books • prints • typography • design
Xmas Pi and christmas pie. It’s that time of year again. In my neck of the woods Christmas day will be either blistering hot with a chance of late thunderstorms, or wonderfully mild and raining, a respite from the blistering hot days preceding it. I’m hoping for the relief of a cool day, but whatever the weather we will sit outside and feast on prawns and pudding. Wishing good cheer and happy days to everyone.
Who ever would have imagined that supermarket shopping bags would become interesting. I found this bag at, of all places, the Whole Foods Market on Maui. It was immediately appealing because, at the time, reusable shopping bags in Australia were pretty much available only in plain green. We still call them green bags, although now a green bag can be blue, orange, patterned, or anything else! (The best bags come from the place I buy coffee beans—they are black with a repeating pattern in orange.) Despite the growing choice of reusable bags, I still like this one, with its graphic illustration and promise of lemons straight from the sunshine state.
Often the best things turn up when you are not looking for them, like this scrap of street poster. I have long been in the habit of looking for type everywhere I go — and even more so these days as I have a new project in the pipeline — but this fragment appeared when my focus was elsewhere. I like it on so many levels: the bold, no-nonsense sans serif type, the colour, the very scrappiness of the torn edges and glue residue. My upcoming project involves type and a book, so this piece of urban detritus is remarkably prescient.
Alphabet City Press 