plural blog

Tons of things happening in September at the pl_studio:

Sunday, September 6
@ Schubas 9pm
Come hear us talk about the Whistler installation at the Show n’ tell Show

Friday, September 10
@ U of I

Saturday/Sunday, September 12/13
on Division between Ashland and Damen
11am – 7pm

We’ll be participating in this year’s Renegade Craft Fair in Chicago.
We’re pretty excited to be sharing our tent with ObeyYourBrain.
Come by and check out all things modern and musical.
Since we’re not really crafters, we’ve come up with some extra special items,
so come look for some unique paper goods, posters, publications, records,
and of course some free stuff.

Thursday,  October 1
@ Harrington College of Design

Don’t you think graphic design is boring? Although the industry has never experienced such mass cultural awareness—Helvetica in the movies, a movement to ban Comic-Sans, personalizing our apartments with screen-printed ephemera and torsos with personally curated t-shirts—every public design panel, conference and gathering is a self-congratulating snooze-fest.

Well not anymore, my friend.

We’re pleased to announce another edition of Chicago’s first and only live talk show centered around design. The Show ‘n Tell Show is a late night-style show where the guests are the city’s most dynamic designers, photographers, illustrators and poster-makers. They each present a single project in a lively evening full of drinks, laughs and design.

After a year at The Whistler, due to over-capacity at the last few shows, we’re moving on over to Schuba’s. Accordingly, the show will be bigger and badder than ever, in Schubas beautiful performance space.

The next show is our best yet. Guests include:

Ivan Brunetti (Schizo, Fantagraphics)
Billy Bauman (Delicious Design League, live from Flatstock Seattle)
123 Clap (Members of the M’s, video/music experiments)
Jeremiah Chiu & Renata Graw (Plural)
Ross Zietz (Threadless)
Davey Sommers (The Post Family)
Elaine Fong (Elaine Fong Design)

The details:

The Show ‘n Tell Show
September 6th, 9pm
Schubas
3159 N Southport
Chicago, IL
ALWAYS FREE

Friday, August 21, 7pm
with Harper Reed & Dawn Hancock
@ Andrew Rafacz Gallery
 FREE

from AIGA: Public Works is a series of shows and events that features artists who’ve spent years in Chicago working within the independent art and music communities.

Harper Reed - Threadless
Harper Reed is the amazing CTO for the awesome Threadless.com. He is responsible (along with a cadre of amazing engineers) for bringing Threadless.com from the mean streets of startupville to the gold paved
streets of enterprise city. Harper oversees the architecture, execution and maintenance of skinnyCorp’s community websites. He is waiting for the singularity. When not causing problems with technology, Harper can be found yoyoing, juggling and hacking random internet appliances. You can read his blog at nata2.org.

Dawn Hancock - Firebelly Design
Dawn Hancock calls the shots. As creative director and owner of Firebelly, she cultivates the studio’s design culture and inspires the best work with vision, compassion and an infallible gut instinct. The Firebelly Family is a tight knit collective of strategists, designers, writers and programmers working hard to connect authentic companies with real people in socially responsible ways. When she’s not designing for world change, Dawn mentors the next generation of rabble-rousing problem solvers through job shadowing, studio tours and portfolio reviews. She also spends time lecturing at design schools and conferences as far away as Doha, Qatar in addition to teaching workshops on sustainable design. A few of her other endeavors include: the annual Firebelly Design Grant, Camp Firebelly, her nonprofit the Firebelly Foundation and its first program, Reason to Give.

… Of course the first video I watch happens to be New Orleans at 00:00, I guess I deserved getting the shaft…

cityoneminutes is a trip. Whether you navigate by city or through time, a one minute video clip shows you what’s happening in a particular city during that hour. (For example, if someone was to watch one minute of what I have been doing for the past hour, Chicago might not seem like the most exciting place on Earth.) Check it out… link via @swissmiss

from CoolHunting: Created by Swedish creative Maximilian Larsson, the recently launched Helveticons use the same design principles as the go-to eponymous font for a universal set of interface icons.

Helveticons come in a variety of formats—six of which are scalable vector graphics—including Photoshop, Illustrator, OmniGraffle, EPS, PDF and PNG. Royalty-free and comprehensive, the 245-icon collection serves as a valuable asset for its simplicity and range of essential symbols.

Helveticons are available online for $279, along with a free set of 22 folder icons.

Two Day Silkscreen Workshop

When: Saturday, August 29 & Sunday, August 30, 1pm - 5pm both days.
Where: @ No Coast, 1500 W. 17th St.
Register: email everyone@no-coast.org

Two Day Workshop Schedule (must attend both days)
Saturday 1pm- 5pm:

Homework:

Sunday 1pm- 5pm:

Cost: $40 requested donation.
Cost covers instruction, lab use and basic studio supplies.
Limited paper and ink available for use.
Sliding scale available- $20 minimum. Please notify us in advanc

for 1000+ days. Super impressive and inspiring self-motivation by Edward B. Gordon.

hipped to by @espiekermann

I didn’t realize how into sports I am… now I know.

from MIT: Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab. It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.

Personas was created by Aaron Zinman, with help from Alex Dragulescu, Yannick Assogba and Judith Donath.

(thanks for the link @shannonbenine)

Friday, August 21, 7pm
with Chris Eichenseer, Jason Teegarden-Downs and Justin Fines
@ Andrew Rafacz Gallery
 FREE

from AIGA: Public Works is a series of shows and events that features artists who’ve spent years in Chicago working within the independent art and music communities.

Chris Eichenseer - SOMEODDPILOT
Chris Eichenseer is a photographer, designer and musician. He has spent most of his life attending band practice, and this not only taught him how to be an entrepreneur, but determined the nature of his work. Chris founded Someoddpilot in 1999 and since then has built an internationally recognized body of work, including branding and designing the Pitchfork website, photographing musical luminaries such as RJD2 and Steve Albini, designing dozens of record covers for Consumers Research, Chocolate Industries, and Mush, and designing industry websites for Drag City, Windish Agency, Fat Possum, Mad Decent and many more. Someoddpilot calls Chicago home with an office located in the crook of the Ravenswood industrial strip on the city’s North Side.

Jason Teegarden-Downs - Delicious Design League
Jason Teegarden-Downs is one half of Delicious Design League: a two-man duo fighting out of Chicago, Illinois that specializes in graphic design and illustration for the music industry. Mostly recognized for their limited edition hand screen-printed music posters, they also create a plethora of anything that can and should be designed, logos and identity design, retail and promo packaging, magazine illustration, and so on. Their growing clientele includes Jane Magazine, Clothes Optional Vintage Clothing Boutique, John Brown Citrus Publishing (U.K.), Cilichili magazine (Czech Rep.), Metro Chicago, The Fillmore New York at Irving Plaza, Live Nation, Firebelly Design, Draft FCB, Mozilla, The Royal Order, and many bands such as, Gomez, Ben Kweller, Pelican, Office, Alla, and on and on.

Justin Fines - DEMO
Justin Fines is an artist and designer. DEMO, Fines’ freelance endeavour, was founded in 1997 in Detroit, MI. An award winning designer, Fines has worked in several design media, with projects ranging from record covers to corporate identity, tshirts, motion design and direction, skateboards, books and more. Recent projects include a line of snowboards for ROME, an artist series board for Zoo York, limited edition T-shirts for Nike, and a collaboration with Adidas and Chinatown Soccer Club. DEMO is headquartered on Rad Mountain at the Old American Can Factory, which is located in the beautiful Gowanus district of Brooklyn, NY.

Some really sweet type by Lisa Rienermann, taken from MirageStudio7Blog:

“It began with the Q,” she tells Slanted. “I was in a kind of courtyard in Barcelona. I looked upward and saw houses, the blue sky and clouds. The more I looked, I saw that the houses formed a letter Q.”