graver fates leafy hamming

 “What could be more interesting, or in the end, more ecstatic, than in those rare moments when you see another person look at something you’ve made, and realize that they got it exactly, that your heart jumped to their heart with nothing in between.” 

Robert Motherwell

Pattern in pattern on pattern in front of pattern.  What?  No plaid?

pattern on carved eggs~

Looking like fine victorian lace, the carved eggs created by Beth Ann Magnuson are the definition of the word delicate. On each shell she free-hand draws the final patterns she envisions carved into the egg. She then empties the content of the shell through a small hole. The true magic begins as she removes each tiny shape using a fine rotary cutting tool. After a dozen years flower farming, Magnuson moved to rural Illinois and found herself instead surrounded by fields of chickens and her surprising new medium:

My gardens and the surrounding verdant fields supply me with material and inspiration for my artwork. I gather eggs from neighboring farms and carve the shells into delicate ornaments I describe as Victorian Lace Eggs.

Segue over to more eggs, this time fried~

 When Vladimir Loginov and his brother Maksim say their fonts are handmade, they’re not lying. The Estonia-based designers have used almost every imaginable (and for that matter, unimaginable) material to hand-craft their typographic sets. Eggs, toast, fried potatoes, sausages—hell, you could easily spell “breakfast” out of all the food-related letters they’ve created over the years.

a whole ashtray of butts

potatoes

tiny fishes without a job

Which leads us further into more fonts, this time ethereal~

By day, Marcus Byrne works as a motion graphics designer for clients like Honda. But one night the Melbourne-based designer and self-proclaimed Apple geek decided to create a new font using the colorful icons on his iPhone and came up with a lively collection of letterforms and a typeface called Phone Streak.  Byrne created each character by waving his iPhone like a magic wand in front of a Canon 5D DSLR and conjured the magical results in three- and four-second exposures. The resulting typeface is dynamic, what you’d expect from a font made by flailing an iPhone around in the dark, but also displays a strong sense of craft. Through a process of trial and error he was able to manipulate the phone the way a calligrapher controls a brush. “Holding the iPhone in the same position for a little longer before making the strokes gave the camera enough time to capture the detail in the App icons.” says Byrne. The frozen images of app icons act like serifs, grounding the letters while also revealing their unusual origin.

And, what do you DO with fonts?  You make books.  I wonder if the Douglas cook book is still in print...

You cannot unsay a cruel word.

Were you ever visited by such a polite squirrel?