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New site!

My new site is live at AUSTINSTAHL.COM. Farewell, Tumblr. I’ll probably leave this stuff up for a while, but head over there for news, new work, etc.

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Facelift coming soon for this little corner of the web.

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Some personal-project news: I’m editing and art-directing a new independent magazine about baseball called Road Grays. We plan to launch in early 2019, but the work of putting together Issue 1 is underway now! 

Go to roadgraysmag.com to sign up for the email list for updates. And if you’re a writer, illustrator, or photographer with a love of the game, we’d love to hear from you about contributing to the magazine! Follow the link for details.

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Magazine Reading: February

The latest in an ongoing series where I note some of the cooler magazines I’ve been spending time with.

Perdiz

This was my first time seeing Perdiz, a bilingual magazine “about things that make people happy.” They put that wide-open concept to nice playful use, with the content ranging from an interview with a maze designer to a set of gorgeous studio photos of a deep-fat fryer (on a special signature of high-gloss paper to show off their deep blacks and sharp highlights). For me the most memorable story was a fantastic profile of the eccentric creator of a rural ultramarathon — a great reminder of the kind of discovery that magazines are so good at providing. I would never have sought out such a story, and my algorithmically-controlled online ecosystem wouldn’t have served it up for me either, but it’s one of the best things I’ve read so far this year.

The California Sunday Magazine

This issue of the always-amazing California Sunday got some well-deserved attention for the long feature that takes up most of the issue: the complex story of California’s biggest agricultural empire. (This comes on the heels of their excellent “Teens Issue” from December, another example of giving all or most of an issue to one topic. Playing with the format is something they’re doing as well as anybody right now.)

Beyond the great writing and photography, what puts this in another category is the well-considered details, starting with the cover: I love the cleverness of splitting the headline to place DUST over the dust, and the audacity of specifying a day-glo spot color and then only using it for an underline.

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For the second time this year, I had a great time designing the artwork for an EP by songwriter A. Spencer — this time for a set of songs called Cicatriz that beautifully captures the weariness and dread of 2017. 

Part of the lyrical inspiration for the title song, as described to me by the artist, was last year’s series of shocking and momentous voting results—in Britain, here in the U.S., and in Colombia. (In his words, it felt like “the idea of democracy was quite literally coming apart at the seams all over the place.”) So my concept for the artwork was to allude to the impact of those moments by filling the space entirely with giant type, like a vintage newspaper headline. The letterforms on the cover are based on a particular style of condensed type in this vein, but I drew them from scratch so I could get it all to lock up exactly how I wanted, by controlling the width and stroke weight more precisely. It was then printed and “roughened” manually (using a photocopier and physical manipulation of the paper) before being colored digitally—the uncomfortable color combination feeling to me like a sort of funhouse version of the news. 

The lyrics and credits carry the concept to its logical conclusion: They’re printed as newspaper stories, in narrow justified columns.

I enjoy the way this artwork functions as a sort of inversion of the art for February’s A Secret Spell EP: Where that cover was dominated by a huge, striking image paired with tiny text, this one is 100% type and color. Check out both albums: The music is excellent.

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City Paper is Dead, Long Live City Paper

It's hard to describe, to someone who's never experienced it, the pleasure of being a part of something you'd previously loved from the outside. It's what I imagine it might feel like to be drafted by the team you grew up rooting for.

I'd been reading the Baltimore City Paper since high school in the late ’90s, when I'd pick up a copy on occasional trips into the city, and it was a window into a world of arts and music and general adult freedom that I longed to enter. After I moved to Baltimore for college, it became an indispensable companion to the city I was now exploring, and to a growing music scene that I was attempting to infiltrate. And it was a consistent source of great writing about things I cared about — it seems weird to say now, but at the time, it was not easy to find genuinely good writing on the internet — with great photography and illustration alongside it.

So when, as a newly-minted college grad in 2004, I got invited in for a job interview after an acquaintance had recommended me, it was both exciting and surreal to see where this thing I loved got made. (I believe the only time I ever used the stately front entrance to the offices at 812 Park Ave, a converted Mt Vernon rowhouse mansion, was for that interview; staffers, as I soon learned, customarily slipped in via the back alley.) I had spent the previous several months searching for a “real” graphic design job, and this City Paper position was for a production assistant, so I wasn't entirely sure it was the right move, but it seemed like too much fun to pass up. Even for a measly $12 an hour.

It was. The vibe of the Production department was like being in a class populated entirely by class clowns, on a day where you had a substitute: You knew you'd need to get your work done eventually, but in the meantime a feeling of let's-see-what-we-can-get-away-with anarchy hung over the whole enterprise. We occupied a large room on the second of the building's three floors, appropriately between Editorial (above) and Advertising (below). There, six of us laid out some parts of the paper—whatever wasn't handled directly by Joe, our goofily ebullient art director—and designed a massive number of small ads for local advertisers. (We offered this service for free, and it was like layout boot camp.) Music was usually blaring from a boombox perched on the mantel of what had once been a bedroom fireplace, often controlled by the eclectic tastes of our senior designer Matt. A second sonic layer, made up of constant jokes and banter, floated overtop of and intertwined with the music. Even if the work itself sometimes felt like drudgery, I was never bored.  

On Mondays, we worked a 12-hour shift as final ad approvals came up the stairs from Advertising and final article edits came down the stairs from Editorial, all needing to be placed onto pages. At dinnertime we'd wait anxiously for a call from the basement to tell us the company-provided pizzas had arrived, and then march down past “the morgue,” where nearly thirty years' worth of papers were archived—a weekly reminder that this madcap pursuit had a long history (longer, indeed, than my life to that point).  

I'd gotten a lot of advice in design school about making sure my first job was one where I could keep on learning, and while I'm not sure that CP was quite the type of job these advice-givers had in mind, I was undoubtedly learning plenty: When to push back against bad ideas (no, Mr Advertiser, the fact that the ad we designed for you contains a few slivers of white space does not mean that we can now cram 50% more content in) and when to grin and bear them (usually making private use of my colleague Rebecca's oft-repeated saying: “If that's what you want...”). How to wrangle disparate pieces of content into a coherent whole (it was our job to create “The Map” that determined which content/ads went onto which pages, no small task when we had so many different ad sizes that we used the letters of the alphabet to refer to them). How to keep your cool when the pressure was on and tensions were rising.

And though I didn't fully recognize it at the time, I was beginning to learn that publication design was what I was meant to do; I loved spending my days working alongside people who were putting something of value into the world. As difficult as I found the schedule—after Monday's 12-hour slog, you'd grab some sleep and then head right back for the mad dash of Tuesday morning, sending pages off to the printer—I immediately appreciated too that if a week's work wasn't your best, well, you didn't have to wait long for a chance to do it better.

After a little less than a year, though, I was growing weary of that weekly grind. Adding to my weariness was the peculiar mix of entitlement and insecurity that perhaps only young twentysomethings can feel with the ferocity that I did; I felt that my numerous design talents were not being properly utilized as a mere Production department drone, and simultaneously feared that dronehood was perhaps all I was capable of. It didn't take long for this mixture to curdle into a bad attitude that I evidently didn't hide well—at some point that summer, our production director, Athena, called me down into the alley (the only place one could have a private discussion at 812 Park) to ask if I really wanted to be working there. I admitted, to her and to myself, that I didn't.

(Athena, thank you for putting up with me.)

So I moved on. I only worked at the paper for less than a year, but that time has taken on an outsized importance in the life story I tell myself, looking back with a dozen years' distance. As short as my tenure was, I had the privilege of being a small part of this local institution, this forty-year history of documenting and shaping the social and cultural life of my city. There's a pride in that, which I expect will never go away.

City Paper itself, of course, has now gone away, killed by its parent company earlier this month. Count me among those who felt the paper had experienced a sharp decline in quality and consistency in recent years, though to be fair, at least some of that must have been due to rapidly shrinking resources. Certainly they were still capable of great heights: their dispatches from the summer's Baltimore Ceasefire and their longform deep dive into sexual harassment and abuse in the arts scene, to name two from the final few months, were engrossing and important pieces. These are the kind of community-serving features that they seem ready to continue in new form over at the Baltimore Beat, which launched this week under the leadership of some recent CP vets. I look forward to following it.

City Paper's demise has been framed widely as a symptom of the 21st-century media landscape, where the internet has killed print advertising so thoroughly that no free print media can survive, but apparently CP was still profitable—just not profitable enough for the corporation that chose to end it. The narrative that it really fits into is the one where more and more independent media entities, print and digital alike, are bought up by the rich and powerful and don't always survive the whims of their new patrons.

I still have a copy of the first issue of City Paper I worked on, from October 20, 2004. It contains 136 pages (compare this to the final issue's 40) and lists fifty-one employees on the masthead, not counting contributors or distribution. (Baltimore Beat's full-time roster, reportedly: five.) So, yeah, independent media in 2017 is leaner in more ways than one. But I think it can still be a force, a beacon to draw kids like me to cities like ours, and a vital resource for those who are already here. Even if there are fewer opportunities to be drafted by the home team, I have to believe that there are new teams to start, new games to invent that we haven't yet dreamt of.

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Magazine Reading: October

The latest in an ongoing series where I note some of the cooler magazines I’ve been spending time with.

Eye

You may have seen the publicity surrounding this issue’s amazing covers, which are all one-of-a-kind, created with variable data software and a modular typeface from Muir McNeil. (A wonderfully hypnotic video of the printing process can be seen here.) But what’s between those covers is every bit as good. From the thoughtfulness of the discourse all the way down to the feel of the paper stocks, Eye is consistently the world’s greatest design magazine.

Double Dagger

Like Eye, Double Dagger is both design-focused and British, but otherwise rather different: An all-letterpress-printed publication presenting original art—straight from the wood or linocuts!—alongside type set on a Monotype caster. There’s a great sense of connection and intimacy that comes from seeing the impressions in the paper, knowing that someone locked all this up on the press by hand. And it’s extra fun to pull apart the broadside pages and see how they planned the colors (including some cool split-fountain stuff) on each sheet.

It’s a stunning coincidence that both of these magazines’ covers feature a colored pattern of overlaid and interlocking circles—one created with a thoroughly 21st-century process, and the other with technology that has been around for hundreds of years.  

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Now that this album is out, I can share a peek at a fun project from this past summer: The vinyl LP package for my friends Underlined Passages. 

Check out more images of the album (including an unused alternative version of the cover that I lobbied hard for!) at my portfolio.

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I’m so pleased to have Arcas included in this little exhibition in the graphic design gallery at MICA, of typefaces designed by alumni. I’m in some amazing company! 

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I've spent a fair amount of time this summer poring over The Process is the Inspiration, the new book from House Industries. I'm a longtime admirer of their type and design work, and I also learned from them quite directly during my design education (at MICA circa 2003, House's Andy Cruz and Ken Barber taught a typography class that was one of the more playful and fun courses I took), so I was familiar with much of what I would find here. But even still, the book is full of wonderful surprises.

They made the unusual choice to organize the book not stylistically, or chronologically, or by kind of project; instead it's split into six guiding concepts that form their philosophy (“Get Your Hands Dirty,” “Embrace Chaos,” etc), each illustrated by a few projects. It's indicative of their work that this out-of-sequence presentation is not jarring in the least; you can't really tell when each project happened, because so much of their work is sort of out of time—not quite “retro” despite clear inspiration from the past, but not tied to its own time either. 

Content aside, my very favorite thing about this book is the production details. The first thing you notice is the thick debossed covers, printed in metallic ink. Once inside, you eventually notice that there's an overlaid glyph, shape, or pattern printed in spot varnish on every page, like a semi-hidden extra reward (Once you catch on, it's great fun seeing what they chose to print in the varnish on each new spread). And then there's the incredible back ‘Et Cetera’ section of stuff that didn't fit anywhere else, recontextualized and printed on 3 signatures of special paper, each in 3 spot colors. True to form, this is the kind of thing you do just because it sounds fun and maybe a little crazy, and because you have the vision and technical knowledge to pull it off. And it inspires me to think that way—to be on the lookout for those “maybe a little crazy” moments—more often in my own work. 

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Poor Repainting Attempts: The Blog!

For a number of years I’ve been occasionally sharing photos around here of something I affectionately call Poor Repainting Attempts—little blips on the urban landscape where someone has not quite matched the right paint color. I find them weirdly fascinating, and I’ve decided that these photos deserve a home all their own, so here it is: the Poor Repainting Attempts blog! Give ’em a visit if you’re so inclined (and feel free to send me tips if there’s a P.R.A. near you).

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Happy July! My typeface Arcas is back on sale: 30% off all month long. 

Get it at MyFonts or YouWorkForThem.

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Magazine Reading: June

I’m going to start documenting some of the magazines I read, from time to time—Here are four from June:

Anxy

This is a new magazine focusing on personal stories related to mental health, and it’s a lot more fun than that might intially sound. The first issue’s theme is Anger, but my favorite pieces are the ones that have a less-direct connection to the theme—Lorena Rios’ reporting on the state of Turkey, Matt Eich’s haunting photo essay (which benefits from the lovely printing on uncoated stock). Anxy uses several Schick Toikka typefaces to great effect, varying the size and treatment for a design that feels playful while still serious.

Full Bleed

My first experience with publication design was during my time attending MICA in the early ’00s, working on the student magazine at that time, Formica. We had fun and learned a lot, but it was essentially an amateur operation. Full Bleed, MICA’s new student-run magazine—which launched with a successful Kickstarter this spring—puts us to shame: This is a serious little publication. A couple of the articles slip too far into “art-speak” for my taste, but for the most part the content, design, and attention to detail are as high-quality as it gets. Perhaps the distinction here is that this is less a student magazine than an independent magazine produced by students — i.e., the audience is the wider world, not just the student body, and the quality is high enough to support that ambition. Kudos.

Offscreen

Nice clean redesign of this “human-centred technology magazine,” using just one typeface, Robert Slimbach’s recent versatile sans family, Acumin. I’ve coincidentally been working on a project that uses Acumin, so I’m a little miffed that they beat me to it (not really—I’m actually surprised it hasn’t become a more popular choice yet!). It’s great to see it used so beautifully and simply. Quality printing and production details on this too, helping to justify its relatively high price tag.

Works That Work

Sad to hear the announcement that WTW is winding down (this is to be their next-to-last issue) but they’ve had an impressive run, and they’re certainly not stumbling toward the finish line, if you’ll excuse the lame attempt to reference this issue’s theme: play. The issue explores the intersection between sports/games and design, and there’s quite a wide range of interpretations of what that can mean, from the considerations of tennis-racket strings to the endless ingenuity of drug-test cheaters. As always, WTW’s stories of real-world creativity have a sort of hiding-in-plain-sight quality, like, “How have I never considered this before?”

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The artwork for Austerity

A few months ago, I released an album of music called Austerity. It is only available digitally — no physical copies at all (maybe someday). But it was important to me that the artwork be created by hand in the real world, even if it would only ever be seen on a screen. I'd like to tell you a bit about how that art was made.

My idea was that the artwork should reflect the process of the recordings: Just like the music, it would be built by hand using “cut-up” raw material that was matched together using my own intuition. That meant collage, a technique I used much more extensively in my youth (I have sketchbooks bulging with extra layers of paper, pages wavy from PVC glue) but had gotten away from in recent years. I still have a stash of unused collage material, from which I grabbed a stack of early-60s Life magazines for the Austerity cover.

I’m not sure why these particular images called to me, but as with the music, I let intuition take over and tell me what it wanted to be. Part of the fun of collage is that you have to make decisions in the moment; you can only use each piece of material once, and there's no Undo unless you rip it off the page. There's a certain abandon that comes with this, a total acceptance of chance and accident that can feel thrilling in a way that "regular" design never does.

As a substrate, I used pieces of watercolor paper cut to about 7 inches square, a decent size for the scale of the raw material and the Letraset type I knew I wanted to use for the title. (For those who don’t know, Letraset was a pre-computer method of setting DIY type. You transferred each character from a tacky transparent sheet onto your design by rubbing it down carefully. Another favorite of my youth, though it was already pretty much obsolete by that time.)

When it came to the type, I did cheat a little: afraid that the texture of the paper might cause trouble, I transferred the type to a separate smooth sheet and then combined it with the collages in the computer, after scanning both. My name, likewise, was handwritten on a smooth sheet and scanned separately. And then the song titles and detail text on the "back" cover?* I must report that this text was made with digital type, since I didn’t have Letraset at the smaller size I needed. What can I say: A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

The final art is below. Austerity is available to download at Bandcamp or to stream at your favorite streaming service. 

*Yes, a back for an album that can't actually be flipped over. A hi-res PDF comes as a bonus download for those who purchase the full album on Bandcamp.

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I’m thrilled to announce that my first typeface, a display sans-serif called Arcas, is now available!

I’ve been interested in the discipline of type design since my college days in the early ’00s, but I finally got serious about it a few years ago. After a long process of learning, trial & error, and revision, I am finally ready to usher my first release into the world.

Arcas is a family of three weights, built with no curves — straight lines only. A lot of fonts with this characteristic have either a “sports” or “tech” feel, but I wanted to make something warmer, friendlier, more unusual. I think it has its own unique personality, which I’ve enjoyed getting to know as it’s taken shape.

(About the name: Arcas was a figure in Greek mythology, the namesake of the Greek region of Arcadia — and also of the neighborhood I moved into shortly before getting the idea for this typeface. As the story goes, Arcas was transformed by Zeus into the constellation known as Ursa Minor [aka the Little Dipper]. Just as constellations are drawn with imaginary straight lines between a set of stars, straight lines connect points to form the letters of Arcas.)

Arcas is available at MyFonts or YouWorkForThem. Intro discount for the early birds!

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I was happy to help out my buddy A. Spencer Goldman with the design for his new EP, the first music he’s released under more-or-less his own name. (His main outlet is the excellent Fulton Lights.) 

Sometimes the best thing a designer can do is to know when to stay out of the way, and that was definitely the case here—when you’re working with an image as striking as this George Boorujy painting, you let it do most of the work.

Check out the music here—highly recommended!

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New album, ‘Austerity,’ out today!

I’m happy to announce that I have some new music available today!

The TL;DR is: Austerity is an album of short instrumental pieces made from repetitive rhythms and interlocking melodies. You can download it at austinstahl.net, or stream it at Spotify or Apple Music.

But if you’re interested, a little background: Several years ago, I began to get interested in the idea of music that has a specific use. In certain regular moments in my life—getting ready for bed, making breakfast, working on design work, reading—I increasingly found myself wanting music with a certain unobtrusive mood. For me, that music was often instrumental (Steve Reich, Arthur Russell’s ‘Instrumentals’, Daniel Lanois’ solo music, Eno’s ambient period) or at least partially/often instrumental (Neu!, Berlin-era Bowie, Yo La Tengo’s quietest moments, Eno’s Another Green World). Music that can recede but isn’t purely background, that rewards your attention but doesn’t always demand it.

At some point it felt natural to start making some of my own. I hit upon a way of working that was new to me: instead of my usual method of writing a song and then recording it, I would begin the recording with no idea what was going to happen. I’d usually start by choosing one instrument and improvising for a while with the tape running, and then I’d edit that performance by cutting it up, slowing it down, making loops or building structures. Then I’d respond to that with more layers of texture and melody, out of which a “song” would emerge.

It was freeing, like there was no longer any conscious intention that I felt bound to please. And the act of making these sounds was often meditative, soothing; it was exactly what I needed in this strange anxious world we’ve recently found ourselves in. In this moment, this is the music I wanted to make because it’s the music I needed to hear. The finished album is called Austerity, and I hope you find it useful too.