl to Eric Heiman, to round out a roster of sturdy, time-tested advice. Now that they're experts on the subject, what do they think is the most important thing for design graduates to remember? "Keep knocking and the door will open," answers Andreev, while Covert says, predictably, "Never sleep."
www.neversleepbook.com

LESSONS LEARNED
Anyone who’s seen Stefan Sagmeister speak during the last few years knows the story: In 1999, he took a sabbatical he named “a year without clients.” Pulling quotes from a diary kept since he was 14, he assembled a definitive list of 100 phrases that have guided his life and began illustrating them in various works of art, from letters stretched in electrical tape on a chain-link fence, to a regenerating digital spider web that “hung” in a gallery, to signs held while dangling out of a building in Manhattan (nearly getting arrested in the process). The book Things I Have Learned In My Life, So Far (Harry D. Abrams) gathers these extraordinarily beautiful pieces together for the first time, and a new site-specific installation at the Wolfsonian in Miami brought Sagmeister’s words to life during Art Basel Miami Beach in December 2007. For the latter event, inflatable monkeys adorned the Wolfsonian, brandishing the phrase “Everybody always thinks they are right.” Inside, the bar held another message, as martini glasses declared “Low expectations” while swizzle sticks continued the thought with the words “are a good strategy.” Invitations for the opening included Sagmeister’s 100 phrases rendered in a surprising medium: printed on a chocolate bar.
www.hnabooks.com, www.wolfsonian.org

STRETCHING BOUNDARIES
“Designers have the ability to grasp momentous changes in technology, science and social mores and to convert them into objects and ideas that people can understand and use,” writes Museum of Modern Art curator Paola Antonelli in her introduction for the upcoming exhibition Design and the Elastic Mind. This ambitious show hopes to illustrate designers’ new roles as change agents in a rapidly transforming society, with 200 examples that go far beyond simple problem solving. From biomimetic solutions such as the Aqua_ray Robot or Powered Ankle-Foot Prosthesis that render impersonal, cold technology into beautifully lifelike objects, to web-based applications like gmap-pedometer.com (which mashes Google Maps into more usable information), to presenting a revolutionary concept like Biojewellry (rings fashioned from human tissue), Design and the Elastic Mind will focus on how design can bring possibilities to life. While the exhibition explores the relationship between design and science, it truly focuses on the ways that design reaches people. Feb. 24– May 12, 2008.
www.moma.org

SCARY GOOD
Designer and illustrator Stefan G. Bucher has always loved the satisfaction that finishing a drawing gives him, but he wanted a way to share that process with a larger audience. On Nov. 17, 2006, Bucher sat down at his desk, spattered a bit of ink on a piece of paper and filmed the process as he transformed that blot into an illustrated monster. He did this once a day for 100 days, posting them on his blog, DailyMonster.com. After the 100 days, Bucher realized his growing fan base wanted to play along, so he began presenting ink blots for his readers to transform into their own monsters. The response was overwhelming, and Bucher now gets monster contributions from all over the world. Come February, his 100 Days of Monsters (HOW Design) will also become a book, giving Bucher the opportunity to share his passion with an even wider audience. “It just goes to show you,” he says, “if you simply do something that’s fun and important to you—and if you do it with love and sincerity—there will be people who connect with what you’re doing.”
www.dailymonster.com

TYPE OF DAY
A good desk calendar plays two roles: providing the correct day and date (of course) and delivering a worthy daily meditation, however brief it may be. As the new year rolls on, designers have no better way to reflect on the significance and evolution of typography than with the 2008 Pentagram Classic Typographic Calendar, designed annually by Pentagram partner Kit Hinrichs. This year, 12 months of type focus on Matthew Carter, who worked with Pentagram’s original partners in Britain back during the 1960s. Carter not only founded the legendary Bitstream foundry, he has also been the creator of ubiquitous fonts that most Americans use every single day, from Bell Centennial (the phone book) to Verdana (the computer monitor) to Miller (The New York Times). A daily dose of Carter’s work every morning might very well make you notice how many other places his fonts pop up. A super-size 33 x 22-in. version ($36) is suitable for wall-hanging; a smaller 18 x 12-in. version ($22) is ideal for the desk.
www.kenknight.com

SEPARATED AT BIRTH
Sixty-nine-year-old Ed Fella took his commercial art career into the realms of illustration, photography and typographic art, while 36-year-old Geoff McFetridge has spun traditional graphic design work into a series of commercial projects like skateboards, toys and music videos. But in their respective creative pursuits, Fella and McFetridge succeeded in forever blurring the line between graphic design and art. Their paths intersected at the California Institute of the Arts, where Fella has taught for over 20 years and McFetridge earned his MFA in graphic design. A professor at CalArts, graphic designer Michael Worthington, recognized the value of exploring the similarities between the two, organizing Two Lines Align: Drawing and Graphic Design by Ed Fella and Geoff McFetridge. The exhibition, at L.A.’s REDCAT gallery, illustrates the intertwining styles of these two stars, who are sometimes uncanny in their similarities—even in pieces created decades apart. In all, it’s a testament to two very different artists’ enduring ability to cultivate new audiences for graphic design. Feb. 21–April 6, 2008.
www.redcat.org

INTERACTIVE ACTIVITY
The annual South by Southwest festival held in Austin, Texas, essentially relocates the creative center of the country to this college town every March with concurring music, film and interactive conferences. But it’s the continuing convergence between the festival’s parts—the businesses of digital downloads, documentaries and dotcoms now have some serious overlap—that makes for another unique level of serendipitous conversation in the Austin streets. This year, South by Southwest Interactive—abbreviated SXSWi by those in the know—will bring thousands of designers, programmers, bloggers, entrepreneurs and general web whizzes to the Austin Convention Center for five days of networking, speakers, panels, awards shows and too many parties to count. Quite simply, if you’re doing any business online, you’d do well to show up here. March 7–11, 2008.
www.sxsw.com

LESS IS MORE
One need not scour the web for long to realize that the internet continues to spawn countless design blogs, even as readers find themselves with less time than ever to read them. And that’s exactly why Khoi Vinh and Liz Danzico felt the need to create another one. On the surface, A Brief Message, launched in September 2007, works like any other blog: Vinh and Danzico curate essays on design from a variety of writers, pairing them with custom illustrations by artists and designers. But there’s a catch: The posts (and all comments) are capped at 200 words. An inaugural shortie by Steven Heller cheekily questioning the death of print (with a clever origami dinosaur illustration by Jennifer Daniel) gave A Brief Message both an argument for its existence and an instant loyal following. Although some of those tapped to write have refused the abbreviated format (“Most design writing is short enough as it is,” one e-mail actually said), big names like Debbie Millman and Rob Giampietro have seen fit to tackle topics—ranging from beauty in design to the endless debates surrounding Olympic logos—within the allotted 200 words. Which, if you’re curious, is exactly as long as this paragraph.
www.abriefmessage.com

CHALK ONE UP
San Francisco-based Cahan & Associates was charged with branding VMWorld 2007, a technology conference held in the city last fall. They commissioned Brian Rea and Nicholas Blechman to create a series of 30 illustrations, including signage and banners for the Moscone Center, where the conference was held. In addition, Rea and Blechman flew to San Francisco to draw a mural live over the course of the conference—eventually covering an entire 60 x 16-ft. chalkboard. Using a lift to reach the higher elevations, Rea and Blechman worked 9 to 5 for four days, reproducing about 200 sketches based on technology terms that were given to them ahead of time. The conference’s 11,000 attendees marveled as terms like ‘hypervisor’ and ‘paravirtualization’ were rendered real-time in chalk, giving the artists a very different level of interaction with their audience. “People would come over and talk with us, offer suggestions as they passed by or simply stand and watch,” says Rea. “It made us look at what we were doing very differently, somehow.” Don’t worry, this intricate chalkboard was not erased; afterwards the panels were shipped to VMWare’s campus in Palo Alto, Calif., to be permanently installed.
www.brian-rea.com, www.knickerbockerdesign.com

A VISUAL FEAST
Drivers and pedestrians traversing Wilshire Boulevard in L.A. during 2007 were treated to a slow reveal of a vibrant oversized artwork by legendary graphic designer April Greiman. The 75-ft.-tall mural, titled Hand Holding a Bowl Of Rice, was commissioned by the developer Urban Partners (with art consultant Merry Norris) as a public art project spanning a new mixed-use building that sits atop a Metro station. Greiman first shot video in the adjoining neighborhood—the largest Korean community outside Korea—to create a three-minute film that screens in the building’s rental office. One still of a bowl of rice was manipulated into the 8,200-sq.-ft. image, which was hand-painted in oil directly on the building by muralists Rafael Valencia and Jim Fahrenstock. The rice bowl gives a gracious nod to its Koreatown location, but to Greiman it also holds another level of meaning: It represents the most common form of sustenance in the world.
www.wvstation.com, www.madeinspace.la