Wary Meyers Baxter Library Installations

Our first round of installations for the Old Baxter Library/Via Advertising Agency is finally all together in one spot on our website. Including this fountain pen & ink seating group, which would look equally cool with oil wells, pastry bags, or shampoo bottles- whatever your company's reception area needs, we can do it.

Click!

High School

Taped to a pole in my high school cafeteria, 1976.

(via my older brother)

Happy Valentine's Day!

... and be sure to click over to You Have Been Here Sometime and read our short guest post about Ettore Sottsass, his Superbox, and all things boxy and striped.

Boro Sweet Boro

With a little help from us Urban Outfitters has boro'd the Japanese Boro Jean Quilt project from our book and made it into a cool hippie wall hanging. "Boro" is Japanese for rags, and is most often used in reference to the resourcefully mended, endlessly repaired indigo cotton futon covers of the farmers and fishers of Northern Japan. (See much more info here, and here was our primary source of inspiration during the original project). Our quilt version was made from salvaged old jeans.

Although Urban's is a slightly smaller size quilt it would also make a cool dog bed or a kind of tami mat or boro blankie for a kid.

The plum blossom-y peasant print on the back fabric (above) was also designed by us.
The middle photo is the Urban's sample, on top of our larger original, as it came to us to be okayed. The top photo is a spread from our book, taken near Linda's parents' house Long Island, Maine. The old hippie anthropomorphic shack being a "sweet home" ;-)




Home Sweet Home by Wary Meyers Denim Wall Art at Urban Outfitters

David Hicks on...

A boxed holy trinity of decorating books by the Headmaster of interior design,

 from an estate sale in England a few years ago.

David Hicks at a Schweppervescent tablescape in his London home, 1972.
From an old W Magazine.

Herb Lubalin Ampersand

Ampersand designed by Herb Lubalin for Upper & Lower Case Magazine, 1970. 

This 3-D version is a leftover from a type/writing themed installations project we've been working on lately for an ad agency. More soon.........

1984

Progettazione 1x2

Gustav Eiffel/ Enzo Mari- inspired 1x2 plank mantel ("Eiffel Mantel") just after completion in the summer of 2008. Highly mathematical instructions on how to build it are in our book Wary Meyers' Tossed & Found.

Below that is from the following spring, when a winter outside oxidized the nails and they leached into the wood grain, but I like it even better that way. It shows more of "the hand".

Above, a pig working on a Mari-esque progettazione (interlocking end table/s) in the illustration for the book's last page (the end).

also:

Enzo Mari at DesignMuseum.org

Enzo Mari at Reference Library

Enzo Mari at Daddytypes, and Greg.Org

Collage Prep

From Linda's junior high school notebook, which consists solely of notes to her friends about guys. The cover should totally be made into a poster.

A poster of the cover and a t-shirt of the "Hunk Page".

Or Hunk Page wallpaper, including the notebook lines.

related: John's junior high school notebook

First I take some triangles....

Besides Richard Scarry and Al Jaffee, another artist-hero of my Marvy Marker-stained youth was Ed Emberley, whose how-to-draw books taught me and countless other kids how simply drawn lines and shapes can be put together to make fish, trains, dragons, spiders, barns, Indians, sauce pans, pigs, hot rods, weirdos, entire worlds, etc...

A rare opportunity to see some of his original drawings and book layouts is on now, so if you're in Los Angeles in the next week (hurry!) you should absolutely check out this show:

From the LA Times:

For generations of creative kids, some of whom are now fine artists, Ed Emberley's step-by-step cartooning manuals such as the 1970 classic "Ed Emberley's Drawing Book of Animals" can be summed up in a few words: Best. Books. Ever. On Saturday, Emberley will make a rare Los Angeles appearance at an exhibition featuring original mock-ups from his beloved drawing books -- 13 of which are still in print -- along with new works.

The show, "Ed Emberley & Friends," will also feature murals by five contemporary artists including curator Caleb Neelon and Los Angeles-based painters Seonna Hong and Saelee Oh -- all of whom learned to draw the Emberley way.

Breaking a drawing down into simple shapes and squiggles, the award-winning children's book illustrator crafted easy-to-follow visual recipes for colorful characters that have an innocent charm and super-cute factor that have endured for 40 years after they were created. (I mean, just look at that little yellow mouse, below.)

For the show, Emberley has created a signed, limited edition of 18-by-24-inch prints of the animals, above, and one of his lessons, right.

Ideal for a nursery or kid's room, and mighty tempting for nostalgic adults who also admire midcentury design, the prints will sell for $30 each. Original Emberley drawings are priced at $300 and all proceeds will benefit children's hospitals and the Art for Kool Kidz program.

The artist reception, which is open to the public, is Saturday from 7-10 p.m. at the Scion Installation L.A., 3521 Helms Ave., Culver City. The show runs until Aug. 7.

-- David A. Keeps

related: Draw a Sasquatch the Ed Emberley Way (Boing Boing)

and

the rarity of The Wizard of Op, including endpapers, at Stopping Off Place, (and the missing couple of pages, but no endpapers, in 1997 gif-style at Maurice D. Wagschal's homepage)

a to z by Bob Gill

A to Z picto/typoographic color matching flipbook by legendary graphic designer Bob Gill, 1962.

A slightly redesigned edition was reissued by Italian publisher Corraini last year, which can be found at Jenny Dalton's small but excellent book dept of Little Big Magazine.

Super Sweet Diamonds

Motified bottle

from the basement of an estate sale.

Tensor's Floating Disc? Check.

Liberty Studios

The great facade of Anthony Lover's Liberty Studios, NYC, with its perfect mix of industrial age iron work, Gill Sans Extra Bold (a typeface) and supergraphic American Typewriter (this blog's typeface) number. And the beautifully poetic and patina'd window.

Sometime crashpad of our errant carpenter, the studio is more noted for creating the amazingly detailed HBO Starship intro back in 1982. (link)

4 swimming pool designs by Claes Oldenburg

The 1940 Book of Small Houses

A few pages from The 1940 Book of Small Houses, a treasure trove of International Style. 

Above, for a competition between modern and traditional styles put on by LIFE magazine, Frank Lloyd Wright presents his modern Usonian "good time space" to the Blackbourn family, who, out of four families in the competition, are the only ones to choose a modern house. From the book: 

"The Blackbourns like both houses. The traditional house includes everything they were sure they wanted. They chose the other house. "It is completely different," they say. "It is the only house of its kind in the country. We chose Mr. Wright's design entirely on its own merits." The Blackbourns are now convinced that they want to live not as they have always lived, but in the manner made possible by the modern house." 

Kudos to them. Below are some other designs, including two by Richard Neutra, one which came in second place in a Ladies Home Journal contest, and another which merited only an also-ran in an American Gas Association contest. If you're ever thinking about building your own house, this is an excellent book.

Click to enlarge them all.

another LIFE modern house not chosen, even with the awesome ping pong room.

Distressed Finnish

Aalice Cooper Alvar Aalto Maash Üpp, from the pages of 

Wary Meyers' Tossed & Found

Lou Dorfsman

Type Chess Set, from Wary Meyers' Tossed & Found. (click to enlarge)

Le French Dresser, ibid.

Lou Dorfsman

Two of my favorite projects from our book, and the man who inspired them. Lou Dorfsman, designer par excellence. Our latest post at AT is about it all, read it here.

Herb Lubalin & John Alcorn

Designed by Herb Lubalin and illustrated by John Alcorn. The type treatment on the cover is great, but the case is awesome. It repeats on the back, then the endpapers are the same but the colors reversed. Two of the greats.

Aalvabet

from the type on pgs 34-35 of Tossed & Found