Alimentum wins again

The magazine has won again! The design talents of Peter Selgin and myself are to get laurels, certificates, and a plate of canapes!

The 2009 New York Book Show Committee:

Congratulations! It is our pleasure to inform you that your entry: ALIMENTUM: THE LITERATURE OF FOOD, in the category of General Trade/Quality Paperback Series, has won an award in the 2009 New York Book Show.
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And speaking of design, I am struggling to learn Dreamweaver CS4. In my new freelance life I am designing websites, something I last did with any regularity in the late 90s at MTV Networks. With one of my big clients I only have to do the design in photoshop and a team of web builders takes my design file and cuts it up into a live functioning website, building all the programs that run the thing invisibly from a server somewhere. But for smaller clients who aren't looking to do large scale business with their site, I am the one creating the HTML and all the "back end" stuff. I need to avoid jargon, "yeah, I'm a back end specialist" it sounds mmmm..... not work-like.
Here is a first go at a homepage for a very talented and skilled poet who also happens to love hot color.
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And just in case you were wondering where my new found love of graphic novels is taking me, right now I am delighting in Craig Thompson's Blankets. It is a terrific autobiography, over 600 pages. He was raised by Christian fundamentalists in a small farming town in the cold north wastes of the US. It is amazing that his struggles with faith, girls, his family, bullies, snow, and first love are told with vivid black and white drawings. His line is vigorous, at times spirals into beautiful spiritual doodling, can capture humor and brutality, can lampoon other art styles, and keeps the story moving to its satisfying conclusion. Bravo. I have no trouble believing him when he says he has a fascination with calligraphy. The faint toothiness of his paper and the gestures of his strokes helps make his work breathe on the printed page.

I hope he takes some calligraphy classes, I loved all the ones I had with the great artist Jeanne Wong. The ability to move your whole body, not just your hand; to put your whole spirit, not just your words onto the blank possibility of a page, to capture the fluid moment in dried ink. I took italic, roman, uncial, and more italic, but it all was really about the same thing, no matter what the style, beauty happened when practice leaped into a joy of doing.