Sept from Susan - Tartan lettering

Susan has a whole series of insects and bugs on her IG - and I was thinking they looked like fantasy creatures. This one makes me wonder if she is looking at actual creatures for the shapes and then being inventive with the details. Susan is probably our most skilled italicist. Or should that be italisizer. Spell check is not fond of either option.

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Yesterday, I called that lettering of the word TARTAN an abomination. Ironically, it was fun to resolve a twinge of bitterness that had lingered for over 50 years. I spent my sophomore and junior years working on the yearbook. It was my only extra curricular activity. I was the person who had put in the most hours and was the logical choice to be the editor my senior year. The advisor who was the art teacher led me to believe that I would be the editor. I do not know what the formal procedure was for naming the editor, but there were two mommies of two other senior girls who had not worked on the yearbook at all - who pulled strings to get those two girls the position of co-editors.

When the art teacher/advisor gave me the news I told him, "Good bye and good luck." I knew it would be a real pain in the neck for him to teach those two what they needed to know to prepare all the pages for the printer. He was one of those teachers who left in the middle of every class to go smoke a cigarette - and seemed to just *phone it in* as they used to say.

My mom offered to call the school or appear in person to see if she could help me with the situation but I declined. The incident was a good learning experience - accepting unfairness. Now - I am so happy that I did not work on the year book. I knew nothing about design and even less about lettering. My cover  probably would have been cringe-worthy. I'm glad I was spared having to look at my cheezy high school art and that my name wasn't in the list of contributors.

That drawing of the lights and toad stools isn't half bad. I could easily have done something that was 100% bad. So maybe the gods of fairness were just looking out for me. I hope, in their spare time, they will go through the blog and delete all my cringeworthy envelopes. 

The design principle that I used on the Reflections book cover was repetition. Repetition is one of my favorite design principles. So if you are asked to make something out of an existing thing that is not gorgeous - just crop it and repeat it and flip it around until it works. While 6 and 9 are a reflection - numbers are so versatile that any two numbers would have worked.