For all to see

The sea is so big, and my contribution is so small …

On the bright side, it's a darned nice looking sea in which to bob about. (Look, ma, I'm in a museum!)

Designer Lisa Park-Steskal just sent me photos of an exhibit she helped create for the Lindsay Wildlife Museum in Walnut Creek, Calif. Lisa commissioned me to create spot illustrations for it. You can see two of them in the picture above, if you know where to look.

This is one of several opportunities to work with Lisa, including signage in Old Sacramento (and here and here) and an Arts & Crafts-influenced promotion.

The museum exhibit describes raptors, or birds of prey such as falcons, hawks and eagles. My job was to illuminate key design components of the raptors' talons and the birds' lightweight bones. The white illustrations on blue backgrounds are supposed to evoke a diagrammatic, blueprinty feel.

Here's an example:

A Swiss cheese of air and strutts and bubbles make raptors' bones so light.

They were the size of coffee saucers all the time I was working on them, through several iterations.

Even though my head told me they were meant to support larger ideas about raptors, my heart started convincing me these were gonna be marquee features.

In the end, they're just right in a sweeping, clean, engaging design.

Lisa had the illustrations affixed  to disks so they float off the display, like medallions. The understated circle gets vigorous and intelligent use throughout the museum displays here, cuing and drawing visitors to isolated bits of information.

Maybe someone will take a good look at my spots and come away with the rather cool concept that raptors have a way of locking their talons closed, so they don't have to waste any muscles holding dinner tight while they fly away.

Forced to answer, without a moment's hesitation, what I'd really like to do with my work life, I'd say designing museum exhibits.

Museums fascinate me for meta-exhibition — not only for what they contain, but how they present what they contain. It's science and dark art, finding the right ways to convey information to all visitors in as many possible ways, and to move them through the arenas. In my limited museum world-view, I'd say it's an extremely difficult job to do well.

As a teacher, my unreachable goal was to engage students as much as possible, so that learning became enjoyable and overcame boredom. It's small wonder that kids clamor for field trips to museums; sure, it's a day off from the tyranny of routine, but it's knowledge in which, done well, they can immerse themselves and touch and twist and discover.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium does this well. I once convinced my wife to stay from opening to closing, half to talk in the vast volume of data, half for the countless means and media to impart the data.  

It's design and illustration and communication writ large and re-writ constantly to meet consumer needs. I'd love to do more of this.

Spots before your eyes!™©®*

This spot leaves plenty of room for text "callouts,"
describing the tendon's special mechanics as the
talon closes.

*(I really should trademark this; it was the headline I used back in the day when I mailed postcards featuring my work to prospective clients. Nobody else get any ideas!)

I just finished these spot illustrations for a display that will go up at the Lindsay Wildlife Museum in Walnut Creek, Calif. The display describes raptors (owls, hawks, falcons and other birds of prey), and the spots illustrate lightweight bird bones, plus something I didn't know before: How raptors hold said prey.

It turns out that as certain leg muscles pull the raptors' sharp talons closed, the tendon attached to the underside of the claw catches on the folds of a sheath around the tendon as it fold together like an accordion. The underside of that specialized talon has a jagged set of teeth that catch on the folds and holds the talon in place so that the birds don't have to contract their muscles constantly.

The roller coaster car is meant to show how
the "teeth" on the talon tendon and the tendon sheath
catch each other, in the same way that pins on the
car catch the teeth of the belt raising the car to
its eventual speedy descent. The client chose the
version without the riders.

The display also demonstrates a key factor in flight: Hollow bones. The bone structure is supported by a mad maze of bony struts in every direction within the bone. I wouldn't call it a honeycomb because that would imply order and uniformity. I'm curious, though, whether some order exists within the bone beyond my ability to see it.

I'll post the display when it's available.

It was another opportunity to work with Lisa Park-Steskal, who designed the new Old Sacramento signs for which I illustrated. (Also here and here.)

Lisa wanted a blueprint look but in a sketchy, loose style, as if the museum was jotting down relatable concepts to help visitors understand what was going on in a raptor's claws and bones.

Birds' bones are not solid, but shot through with tiny struts,
making them light for flight.

Encouraging signs

A sign, serving its humble purpose! Success!

Two-thirds of the signs I illustrated for Old Sacramento have been installed. Hoo! Ray!

The signs went up at Pioneer Park (right) and at the Lauriet Assay Office. I know you join me in anxious vigil for the Waterfront Park signs to appear. Smoke 'em if you got 'em.

Seeing the signs for the first time last week, I did three things:

1. Wiped off pollen and smudges with my shirttail,
2. Wondered morbidly when someone would deface them, and
3. Realized they are awash in a great ocean of signs in Old Sacramento; so many signs, each so different from the next, you'd think they're what holds up the buildings.

Named for a bakery … that occupied
the site next door.

These new signs are necessarily understated, a dark chocolate on a cream background, designed by Lisa Park to blend in to the 19th Century surroundings, and then become visible to provide handy information the moment visitors wonder what the heck they're looking at.

Though I understand that, I wouldn't mind a little neon, or maybe another sign telling visitors, "Hey! Look at this cool sign!"

As I guide visitors through Underground Sacramento (in the character of an Irish lout-turned-clerk) I tell them with a wink the signs are new and that I'm familiar with the artist's work.

Though the signs are pebbles in a pond, I'm happy knowing they're part of a much larger long-term plan to reveal more of the lunatic history of Sacramento, in which founders built too close to the Sacramento and American rivers, and solved the problem of their own making by lifting the city out of the floodwaters.

A good place for a sign answering,
"What the heck is this?"

Eventually, as The Sacramento Bee reports, the state would like to re-establish two levels of the city in what seems like an empty lawn at Front and I streets in the heart of the old city — the 1849 level of the city, where foundations are still intact, and the post-1864 city level, some 20 feet above.

I'm hoping sooner than later, and that the economy turns around to make it so.

Artsy craftsy: New work

A new opportunity to work with designer Lisa Park arose recently, an emergency illustration for an upcoming home and garden tour in a Sacramento neighborhood (other work here, here and here).

The trick was to depict an actual Curtis Park home, modify its landscape, give the overall feel an Arts and Crafts look (which in graphic design and illustration features thick lines almost overwhelming detail, turning shapes into simplified icons; contemporary illustrator and printer David Lance Goines regularly employs the Arts and Crafts look), and get it done fast.

My first thought was uncomfortable: Shingles and leaves in a short time. Drawing as I do, right-handed with a mouse (I'm left-handed), I recoiled at the thought of all the leaves and minute lines representing the roof.
Luckily, all Lisa needed was line art. She would apply the color, type and overall design.

The outside shapes would be easy by comparison. (My son has since lent me his electronic tablet, and once I get a pen to replace his that was lost, I'll have a learning curve ahead of me, but will be grateful to speed the process one day soon.) The devil would indeed be in the details.

This is the postcard. The package includes a poster, which required me to make the elements as separate entities so that Lisa could move them to fit different dimensions.

This is the line art as I composed it, for my own entertainment. You can see how the elements differ from the postcard:

The azalea-like flowers above I had designed to nestle in the slope of the roof, but making them independent allowed Lisa to move them for the design.

Ultimately, the illustration doesn't fully embody the Arts and Crafts look; the home's style fits that movement, but the depiction of if is more architectural than ornamental. Only the azaleas above and undulant grasses below, I think, truly bespeak the Arts and Craft look.

Ironically, if I had worked less hard on the project, thickening outlines and tossing out details (and having time to sweat out which details to lose) the finished piece would have carried the Arts and Crafts theme more globally. A fun challenge, though.