When my friend Wolfgang told me about a potential graphic design project for a lo-fi upstart rooftop farming project in Brooklyn, I was all about it. Two months ago, Wolf’s friend Ben Flanner quit his day job and teamed up with movie-producer/green-roof-designer Chris Goode to develop a 6,000 square foot organic vegetable farm in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

As they’re just getting started and have virtually no budget for branding, they asked me to help come up with a business card and some basic branding materials on the cheap. So, in true DIY style, I designed a rubber stamp for them..

I’m happy with the result, from both a practical and stylistic standpoint. The stamp only cost around $20 to produce, and Ben can use it to print business cards on an as-needed basis, in any quantity and on any virtually any material. For me, it was an interesting design challenge to create an information-rich yet aesthetically appealing card while only using one color, and now I know not to use bold fonts or thick lines for a stamp design, as the ink has a tendency to bleed, causing letterforms and lines to be fatter than they appear in the original design.

For more info on rooftop farming and Brooklyn’s epicurian DIY movement, check out these links..

• RooftopFarms.org
• Goode Green
• Urban Farming, a Bit Closer to the Sun (NY Times)
• Brooklyn’s New Culinary Movement (NY Times)
• A Rooftop Farm for the Future

I lived in L’Isle sur la Sorgue, France from September 5th-ish of 2001 to June of 2002. It was cool. This year when my friend Brett took a short trip to France, I decided to put together this little google map of some of the coolest spots I happened upon during my time there. So if anyone else is southern-France-bound, take a look..

Looking through my old design stuff again, I came across this image, a proposed tee design for a climbing gym’s ninth annual climbing competition.

I remember really pushing for this design, but the client wasn’t into the monkeys, so it died.. Fuckin’ haters.

I often wish I had a place to post programming and design tidbits, but don’t want to pollute this blog with technical tedium. So I started a little tumblelog at zeke.tumblr.com.

While perusing my Flickr sets today, I came across a set of photos from a sculptural project I worked on with the Rome & Gold Creative crew. It’s a giant steel guitar positioned over the pedestrian entrance of the Journal Pavilion, an outdoor concert space outside Albuquerque, NM. Unfortunately, I moved away from Albuquerque before the project was completed, but got a chance to see it partially constructed..

Check out the full set here.

Earlier this year I enrolled in a beginning printmaking class at Santa Barbara City College. The prints below are my first: a drypoint (intaglio) study of circus-style type design, made on a zinc plate. The letters (in particular the ‘A’) are based on the Zebrawood font; I’ve always been fascinated by the various ways font of this style suggest a visual gradation from black to white with simple geometric shapes: circles, trapezoids, rectangles, chevrons, etc.

This project taught me that drypoint is a printmaking method that affords the artist great control over line depth and shading, but it’s not ideal for such ‘graphic’ imagery as type.

Next up.. screenprinting!

My good friends Brett and Viktoriya are soon soon to be wed. I designed invitation cards for them and spent the wee hours of a single evening putting together a simple website. Check it out at brettandvika.com

I just whipped up a teeny tiny web service called Folksonomatron, using Sinatra, a web application framework written in Ruby. You give Folksonomatron a URL, and it gives you back a comma-separated list of that URL’s most popular tags, according to delicious.com. This service will likely grow into a more robust tag suggestion service, with aggregate tag lists from sites other than delicious, but this is a start. I plan to use it to build an ajaxy tag suggestion mechanism for Queriac.

Samples URLs and Results

http://google.com: search, google, searchengine, engine, web, searchengines, reference, internet, tools, research

http://rubyonrails.com: ruby, programming, rails, development, web, rubyonrails, framework, web2.0, webdev, ajax

http://carrotmob.com: activism, environment, green, social, flashmob, sustainability, nonprofit, politics, consumerism, shopping

For the nerdy: the source can be found at github.com/zeke/folksonomatron.

I just wrapped up the design and development of a little pro bono publico project that’s been keeping me busy for a few days. Luchaddys.com is a mini-site for this year’s New Mexico ADDY Awards. For those unfamiliar, the ADDY awards is the world’s largest advertising competition, held at the state and national level with over 50,000 entries annually. Back in my days at Rome & Gold Creative, the ADDYs were kind of a big deal; winning ADDY awards is a great way to establish yourself in the design/branding space. These days I’m even less gung-ho for advertising hobnobbery than I was back then, but the project gave me a nice chance to release some pent-up creative energy. Check it out.

Contest! Juarez!

Oh, and I almost forgot: Don’t miss your chance to win a bus trip to Juarez and a fifth of Tequila (with worm)! Download one of the luchador masks on the site, print it out, color/design/whatever it, and send it in. This contest sounds bogus but it’s not.

Stills from the Site

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