Daily Book Graphics #1000 is Up.

This same post appears over at Montague Projects Blog

As of Daily Book Graphics #1000, I have posted 1,749 images, 1,081 of them book covers.

I haven’t made a big deal out of any of the milestones in the Daily Book Graphics Project, but somehow hitting 1000 posts seems significant. I started this project on February 21st in 2009 with the intention of doing it for a year. The idea for DBG was borrowed from my friend Michael Kelleher who started his Aimless Reading Project (on his Pearlblossom Highway blog) in early 2009. He was, and still is, going through his library alphabetically and writing something about each book. My idea was to go through the books I owned and scan the graphics and covers I found interesting. I wanted to liberate these images from the shelf. However, digging through books every day and scanning multiple images takes a lot of time so I pretty quickly started to focus on covers. It didn’t take long for me to run out of my own books so I began buying books from thrift stores and charity book sales. I try not to spend more than a dollar per book, but if I find something amazing, or by a designer I collect (Rudolph deHarak, John + Mary Condon) I may go as high as $5.

Doing this for the last three years has been an education in graphic design. Not that I wasn’t fairly well educated to start with, but I think my eye has become much more sensitive. It wasn’t my original intention to have the project focus on a particular era, but 1950 to 1980 is ultimately what I find most exciting and interesting. And spending all this time soaking in the mid-century aesthetic led directly to me designing faux books as part of my Secondary Occupants/Collected & Observed art project. 

So thanks to everyone who follows the blog and the Flickr feed, I have no plans to stop any time soon. And thanks to all the like-minded book bloggers and Flickr posters, collectively we are building an incredible graphic design archive. 

Montague Projects in "Typography Sketchbooks"

I'm happy to tell you that I have work in Steven Heller and Lita Talrico's book, Typography Sketchbooks. The book is packed with heavy hitters (Art Chantry, Ivan Chermayeff, Milton Glaser, Erik Spiekermann), I'm not entirely sure what I'm doing in their company! When asked to contribute for the theme of typography sketchbooks, I decided to use the notes and files from the design process for the Frazer/Montague Design logo. The first spread is from an actual notebook and the second is one of the sprawling Illustrator documents I generate when I am trying out different directions for the design of a logo. I might have been a little too honest, a lot of the work in this book looks like finished work that involves typography. Also, they don't show my final design, for the logo, but that's OK, the reader basically gets a sense of it from the first spread.

Secondary Occupants at UWAG

I'm installing my Secondary Occupants project at the University of Waterloo Art Gallery, (in Waterloo, Ontario). I'll be posting installtion shots in the next couple days.

University of Waterloo Art Gallery

Secondary Occupants Collected & Observed

November 10–December 17, 2011

Opening reception: Thursday, November 10 from 5:00–8:00 pm 

Buffalo on the Bowery Auction

Over the last several months I have been serving as the curator for a charity auction called Buffalo on the Bowery. It's an auction to benefit PUSH (People United for Sustainable Housing) and Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, both important Buffalo organizations. The auction features artists that live and work in Buffalo or are originally from here (there are a few exceptions). The auction will be held at Charles Bank Gallery on Bowery near Spring St. in NYC on October 11th. In addition to curating I'm also doing the identity design and the website design. You can check out the goods at BuffaloBowery.org

Montague Projects at PULSE L.A.

I will be showing new work from the Secondary Occupants Project at PULSE L.A. Art Fair, September 30 to October 6th with Black & White Gallery. It will be all new faux books and posters. you can see some of them on this site here. I'm going to be out there for the fair, so you may find me lurking by my work.