Design – elastic wax

Break-of-Dawn

I just finished the new breakofdawn.org. For a while, I’ve been meaning to physically separate my professional and personal sites. I had just been using Break of Dawn for everything. Recently, I started Elastic Wax in order to lay the groundwork for the split. But ever since, I had completely neglected the Break of Dawn domain, instead pouring all my free time into this blog.

But, as of 30 minutes ago, I have completed Break of Dawn, which is now my portfolio site. There are still a couple links that don’t go anywhere and the work I have up isn’t all that recent. I will be filling it all in as time goes on. The important part is that the site is now live and ready to be viewed by the masses.

My email address is staying the same, so there is no need to update.

I’ve been reluctant to say that I am a complete dork when it comes to typography. I can spend hours looking through font specimen books for no reason other than just to gawk. Subtle differences between similar fonts pass most people by, but to me, it’s the difference between good design and hasty choices. So when it comes to events in Los Angeles that showcase interesting type related design, it immediately goes in my calendar. Which makes me mad that I completely missed John Downer at ReserveLA last night.

The blame for this falls squarely on me. I’m just over a week behind on my blog reading, and that can really add up. After a day, I usually have somewhere in the neighborhood of 800 unread posts. So when I ran across this post on Hoefler & Frere-Jones’ blog, I knew I had missed something important.

John Downer started his career as a freelance type designer in 1983 and is a master sign painter by trade. The Propagandist has a slideshow here of his work. It’s a great read if you enjoy design and typography. You can also see the line of shirts John designed for Freshjive on slides 1 and 25.

I don’t know if the exhibit is still up, or if it was a one night thing. I’ll update as soon as I know.