OK, so you know about the big HOW Design Conference, which is coming up in less than 3 weeks (gulp!) in Boston. As if that weren't enough, here are some other design events coming up that you should have on your calendar. Registration for all three events will open in May and June; visit the websites to get more info and to sign up for the free email newsletter so you'll be among the first to know when registration opens.

• Mind Your Own Business Conference, September 25–28, Hyatt Lost Pines Resort, Austin, TX. Principals of design firms, small ad agencies, marcomm firms and PR shops are invited to join our top-notch group of business consultants for a retreat that will bolster your marketing and management skills and rejuvenate your business. This year's MYOB features a return engagement by popular speaker Blair Enns. Plus, you can plan to stay over Sunday (the conference ends Saturday night) for bonus sessions, software demos and a working day.

• Back by popular demand, the In-HOWse Designer Conference lands this year in San Francisco, October 3–5. In two years, the event has seen explosive growth and is now the business and management conference for in-house design managers. Sign up early; the past two events have sold out quickly.

and ... <drumroll please>

• HOW is proud to announce a brand-new event: The Creative Freelancer Conference, August 27–29 in Chicago. Co-sponsored by Marketing Mentor, this event is specifically geared toward designers, illustrators, writers, photographers and other creative solopreneurs.

For a treasure trove of early 19th-century typographic inspiration, check out Rolling Paper Graphics from Gingko Press. This unique collection presents 540 different kinds of rolling paper plus seventy posters.



via Fly

Posted by Megan

If you're a HOW subscriber (or if you've ventured into a bookstore in the past several days), you may have seen the latest issue, with the HOW logo made out of bright green seedlings. Given both the season and the content (the issue's all about nurturing and harvesting your creative energies), the garden theme seemed ever so appropriate.

During our cover brainstorm session, we talked about actually growing the logo. Seeing as how I fancy myself quite the green thumb, I offered to give it a shot. Art director Bridgid McCarren and I discussed what kind of seeds might make pretty little sproutlings, and we settled on trying two kinds: grass and radishes. Me, I love the little heart-shaped radish seedlings.

We purchased soil, seeds and planting trays, cut templates of the logo that we carefully filled with seeds and set the whole works up in the sunny window in my cube. Then we waited.

Turns out, when radishes sprout, they really take off! By the time of the photo shoot, they were way too tall and leggy to "read" as the logo. They'd grown perhaps a bit too well. (The grass seed? A total dud.) So Bridgid, bless her soul, took tiny scissors and tweezers and "planted" just the tops of the baby radishes to form the logo that you see on the cover. It wasn't a Photoshop job, but it did take a bit of creative engineering to pull off.

Click on the cover below to see the lineup of creative goodness in the issue.

Launched by the Art Directors Club and Moleskine, The Undiscovered Letter was a creative competition developed to raise awareness about lettera27, a nonprofit literacy organization. The challenge was to create a 27th letter for the alphabet. My favorite entry was submitted by Rei Inamoto, global creative director for AKQA.

The letter “space” isn’t really a letter because there is nothing there. But without it, ourlanguagewouldnotfunctionanditquicklybecomesunintelligiblewhenalltheletters arestrungtogetherlikethis.

It’s a letter that’s not a letter. You can’t see it but when it’s not there, you definitely notice the lack of it.

You can see Rei's concept fully explained here.

Posted by Megan

Awhile back, we jumped on the bandwagon and posted about You Suck at Photoshop, the videonline phenom that seems to have reached beyond its core designer-geek audience to go mainstream. (At least, we think we posted about it ... we can't find the post, thanks to the not-so-great search function on this blog).

Anyhoo, Time yesterday revealed the IDs of the two guys behind YSAP. Turns out, they're Matt Bledsoe and Troy Hitch, two ad guys in Covington, KY, which, so you know, is just across the river from us here at HOW HQ. Who knew?

I was following links today, looking for some inspiration, when I stumbled on designer/typographer Marian Bantjes website. Clicking around her portfolio, I found an amazing project where she created the letters from sugar. It turns out it was an assignment for Stefan Sagmeister's book "Things I Have Learned in My Life So Far," which has been sitting on my shelf waiting for me to take the time to really look through it. So I let myself spend some time with a few of the chapters, which are bound seperately. Whatever you might think of Stefan and his design star status, the book is inspiring and fun to look at. It's clear that Mr. Sagmeister is very much in touch with an impish, child-like impulse to create something out of nothing.

Posted by Megan

I'm drawn to this set of ambivalent coasters by Canadian illustrator Ray Fenwick.

Posted by Megan

Today Umbra announced the release of Artala, a line of three trash cans decorated with the designes of Joshua Davis. The cans are available in red, kiwi and ocean and are made from biodegradable plastic.

Posted by Megan

On the NYTimes.com Campaign Stops blog, design writer and critic Steven Heller asked several industry notables to weigh in on Sen. John McCain's choice of Optima for his campaign logo. (Actually, it's not like McCain himself actually chose the face.) Heller previously posted about Sen. Barack Obama's use of Gotham by Tobias Frere-Jones.

Read the whole post, which includes Seymour Chwast's curmudgeonly-in-kind-of-a-funny-way comments and Cyrus Highsmith's comparison of the campaign to his dentist. And then there's a fun bit from Matthew Carter, who goes so far as to set the names of potential VP candidates in Optima:

"The moment of typographic truth will come when Senator McCain picks a vice presidential running mate and two names have to be combined on banners and bumper stickers. By choosing Optima, a rather distinctive typeface, he may have seriously limited his options."

Carter notes that both Huckabee and Romney look a little silly in Optima, but that Rice fits the typeface quite nicely.