That time of the year again

Last year, around this time, with freelance work abating for a bit, I gave myself a personal project to keep me busy.  It was a good time to take a break, look back on the year, see my progress as a designer and evaluate some of the inspiration that it took to get me there.  2008 for me was all about explosive color, dynamic compositions, and heavily layered intricate grunginess.  And it was reflected in the artists that I followed regularly and drew upon for passive inspiration.  For me, working on personal projects is a symbiotic combination of something that simultaneously forces me to push my boundaries while at the same time driving me crazy.  It may be that sometimes my ideas are not so much final products, but something more nebulous like “what would happen if I took this element and performed this task in this particular iterative way?”  (That may need some elaboration – future post-worthy…)

So I decided that my project for the end of 2008 was to produce a piece (or, as it turned out, a series) that both addressed where I had come over the course of the year via a personal take on some of those artists’ work as well as a modest attempt to give something back to community out there.  The project took the shape of a 2009 quarterly calendar, where each of the four pieces had a few simple constraints and were each inspired by a designer who had struck me over the previous year.

For the first piece, which would represent the months of January, February and March, I imposed a guideline of using only circles and cool colors and created a piece that was inspired by some of the work by Fabio Sasso of the ubiquitous design blog/tutorial site Abduzeedo.  His site provided me not only with a constant source of (albeit sometimes a bit trendy) inspirational design, but perhaps more importantly, many of the techniques used to get there.

The second piece was a big bite to swallow and took many times longer to complete than any of the other four, and was inspired by the work of Guilherme Marconi.  Again, I constrained myself this time to squares and cubes and a spring-like color palette for the months of April, May and June.

The third piece was inspired by the mighty (he always says that) James White, a.k.a. Signalnoise, using hot summer colors and limiting my forms to James’ iconic hatched lines.

Finally, the last piece, inspired by some of the work of Pablo Alfieri, involved the use of triangles or lines that would convey triangles in a dark purplish crazy monolithic future space scene… or something like that.

I printed the series on 11″x17″ Epson Enhanced Matte paper and gave them away to family and friends for the holidays last year.

So here we are again, less than six weeks until the end of the first decade of the second millenia (whoa…) and I’ve decided that due to the personal satisfaction and great feedback I’ve gotten on last years’ calendar, that I should probably try to make this a regular project.  So this weekend, I started to flesh out “Calendar MMX” or whatever the hell it’s called, with an emphasis this time on typography.  Looking back on this year, I’ve become far more infatuated with type and lettering than most other aspects of graphic design – whether its the type-as-illustration work of Si Scott, Jessica Hische or Seb Lester or the type-as-sculptural element work of 19th century and modern printmakers, type has really made its mark on me this year.

So stay tuned for MMX (check out some sneak peeks on my flickr stream) and hopefully I can finish it by the end of the year!

If anyone is interested in a copy of the 2009 version, contact me.  I am hoping to have the 2010 version up for sale as well.