God Save the Dream

Gluekit has been super into hand-type lately, prompted in part– no doubt– to Mike Perry’s terrific new publication Hand Job: A Catalog of Type (Princeton Architectural Press). Gluekit’s Mountains Rock collaboration with artist Amy Jean Porter and our “We Sing Instruments” shirt were both included (hurrah!) and the thick book is chock-full of interesting, provocative and NEAT hand-drawn type projects and samples. It’s one of our favorite books at the moment and has been sparking all sorts of ideas and new projects.

Gluekit likes new twists on old punk sayings.

Reimagined Book Covers: 001

Gluekit loves to read.

Inspired by Penguin Book covers and the recent publication Penguin by Design (Phil Baines, 2007), we recently decided to take our reading habits one step further, and reimagine the books we’ve read aloud together with Penguin-esque cover designs (talk about collapsing our interests!). It’s a neat way to encapsulate our visual reaction to the storylines and we’re happy to start sharing them here.

We’ve selected two of Jonathan Safran Foer’s novels to kick off everything off. Mr. Foer is one of our favorite novelists, so it’s only fitting that his works kick off Set #1.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close also tops our mutual lists of favorite books. Oscar, the child hero of this post 9/11 novel, captured our hearts and has never really let go. His fearless optimism and precociousness still spark our nostalgia when we’re shopping for pens or thinking of why no one has invented coffee ice cubes.

This week, Gluekit was also fortunate to hear Mr. Foer read some of his most recent work. A very young writer with a very big talent, Mr. F afterwards revealed he likes to write at his public library, a structured environment he finds conducive to letting himself bleed out his words.

Sew on Fire

The Gluekit Team has been hard at work on our assignment for Faesthetic #7, the theme is a dark one for happy kids. One of the things we’ve been experimenting with lately– well, for the past year but it’s picked up with the arrival of a beautiful vintage Bernina sewing machine– is creating plushies of 1-d forms we like to work with. Here we’re crafting a little bit of fire– burn, baby, burn!

We definitely like black and white plushie forms.

New Buttons!

We just got some new buttons for PART OF IT and we can’t decide which colors we like best. They just all look so sizzling. We’ve got a full candy jar at home now and they’ve slowly been filtering out to favorite peoples everywhere.

We like neon cut paper and lots of badges on totes and blazers.

Heavy Symbolism

Preliminary drawing for a New York Times Book Review illustration for “God’s Harvard: A Christian College on a Mission to Save America,” a new book by Hanna Rosin. Surprise fact: Rosin was played by Chloe Sevigny in the movie Shattered Glass, about the New Republic’s fallen angel, Stephen Glass!

We like six degrees of separation games.

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Experiments with cut paper get a bit messy.

We like messy experiments.

Cut, Sew, Go!

A fine example of how scissors and a sewing machine can refashion and revive a summer wardrobe in under two hours: making a too-large Gluekit Landscape shirt into something more fitting and cutting down a pre-Gluekit System Untitled shirt.

We like new/old clothes.

Hardcore Type (Made in Jersey)

Laying down some hard type in Jersey during vacation by the sea.

We like hand-drawn dollar signs.

We Love Art Supplies

Even in Philly on vacation, we find ourselves hunting around for sketchbooks, tracing paper, some sharp pencils, and good ink flow. Luckily we spotted a Utrecht around the corner from our hotel and made a beeline to the cash register.

We like drawing on the run.

New Kicks

These are jammin’ new kicks, purchased in Philly after a long perusal at the always impressive Ubiq store. We just can’t get enough of Vans hightops. The Gallery was fun too!

We like new white sneakers.

Type Research

We had great fun in the stacks last weekend, sorting through an assortment of titles from the 1980s about architecture, designers, and furniture.

We like fancy pants letters.

One Hundred Miles to Poughkeepsie

Two hundred miles to see one of our favorite bands of the moment, Matt and Kim, play a rockin’ set on the first night of their tour. (We tried to figure out how to type out the yah-yahs right, but the hyphens kept getting in the way!)

We like waving hands.

Bitmap Cut Up

Sometimes our projects aren’t sketched so much as cut out and pieced together. This is one of those cases. We’re experimenting with collaging bitmapped patterns into natural forms and seeing what happens. Let’s crash nature smack dab into our computer screen and capture the result, one brick at a time.

We like bitmapped patterns!

Rivers and Islands

Okkervil River played a date right before their national tour started, and before their awesome record, The Stage Names, dropped at the end of this summer. We caught them in one of the tiniest venues imaginable and felt that surge of luckiness that comes from seeing a talented band in a room packed with admiring fans.

We like Will Sheff’s hand-drawn shirts.

Tiger Pops!

Tigers go grrr! And we like just-happened-by-accident collages and the backsides of designs showing through.

We like black and white.