Society of Arts & Crafts video

Here's a wonderful video shot by the fine folks at Detroitfunk.com about the original Society of Arts & Crafts building on Watson & Woodward- this is where CCS came from over 100 years ago. It was torn down the weekend that the Super Bowl was in town a few years ago. Fortunately I managed to snag a handful of the bricks and ceramic roof tiles from the place before they got trucked off to who knows where. I was also lucky enough to have played urban explorer back in the late 80's within the building before it caught fire. Even back then, it housed (stolen?) car parts, was filled with clutter and it was already too far gone to be salvageable without dropping serious money on the place- something CCS could hardly afford to do then.

I can only imagine how grand it must've been to have taken classes back in this building. It's obviously not as spiffy as the current buildings we have on the campus now, but there's something to be said for the architecture, beauty & grace of that era.

Spectrum & CCS

Awfully nice to see fellow CCS alum, uber talented and all-around nice guy, Marc Gabbana getting a crack at designing the Spectrum Call for Entries poster. I got this poster a few days ago at school and hopefully we can muster up a few entries this year from our current crop of students.

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Call out to an old friend

Rainy Saturday morning here and I had to meet a client to discuss a job at a local diner. As I'm there hashing out the specifics of the job, lo & behold a group of ladies stroll through and sit down a few tables away. One of them was a good friend of mine I hadn't seen in ages, Marge Sroka- art director and nice person extraordinaire. I had known Marge for over 23 years now. I first met Marge when I was a freshman at CCS in a heavy duty Psychology class; she intimidated me to pieces. Over the years we'd always bump into one another at the various agencies she had worked in town.

Today I found out she's working in Santa Monica and still living life large. She's still the happiest-go-lucky art director/ designer I know. I marvel at how she's still the same bright person that she is. I knew her in our formulative years in school, I knew her when she had a married name and back to Sroka. She literally flew into town today to meet her friends at the same diner I was eating at. Talk about kismet! Seeing her made my day.

Karim Rashid at CCS

Absolutely amazing lecture on the CCS campus Friday night by this visionary designer. The auditorium was packed to the point that many actually had to watch him in the basement of the WB Ford Building via live video feed. During the entire lecture, all he did was talk about his approach and vision on design while images of his more than 2500 products flashed behind him. He touched on how we should all design for the now. We shouldn't have to design for the future and all of those people who can't design only speak of the past. His lecture also touched upon what is craft and what is mass production. He challenged archetypes and posed the question of whether the digital experiencial world is actually better than the real world (based upon how many hours we work and some of the top requested items for the holidays).

I wish more of my students were there to see him speak (I did run into a lot of fellow alums I hadn't seen in a long while though!). His your "job should be your hobby" comment hit home with me and I really need to stress this to my graduates. Despite Karim Rashid not being an illustrator, some of the things he touched on could apply to all aspects of our school and profession. Again- a great lecture.

My contribution to CCS Potluck

Here's my feeble little contribution to the CCS Illustration Potluck art exchange. It's a statement on how the food goes at this event... er, any CCS event where there's free food.

CCS Illustration Potluck

Another fun filled Potluck meal in our merry department, as organized by our Student Government reps, Lauren Moyer and Domenique Chery. As always a ton of food for the hungry masses and even better yet, an art exchange where I got Chris Houghton's piece shown here. My wayward piece of artwork ended up in the hands of colleague Don Kilpatrick!

There was a myriad of food such as Bryan Durren's Little Caesars' pizza, Steve Schudlich's White Castle sliders, Yoo-hoo soda, taco salad, chips, dip, chinese food, hummus, taboulleh, spanish rice, cookies galore, cornbread, cornbread, cornbread and more cornbread. Again, a fun time to be had by all. Kudos to Lauren & Domenique for their efforts.

Color. woo hoo!

Just for kicks, I decided to toss a wee bit of color onto the last drawing. Again, straight forward and brainless.

Prismacolor can be my friend

Unlike my last post where I was mildly kvetching about having to use Prismacolors to do my linework, this technique is a little more in my comfort zone. A quick ten second sketch in non-repro blue, a swab with the brushwork, tip that black Prismacolor over, briskly swab in tone, and off to the scanner. Some mild tweaks in Photoshop to adjust contrast and voila! For me, this is quick & brainless- and loads of fun when given the opportunity.

Tricky style & work

For about the last three days I've been walloped with doing a huge campaign for Dodge. The tricky thing about it has been that they've wanted me to do this Prismacolor pencil sketchy technique. It's not exactly something I felt completely comfortable with at first but believe me, by the time you're doing the 30th driving shot of the vehicle you get pretty proficient! The one major downside to doing this style (as opposed to my regular line work style) is that when there are changes, I almost have to start all over again. Whiting out Prismacolor is not that easy but it does have a nice atmospheric moody feel that can't be duplicated easily.

But for kicks I took about five minutes to scribble out this Frankenstein monster. Again, I probably spent more time scanning it in than I did drawing it.

The Hudsucker Proxy

Not only am I a huge Coen Brothers film fan, this scene from The Hudsucker Proxy is one of my favorite clips. I use this movie in teaching my storyboard class from time to time. The scene is superb in its pace, editing, storytelling, its simplcity with music and the camera angles. I would highly recommend anyone who hasn't seen this movie to go out and pick it up. It's not Citizen Kane (but then what is?) but this little obscure gem is still worthy of a good fun evening in front of the idiot box.

Simple Minds- Don't You Forget About Me

This was another one of those mid 1980's ballads that struck a chord with me. I was in the middle of my CCS college life, young, goofy & idealistic and this song sort of captures some of that naive innocence back then.

Not only did it have fame in John Hughes' "The Breakfast Club" but it was also used as a touching closing credit in an episode of Futurama where Phillip Fry discovers that his adversarial brother had named his son in honor of him.

Love & Rockets- So Alive

This was one of those quintessential late 80's/ early 90's bands that I saw back in the day. They played at the Fox Theater alongside The Pixies. Hearing this song brings back good times and fond memories of the two gorgeously long legged back up singers they had on podiums behind the band!

Congrats to Dave Boyle

For what seemed like an eternal summer of hanging on pins & needles, one of my ex-students Dave Boyle finally has gainful employment for awhile. He's already ridden the roller coaster ride with Pandemic as to whether they were going to hire him on for an internship or not (ended up being not). But just a while back, he was given a huge freelance opportunity to do some work with them for their Australian office.

Funny how Dave's department chair, Bryon Fitzpatrick just retired and is on his way to Australia. I've been razzing Dave that he's actually taking food from Bryon's retirement and making the poor guy subsist on dingo meat in his well earned retirement.

Congrats to both.

Lois Maxwell- the steady Bond girl passes

'Twas a sad day this weekend when Kitchener, Ontario native Lois Maxwell passed away at the ripe old age of 80.

She will be forever known to pop culture enthusiasts as the unflappable Miss Moneypenny in the James Bond movie series. Moneypenny was always the bridge between M and the flippant rascal, Bond. She appeared in 14 Bond movies and was last seen in A View to a Kill. Roger Moore was quoted "I think it was a great disappointment to her that she had not been promoted to play M. She would have been a wonderful M."

House Industries

Andy Cruz & Rich Roat were just featured a few months ago in Communication Arts and it showed some of the inner workings and philosophies of their highly successful graphic design/ illustration firm. I've been a huge fan of theirs for the longest time. These guys truly have a strong sense of humility and reverence for some of the coolest fonts and creators around. They've worked with Big Daddy Roth, Coop, Ed Benguit, Shag, and a whole list of anonymous typographers who've lent their talents to some of the coolest pop culture items of my generation.