With ideas still flowing we decided to have our new business cards in letterpress printing, an ancient and beautiful printing process that have been fascinating us lately.

FireFly Letterpress from ilovetypography.com on Vimeo.

A couple of international print shops caught our attention: Studio OnFire and Sweet Olive Press. It’s definitely worth checking out their printing portfolio.

Studio On Fire letterpress workspace - Minneapolis / MN.

Poster designed and printed by Studio on Fire.

Business card printed by Sweet Olive Press.

Here in Brazil this process is inexpressive mainly due to lack of demand and also because the steel of machines and types are melted and sold.

Searching the internet, Christian met the Corrupiola guys, Leila and Aleph. They found an abandoned letterpress machine and are restoring it, in an effort to keep the process alive.

Corrupiola's letterpress machine.

Because their machine isn’t working yet they gave us the Oficina Tipográfica São Paulo contact. We didn’t know their work. Besides printing services they publish their own editorial material and offer interesting courses. We are glad to know that a letterpress workspace still exists in Brazil.

Oficina Tipográfica São Paulo

More about Oficina Tipográfica São Paulo on Flickr.

At that time we were recently baptized Sisson Studio (a long story…) with awful projects and short incomes. However, the good side was that I was full throttle with my digital art projects since march, submitting them to competitions all over the planet and meantime starting a very nice friendship with other designers over the internet. Additionally I signed up for a Facebook account and met some wonderful people there, including a person that became our first international client.

Two extremely complicated website projects were giving us some migraine crisis and we were about to have another one coming from our Russian friend/client from Facebook. We were not satisfied at all with that situation and decided to change our gravitational fields.

We stated: “— Web projects are coming, including one for Russia and this situation is intolerable!”. We were then on the search for someone to work with us.

I contacted an old friend, Guilherme Soares. He presented me to Oliver Barnes. We’re working together since then.

What we would never expect was that Ken’s project was waiting for us in the hands of Oliver and his partner, Fito. Ken needed a new website and a simple signature to his name; a logo. Fact is they sent us Ken’s old website link: kenheyman.com.

Do you take it? Hell yes!

We were speechless and also feeling privileged of working with such an artist. We progressively fell in love with the project as we were gathering more information about who was Ken Heyman and his work. It was love at first sight.

There is nothing we can tell about Ken’s work that someone hasn’t told before. We’re far from being art critics but we certainly feel that shiver down the spine when something touches us. It’s the power of art, latent even in the shape of (apparently simple) photographies.

Ken captured intimate moments of people, whether they were famous or anonymous. Captured happy and painful moments. With his heart on the camera.

The weight of responsibility were upon us like plague. Bullshit! We freed ourselves from it in order to feel what must be done using intuition and inspiration. Capturing the simplicity and emotion of Ken’s click was essential.

During the hunting for ideas, one image flashed before our eyes:

Yes, it was Herb Lubalin’s Avant Garde. Simple, elegant, emotive, charming, vintage font. Perfect for what we needed. And this is it, Ken Heyman’s logo/signature was ready, just as simples as he asked to be:

Next step was designing the website and we wanted it to be charming and elegant and we think we got there. Soon, Ken’s new website at kenheyman.com.

A special thanks to Oliver and Fito for the opportunity.

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More of this project:

// (mini) Visual identity guidelines on ISSUU
// On Behance
// On Flickr

Here is the zipped file for a delightful experience.

Also, be sure to check out the HAL Project, specially the screensaver on the “Downloads” link.

I tried to create a visual experience, one that bypasses verbalized pigeonholing and directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophical content…I intended the film to be an intensely subjective experience that reaches the viewer at an inner level of consciousness, just as music does…You’re free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film. Stanley Kubrick, 1968.

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“Lux Aeterna” by György Ligeti

Lux Aeterna by György Ligeti

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My sister, who’s gonna get married next week, asked me if I could design an invite for the special event. I did it with much love and the result came out so nice that our printing/paper supplyer Fine Papers, asked our authorization to exhibit it in their showroom, in São Paulo.

All material was printed using screen-printing on a beautiful Esse’s Latte Texture paper from Fine Papers.

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See it also on:
// Behance
// Flickr

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More of “Whoarewe?”
// on Behance
// on Flickr

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Inspiration:
// typographic posters

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Special thanks to:
// Saul Bass
// Font Diner
// Svetoslav Simov

You read the line every time
Ask me about crime in my mind
Ask me why another road song
Funny but I bet you never left home

On a good day, I know it ain’t every day
We can part the sea
And on a bad day, I know it ain’t every day
Glory beyond our reach

Fourteen seconds until sunrise
Tired but wiser for the time
Lightning 30 miles away
Three thousand more in two days”

–

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This is how we feel, tired but wiser.

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The Black Crowes “Wiser Time”

wiser-time

Poster submmited to the 8th round of the HUGO Create design competition – theme “The Four Elements”.

The Four Elements

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Inspiration:
» Nature
» The Garden Of Hu by Anahata

the-garden-of-hu

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More of “The Four Elements”
// On Flickr
// On Behance

The Fundação Biblioteca Nacional (Brazilian National Library) contributed with technical assistance supplying content to the web library. The institution President, Muniz Sodré, presents the project in this video (in portuguese).

Manuscripts, maps, rare books, films, sound recordings, prints and photographs were digitized and are available at the digital library. There are cultural treasures like the often considered the first great novel in world literature, “The Tale of Genji”, a 11th-century Japanese Literature novel.

Pages from the novel “The Tale of Genji” by Murasaki Shikibu. Illustrations by Shunshō Yamamoto.

Also a large 13th-century manuscript called “Codex Gigas”, the “Devil’s Bible”, from Bohemia, one of the historical Czech lands.

"Codex Gigas", the "Devil's Bible" manuscript detail.

I just visited it and loved it. Researching is simple, the archives are well organized and the professional digitalization job allows the visitors to see the material in great details. Worth visiting.

In short, we don’t reinvent the wheel. This means that we don’t develop things from scratch when there is something more full-blown and (much) better developed out there on the web that can be integrated into the websites we develop. Exemplifying, why should we create a photo managing application like Flickr when Flickr already exists? No reason.

So, because we are redesigning our website we decided to have a dose of our own medicine, installing Smart Look in this website. Smart Look is a free service offered by Issuu which automatically replaces all the documents on your website with nice designed publications.

This is how it works: go to issuu.com and sign up for a free account. Then go to issu.com/smartlook and write down your domain where it’s written “Select your domain”. Click on “Get code” and you will have a piece of code ready to be copied and insert it right before the </body> tag, which in our case was in the “footer.php” file. The next step is uploading the document you want to be featured in your website. Can be a .pdf, .doc or a .ppt.

Usually these files would be a link for download but who said your users want to download files instead of just reading them? Imagine a 20MB .pdf file being downloaded when they just wanted to read it! I’m a suspect because i’ve abandoned a few websites just because of that.

Well, back to the Smart Look, after you placed the code snippet where i told, uploaded the file and put the link on the page, click on it. This click will trigger an upload of the same file to your Issuu account. After the conclusion of this 2nd upload, your document will be ready to be viewed in a charming way.

But if the user should want to download it? On the top left corner there is a link to download. That’s it. Even more, the user can share it via email, print it or go full screen. The publisher not only gets a happy user, but more visibility because of the sidebar showcasing all documents uploaded.

The only concern was if Google Analytics would stop working properly due to space conflict. So far, everything’s OK.

We took advantage of this tool to improve the frappé art Visual Identity Guidelines visualization, and to publish our Digital Art 2008 Portfolio. It includes all artwork we submitted to graphic design contests all over the world, including our awarded “City Sounds – The Original Score” and the published “4+1 Elements“.

In my opinion, the only inconvenient is the doubled upload, one to the server, other to Issuu, and the last one being triggered after a click on the file. A bit annoying. But Smart Look’s still on beta and there will be lots of improvement coming. I do hope so.

frappé art is a logo project for a Russian client opening her own business on the Greek national drink: the frappé. For this particular project we set up a nice collaboration with Juliana Morozowski, talented illustrator from Santa Catarina. Following our main concepts, Juliana came with a modern, charming and creamy frappé glass illustration. It was up to us building the logotype and the final logo composition, plus all the studies that surrounded this visual identity project. We wanted something young, creamy and tasteful and we all got quite satisfied with the results.

The cultural shock was main challenge in this project; frappé is for Greece as beer is for “cariocas”, but even this analogy almost got us crazy. We spent weeks searching for and looking at pictures of frappé, frappé parties, coffee shops, Greek beaches and landscapes; researching websites and Facebook groups about frappé and reading what people wrote about this magical drink. Got into infinite discussions with the client about the ideas and concepts and, still, dove on the task of drinking frappé. Delicious.

The biggest challenge was not to fall on the trap of using blue. This hue saturates Greece and everything related to it, including the frappé. The client made herself very clear on this subject.

Finished the project, what is left, besides the client’s friendship and the satisfaction in seeing the job done, is THE WILL to go to Greece and drink the frappé!

What a project!

We also did a special Visual Identity Guidelines for the frappé art! Click here to see it :)

More of this project:

// frappé art on Behance

// frappé art on Flickr

// Juliana Morozowski on Behance and Flickr

A 12 x 40 cm poster submitted to “Ten Images for Ithaca – Annual poster design competition“, Greece, 2009.

What do I see when I stand in front of a mirror?

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Inspiration:
// Born Of A Broken Man by Rage Against The Machine.

born-of-a-broken-man

// Deep sadness.
// Hope.

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// The project on Behance.
// The project on Flickr.

One of the best things that happened in the fogged month of March was that our awarded work “City Sounds” is now featuring on the Hugo Gallery at the deviantART!! There are wonderful layouts on the same gallery and it is such a pleasure to be among such gifted designers.

This layout was greatly inspired by Bernard Herrmann’s delicious soundtrack for the Martin Scorcese’s master piece “Taxi Driver” and was submitted to HUGO Create Graphic Design Competition last year.

Listen to the Taxi Driver Main Title:

main-title

"City Sounds" poster on HUGO Gallery website.

Special thanks to Wouter De Coster for posting our work on the gallery :)

It’s been almost 5 months since we screamed to be free from Hemingway WordPress theme. Nothing against this theme i must say. But we needed new web clothes and the time has come.

We chose Futurosity Aperio this time; very flexible theme build upon Sandbox, from plaintext.org. Tweaking the design here and there, little by little we are getting what we wanted like we planned. Nothing is set in stone and feedbacks will be highly valuable at any time.

Pretty soon, following a 3-month hiatus, we will post some new projects we’ve been working on since last year.

Peace to all.

The partners had an idea of presenting their clients with a decorative wall sticker that could be printed by their company.

They came to know our work in the “Morar Mais Por Menos 2008″, an interior design fair. They liked our wall stickers and called us to do this project for them.

The project began very raw as they had no initial idea which was good because we could work on it with much freedom! They just wanted a small wall sticker (something like 20×20 cm) so that one could apply it very easily.

The starting point was the sticker itself. We thought it had to be a drawing that would please both men and women.

Working inside a “Nature” theme sounded a good place to begin. Then we had the idea of a Bonsai tree that fit like a glove because the Bonsai cultivation began when men wanted to bring, into their homes, the forests essence and the trees longevity.

So, the Bonsai tree served as the base for the whole project design. We started out by drawing the sticker.

Bonsai tree

The wall stickers

After the client’s prototype approval, they asked us to assemble 100 gifts so that every detail would be carefully approached and the final result would come up beautifully finished.

We couldn’t take on this large task on by ourselves so a few days before Christmas we called our mothers to help us in the gift assemblage and they were more than happy to help. They loved it and so did we; we had a wonderful day together.

For lunch we had tagliarini with sea food (with lots of onion) that Christian prepared and that, as usual, was delicious!

Our lunch: sea food, tagliarini, onions

The afternoon proceeded very calm and happy. We assembled 100 gifts taking care of every detail.

Banana tree fiber paper

Papers and stickers

1mm waxed rope

Stickers rolled with banana tree fiber paper and waxed rope

Empty boxes

Dehydrated moss

Boxes containing dehydrated moss and the rolled stickers

Box covers and tags

100 finished gifts

It was a very cool job, hand-made, with family, with much love.

A special thanks to Aubrey Kane for helping us with the english version for this post :)

We used some uncoated papers we already got at home, most of them pretty old and useless for client’s projects.

Cool isn’t it?

Now try to guess which one is Barbara’s and which one is mine :\

Given the young and fashionable initial concept we came up with a joyful, light and large wall sticker design. Nathalia and her partners applied strass crystals over the stickers, giving the final touch for a nice atmosphere.

More images of this project on our Behance portfolio.

..

..

Click here to download the original illustrations made by Émile Bayard for the 1862 edition of Les Misérables.

Love it.

Some clients disappear.
Some can’t remember were the job stopped.
Some abandon the ship.
Some decide to print one year after the job’ started.
Some forget that the layout is approved and ask to change it.

We decide for them.
Today we cleaned the shelves.
The old project shelves.
Some of them we published.
Some of them we archived.
Some of them we trashed.

Nature abhors empty spaces.
May new projects come and refresh our dazed heads.
May the Universe bring prosperity to our lives.

Flickr and Behance got new stuff.

Peace!

Sarah France came today telling me that our work was there. Great!!!, Oddinary was a great project.

Amazing and perfect handlettering work i should say. Here is a video of the “New York Mollusk” sign project in action.

Balsamiq Studios LLC is a fresh little software company, runned by Giacomo Guilizzoni. Be sure to check his credentials on LinkedIn and his blog.

Follows a quick-and-dirty-3-minutes-low-budget-tutorial on YouTube:

Check the top 10 winners on the HUGO Create website or on Facebook.

Here is the piece:

City Sounds - The Original Soundtrack

]]> http://sissonstudio.com/top-10-on-the-3rd-round/feed 1 http://sissonstudio.com/top-10-on-the-3rd-round http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/sissonstudio/~3/EsiWEl5cnJ0/4plus1-elements-on-oddinary-book http://sissonstudio.com/4plus1-elements-on-oddinary-book#comments Fri, 01 Aug 2008 00:01:58 +0000 Christian Sisson http://sissonstudio.wordpress.com/?p=187 Our work titled “4+1 Elements” is featuring on “The International Oddinaries” section of the Oddinary Book!

The 6th graduating class of SIM-RMIT University’s Bachelor of Design, Communication Design (BDCD), hosted the “Oddinary” Exhibition this year. The exhibition also featured a book containing 33 selected Oddinaries from Singapore and a section for the International ones. And there we are! Couldn’t be happier :)

A huge thanks to Lucius Young and the “Oddinary” crew!

The International Oddinaries section on the Oddinary Book

The 4+1 Elements - bottom right corner

]]> http://sissonstudio.com/4plus1-elements-on-oddinary-book/feed 0 http://sissonstudio.com/4plus1-elements-on-oddinary-book http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/sissonstudio/~3/4uDL3k-_XBo/city-sounds-the-original-score http://sissonstudio.com/city-sounds-the-original-score#comments Thu, 26 Jun 2008 20:10:03 +0000 Christian Sisson http://sissonstudio.wordpress.com/?p=182 “City Sounds – The Original Score” – Art submitted to the 3rd round of HUGO Create Graphic Design Contest – “City Sounds”.

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Credits:

» Original musical score [Taxi Driver Main Title] by Bernard Herrmann

» Musical score transcription by Miguel Angelo [miguelangelomachado [at] yahoo.com.br]

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Inspiration:

» Taxi Driver Original Soundtrack by Bernard Herrmann

main-title

» Taxi Driver Motion Picture by Martin Scorsese

Here’s an excerpt taken from Caglas’s website:

Something to hold on to, to keep in mind, to guard and to preserve…

We all have bits and pieces, vague traces and fragments of past moments or events kept in our memory. We all reflect upon our past from time to time, trying to create a mental picture to relive in a moment long gone.

Time is irreversible, we cannot take back time, we cannot experience a moment more than once. Even the most cherished or loathed memories of events decay and become lost to us over time. There seems to be no cure for this forgetting phenomenon but one: keeping things.

As our memories erode, the souvenirs from our past start taking on a new mission; scraps of paper with notes scribbled, ephemera, trinkets, kept objects give us the opportunity to touch, see, feel and even smell the past without having to go back there. The things we keep don’t have to mean much extrinsically, but a great amount of feeling and memory is contained inside. Feelings and memories are the secrets between us and the objects that are kept.

Here are my entries for the exhibition:

A butter can from a Brazilian brand called Aviação, in activity since 1920.

///////////////////////
» WHAT DO YOU KEEP? – vintage objects.
» FOR HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN KEEPING IT? – since 2007.
» WHY DO YOU KEEP IT? – because it is old fashioned.
///////////////////////

Coke miniature bottles (3 inches tall), limited edition, sold in Brazil in the early ‘80.

///////////////////////
» WHAT DO YOU KEEP? – nostalgic objects.
» FOR HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN KEEPING IT? – since 1984.
» WHY DO YOU KEEP IT? – because it’s a nostalgic object and I like Coca-Cola.
///////////////////////

19th century picture, the Coca-Cola early years.

///////////////////////
» WHAT DO YOU KEEP? – vintage objects.
» FOR HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN KEEPING IT? – came from my parents.
» WHY DO YOU KEEP IT? – because it is old fashioned.
///////////////////////

A picture of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.

/////////////////////////
» WHAT DO YOU KEEP? – vintage objects.
» FOR HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN KEEPING IT? – came from my parents.
» WHY DO YOU KEEP IT? – because it is old fashioned.
/////////////////////////

A pin from USSR that a friend gave me when traveling there, short after the Perestroika.

/////////////////////////
» WHAT DO YOU KEEP? – things from other countries.
» FOR HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN KEEPING IT? – since 1998.
» WHY DO YOU KEEP IT? – because it’s history.
/////////////////////////

“Adventure World Map” is a poster featuring cartooned representation of famous stories like Robinson Crusoe, Toilers of the Sea, The Three Musketeers, Ben-Hur, Don Quixote, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Around the World in Eighty Days, Robin Hood, One Thousand and One Nights and many others.

////////////////////////
» WHAT DO YOU KEEP? – nostalgic objects.
» FOR HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN KEEPING IT? – since 1986.
» WHY DO YOU KEEP IT? – because it’s nostalgic and I like adventure stories.
////////////////////////

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Inspiration:

» Taxi Driver Original Soundtrack by Bernard Herrmann

main-title

» Taxi Driver Motion Picture by Martin Scorsese

» It is the museum and gift shop of mid-century illustration;
» It is the 50’s retro graphics archive;
» A candy shop for the vintage-addicted;
» A Pastelogram;
» Cars, wagons, trucks, ads, space and decor.

Is a 40 x 12 cm poster submitted to “Ten Images for Ithaca“, Greece, 2008.

The full size poster:

The hand-made-type detail:

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The competition invites this year all designers to set their imagination free and talk about their dreams, whether these are images and feelings the human mind creates while we sleep or their hopes and wishes. Therefore, the term “dream” can also be used metaphorically, it can be the “starting point” of an idea or be the main theme for the final piece.

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Inspiration:
» Frustration
» Emptiness
» Indecision
» Weathered by Creed

weathered

// earthWEIGHT
// airIDEA
// fireRAGE
// waterCRY.

A cube submmited to ‘An Oddinary Exhibition’, Singapore, 2008.

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Despite our façade of similarities, each of us possesses a certain quirkiness that makes us ‘Oddinary’. This gathering of creative ingenuity will showcase a gallery of ordinary paper boxes made extraordinary.

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Inspiration:

» Rebecca Parker
» Sarah France
» Heath Ledger portrait by Vincent Fantauzzo
» Since I’ve Been Loving You by Led Zeppelin

since-ive-been-loving-you

But was watching Episode 48 (OpenType Features) of the wonderful video podcast theindesigner that I came to know House Industries. House Industries is a typography, illustration and design studio that markets unique fonts and artwork worldwide. Their work transcends the conventional idea of ‘graphic design’ and reaches out to a broad audience.

To request a free font catalog and download a couple of free fonts as well, here is the place for it. But I recommend you not to go there just for it; browse everything and be sure to check out their case studies and blog.

Hope you all like it! My friend Sarah France, graphic designer and typographer, loved them.

Me too! =D

Artwork submmited to HUGO Create graphic design competititon – 2nd round – “Nightlife and Music”.

Antonio from AilesOne came up with these small and yet wonderful set of clicks of a limited edition of vintage (circa 1900!) Coca-Cola bottles that he bought at a local supermarket.

This is it! Awesome!!!

I love Coca-Cola. Gotta have one!!

This one is called ‘A view of Llansteffan’. Rebecca is a photographer and digital artist that is specialized in creating unique people portraits. She likes to convey subtle emotions through the images, which are created using photography with digital art techniques.

Her work on photography+photoshop is top. This particular piece brings me the feeling of pantomime movies: the dirty texture, the irregular vignette and, at the same time, the sublime look and feel. The washed colorization pushes it to the next level. Sometimes it just looks like it was painted on a canvas. The serenity of the scene completes the eye-catching piece, it all looks perfect.

There’s much more to see, so if you want to take a closer look at her great talent, visit her website and her Flickr sets.

And besides all that, she’s really a sweet person. One of a kind.

By the way, talking about portraits, be sure to check out the newest Chris Orwig’s training titles at Lynda.com:

// Photoshop CS3 portrait retouching essentials

// Photoshop CS3 portrait retouching techniques

Cheers :^)

off the shelf is the James Bowskill web packaging collection. He’s a british Art Director at A.C.O. Tokyo, where he develops brands on-line.

If you want to get deeper into japanese design, visit the web magazine PingMag. The mag also has a Flickr set, a YouTube user and a Facebook profile.

There’s an amazing range of designs, starting from the early 60’s functional cassette designs, moving through the colourful playfulness of the 70’s audio tapes to amazing shape variations during the 80’s and 90’s.
Like James White said: “(…) that site is packed with retro inspiration.”

Hope you like it :^)

Art submitted to MiCA‘ contest about global warming.

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Inspiration:

“Goodbye Blue Sky”, music by Pink Floyd.

pink-floyd-goodbye-blue-sky

“Goodbye Blue Sky”, video by Pink Floyd and Gerald Scarfe.

This website was created to allow visitors to virtually browse — in great detail and in color — 30 selected individual magazine issues [...]. In addition to providing a summary of each of these magazines, the site includes a description of the project, indices of the magazine displayed and links to research resources.

Definitely worth looking!

… Uailab … Graphic-ExchanGE … Computerlove™ … ETC … TypeNeu™ … FormFiftyFive


Updated » 21-02-2008

// The Grafikcache


Updated » 22-02-2008

// The Serif … Design Licks


That’s it!

Who is worse shod than the shoemaker’s wife?

Em casa de ferreiro, o espeto é de pau.

Shame on us. We haven’t designed new business cards since we quit our small graphic design firm and decided to go working at our home studio, by march 2007.

Fortunately it’s not a problem anymore; today we solved it and soon I’ll upload the art to our Flickr set.

I don’t have much to talk about Takagi Masakatsu live paintings except that I love his work. It is truly inspiring and a see-for-yourself-situation. He’s a visual poet.

Visiting his website does not have the same impact as seeing his videos. So I embeded my YouTube playlist. Enjoy’em :^)

Tigran Sisson – my brother’s branding communication project will be finished in the next weeks. He approved all the layouts. His logo is available here and his business card is being packed for screen-printing. On this next monday Tito Abreu will spend his afternoon with us discussing the website project.

Nathália Alberoni – she approved the business card layout and we’re sending it to print production in the next days. Her logo is available here.

Labtox – stucked waiting the content for the brochure. Website, business card and stationery are ready to be presented to them.

Love at first sight!

]]> http://sissonstudio.com/piclens-by-cooliris/feed 0 http://sissonstudio.com/piclens-by-cooliris http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/sissonstudio/~3/8MGvNLJw1IE/victorianathalia-laberoni-logopngn-style-logo http://sissonstudio.com/victorianathalia-laberoni-logopngn-style-logo#comments Fri, 08 Feb 2008 02:26:55 +0000 Christian Sisson http://angelinasisson.wordpress.com/?p=83 Here is Nathália Alberoni Victorian-style logo and some possible applications:

As I told before, Nathália is a recently graduated freelance interior designer that’s addicted to Victorian style and this was a joyfull design project, cause Bárbara loves interior design. We’re now waiting for the business card approval.