Sweet friends, I am raising the prices on all of my art work as of 12:01 am, October 19th, 2013. That day is my 42nd birthday and it marks a fine time to grow up a little in terms of my art career. This is not a decision I am making lightly, but maybe my reasoning is helpful to others out there struggling to assign value to their work as well. Quick edit: here is a link to one store of my work, and here is the link to Ennui Free, my last project. Get it while it’s cheap! My updated art-making standards I will not give away work unless I get a grant to pay for the entire production. I cannot pay for it out of pocket. The Valentine will be a subscription from here on out. I will send out word when one is being produced to a few hundred people who will be given the opportunity to order the work at a reduced price. Everyone else who orders one will be charged …

This summer, I was asked by several students for recommendation letters for jobs and other such opportunities. Each request resulted in a slightly different journey and I learned a lot from them all. I realized I need to come up with a policy for writing them, so I sent out word to all of my professor friends and did some research: there were a lot of horror stories and funny anecdotes. I could easily illustrate this essay with lots of eye-roll-inducing tales of badly mannered students and lazy professors, but I am taking a more positive approach: I am writing this essay for all of my former, current, and prospective students in hopes that I help you make better choices in this area. You are worth the effort, to a one. One thing: I mention “class” in the title. I am simply referring to the fact that you can, right here and now, choose to treat the people around you with respect and thereby slowly sculpt your life’s trajectory. You can be circumspect and polite, …

 I am just back from Los Angeles, having spent an amazing week there working with some incredibly bright students at California State University Northridge (CSUN). I was able to lead 2 groups (about 40 people each) through the history of protest posters and printmaking, and then we designed and printed our own using screen printing. I was invited there by Professor Samantha Fields, who had selected my work to be in a group show called Tomorrowland. Before each workshop, I gave a short lecture on the history of protest posters and its relationship to different forms of printmaking, going through the last several hundred years and then focusing back on the 1968 student protests of Paris. That era was particularly well-documented, and the students were able to organize themselves into an efficient propaganda machine, all because they learned how to screen print. This method of printing enabled them to produce and hang posters that had been conceived only that morning. Of course there were other centers of student protest, but I have a certain fondness for the Paris uprising in particular. Once we had …

A note: In the third photo, the n is actually an upside down u. We didn’t have an n. I am teaching Typography 1 and I have to say, I love this class. The students are eager and willing to take risks, the material is unfolding at a good clip, and things are just generally really rewarding. I have decided to take a more haptic approach to teaching the basic tenets of typography, which I will describe here for your perusal and evaluation. What is Typography? Robert Bringhurst says it best: Typography is the craft of endowing human language  with a durable visual form, and thus an independent existence. Its heartwood is calligraphy – the dance, on a tiny stage, of the living, speaking hand _ and its roots reach into living soil, though its branches may be hung each year with new machines. So long as the root lives, typography remains a source of true delight, true knowledge, true surprise. From The Elements of Typographic Style, pp. 11 Essentially, what I am trying to teach is the history …

I am working on the next big Monstress product: the Game of Love. Right now, it is in board game form. I have decided that I will try to tap the power of crowdsourcing, just as I did with Here & Now. I will send out prototypes of this game to anyone who cares to try it out and will then adjust the design according to the feedback I receive. The way I used to work went like this: I would get an idea, run off to my studio for a few months to perfect it in secret, then spring it on the world. The work was cute, idiosyncratic… it was okay, I am proud of it. I want to push myself past my own limits, I want to make something that could truly reach a mass audience. Some will say I risk losing that special touch of personality, but I don’t think so, not if I approach the process the right way.  So I am looking for some testers. I will be testing the …

I have so much else to do, but this is too much fun.

I am developing the next long-overdue print for Monstress Hearts You.

I’m putting together the rest of the Terribly Helpful Signs, having just sent a bunch out to my design heroes.