Alphabet Road Trip | the blog of Iskra Design

Category: Found Alphabets & Street Poetry

New Typographic Collage for Grantmakers in the Arts Magazine Cover

Numeral Composition 1 © Iskra Design

Numeral Composition 1 © Iskra Design

Sometimes a project comes along that allows me to blend my fine art background in printmaking with graphic design. The cover illustration for GIA Reader was a wonderful opportunity to mix it up between media. The brief was very open: use the numerals 25, to indicate the 25th year celebration of the organization. Make it beautiful and make it art. (Please, more art directors like Tommer Peterson!) When you have a wholistic and adventurous thinker/creator as your partner in crime it makes for great synergy. See the complete project and process here.

Snow Calligraphy, Basic Exercises

SNOWDAYBRUSHWORK

© Iskra Johnson 2010

Who needs to study with the Asian masters? Just get out your fourwheel drive….It's the first snow of the year here. Just back from a walk for hot chicken soup with rice, thank you Maurice Sendak. I never tire of the street's positive/negative mysteries. How to make marks that have the beauty of randomness, the art of artlessness–I aspire to this.

Ice Cream I Scream

Cones

From Aaron Zube, friend and collaborator in San Francisco. A universal symbol set that carries its message effectively in large, medium and small. I just want to know why there are no double scoops. Since San Francisco is experiencing winter fogs and clammy temperatures, this image sequence may have been utilized as part of a shamanistic ritual to reinstall the sun. Trade you Seattle's 101 degrees for whatever wistful autumnal breezes you've got down there!

Tonight someone set fire to an island in the middle of a little lake that the fire engines can't get to  and as far as the eye can see the sky is filled with pink smoke. I found out the cause of the fire while having a jamocha ice cream cone at Baskin & Robbins…. For new prints on the theme of The Ice Cream Man, or "meditations on desire," see new work at Iskra Fine Art.

Airports & Arrows

IMG_0202Arrow2 copy

 

Airport stripes, a Why But Not

 

IMG_0080AirportOneSF

Travels: San Francisco, Utah, and home to Seattle’s airport parking lot with its beautiful guiding arrow. Please, shuttle driver, don’t run me over, this is important!