Miriello Grafico

BARRIO LOGAN DESCUBIERTO is a visual celebration of the working waterfront Hispanic neighborhood in San Diego, called Barrio Logan. The 88 page book is a graphic expose of the visual richness and unique creative energy of the community, featuring details of murals, typography,  sign painters, activists art and general community visual richness.
The book is designed by the team here at MG, led by Lauren English, many who have been active in the promotion and celebration of the community and it’s passionate and active creative members. The book contains a listing our neighborhood discoveries of cool, including artists, restaurants, activists, cafes, place we as designers have discovered and wanted to turn others onto.

While many work so feverishly to be wealthy, then build a fence around the property and never come in contact with the real world, the Barrio stands for the opposite. It’s a place where people share their feelings, their color, and eccentricities. The pathway to riches very much depends on how you define the riches. – RM

Preview the complete book at  http://www.miriellografico.com/mg/barriobook/. The book is available from that link for about $68.  That’s the publishers price, but they do a decent job. (We’ll even customize it with tipped-in found objects from the streets if you want to bring it in.)

Viva mejor.

My car buddy-friend Andrew Duncan, just sent me this site about a just released new cool book called Go Faster Race | Race Car Graphic Design on auto racing graphics authored by Sven Voelker. And their video is cool too. (click on the main photo for that) Racing car graphics from the 60’s and 70’s are one reason I became intrigued by graphic design as a kid growing up in Colorado. – RM

Sven says about his new book:    “Most people don’t know that racing cars from the likes of Porsche and Ferrari were given their looks not by marketing strategists or designers, but by chance. Go Faster (available here on Amazon) is a collection of over one hundred examples of race car design that documents the carefree anarchy in which they were created. In the book, each colorful racing car is featured next to a blank, white model. Thanks to this juxtaposition, Go Faster shows its readers exactly how graphics modulate the look of the vehicle. The neutral models also give readers ample opportunity to imagine their own possibilities for graphic design in motor sports. ”

Our Aussie friend Ian McCallum created the website This Ain’t No Disco to track design trends and in particular, design office spaces. After listing the The Logan last year, he called Miriello Grafico late last year to be featured in his book coming out in April. (I’d like to actually meet Ian someday . . .)  and he put the entire project together in just a few months- a super-organized guy. Here’s what he says about his book- Where We Work – Creative Office Spaces :

Showcasing forty-five of the world’s most extravagant and inspiring work environments from internationally acclaimed and recognized agencies within the advertising, media and design industry, Where We Work explores how creative agencies transform lifeless commercial spaces into bastions of creativity, offering inspiring interiors and visual insight into the breadth and depth of each agency’s thinking. Spaces that not only inspire, but invite us to re-evaluate our lives from nine to five.

To complement the visual showcase of interior design, Where We Work provides an in-depth look at the direction and thought processes behind each agency’s work environment, giving important insight into current and future trends of creative office interior design from some of the world’s most creative companies. Whether the concepts are personal, indulgent or simply well thought out, Where We Work showcases a variety of offices where the pursuit of imagination is the driving force.

Pre-info. is up on Amazon now. The book is published by HarperCollins

The Slow Food movement started in Torino Italy and touched a nerve across the globe. Eat locally, support the local economy and build real community, around food.  For most Italians is not something that needs to be learned, but rather something they’re striving not to forget.

Douglas Gayeton is a writer,  photographer, ice cream maker and now author as very well. He’s  just published a very cool book called  SLOW LIFE IN A TUSCAN TOWN.

Douglas in his on-line interview, explained how the project started this way, ” I was eating at a restaurant near my apartment in Pistoia, Italy and after the meal, I went into kitchen and I said to the chef, “Everything was very good. I wish I could cook like this.” And he said, “Come back tomorrow morning.” So, the next morning at eight o’clock, I met him at a caffé and we went to a butcher. We went to buy all these vegetables. Then, I found myself working for six months at his restaurant. At the time, PBS asked about doing a piece on Slow Food, which was going to be a documentary with a bunch of talking heads. The people in my town, they all lived philosophy of Slow Food, but they didn’t even know what Slow Food was. I tried to capture that.”

I’ve already invited him to our house in Italy so we can compare stories and discoveries. Hope it happens.

The photography and overdrawing by Gayeton are a great visual approach for the text. It’s published by Welcome Books.  rm

Spread sample from Magcloud publications W25 magazine and Mankind mag.

After finishing our BLURB book on Barrio Logan a few months, tracking self-publishing has been on my radar. While  “vanity press” was once the last resort for struggling writers, it seems like it could become the new “test ground” for print publishers. With the publishing model under financial strain (what other business model allows retailers to send back their unsold units for refund and destruction) they can now cherry pick the selected “draft” publications with the potential for a more mass distribution, without having to pre-fund traditional royalties, production costs, etc.

My friend Troy Viss just sent me to Magcloud.com ,  an on-line self-publishing magazine site. I just ordered a sample copy of a cool design form the Philippines. If the quality is decent we’ll  experiment with the model. At .20 a pages it’s affordable and a new tool that when matched with quality creative can help move opinion and spawn ideas. All part of the “Creativity is the New Currency” mantra we’re chanting here at MG.- Ron

The images above are pages from a few Magcloud magazines.

The highly successful logo book Really Good Logos- Explained, has been translated for the German market. Authors Margo Chase, Rian Huges, Ron Miriello and Alex White take a different approach to logos in the book and actually explain what they like and don’t like with over 500 logos – and why. The “why” part has helped to make the book a strong seller among students, professionals . . . and now Germans as well.

Editor Nancy Heinonen/Rockport Publishers said, “We could tell from the interest and orders from abroad that there was a bigger market for this book than the typical logo or design book. It may likely go into other languages as well in 2009. It’s more than cool logos- it’s about the logic and reason of why they work, what makes them good.”

Wirklich Gute Logos . . . now available in your finer German bookstores up and down the Rhine.

If a picture is worth a thousand words than a logo must be worth a few hundred thousand then, no? We just finished a little book called A Logo is Not a Brand that features a host of Miriello Grafico logos. And it shows how a logo functions like the front cover of a book, a set-up for all that’s to come, while the brand is the full story inside the book. It seems to help the confused and brand-forlorned.

The little 44 page book that could is available on mighty blurb.com.

The difference between a craftsman and an artist has always intrigued me. I have increasing thought of my role as a designer very much as a craft. A modern day craft, using a computer and the latest technology possibly, but a craft all the same. When I heard of a book Craftsman by Richard Sennett (2008 Yale University Press) that explored the subject of the role and definition of crafts in the modern world, I read it and enjoyed it immensely.

Here’s what the Yale University Press says about Sennett’s book:

Defining craftsmanship far more broadly than “skilled manual labor,” Richard Sennett maintains that the computer programmer, the doctor, the artist, and even the parent and citizen engage in a craftsman’s work. Craftsmanship names the basic human impulse to do a job well for its own sake, says the author, and good craftsmanship involves developing skills and focusing on the work rather than ourselves. In this thought-provoking book, one of our most distinguished public intellectuals explores the work of craftsmen past and present, identifies deep connections between material consciousness and ethical values, and challenges received ideas about what constitutes good work in today’s world.

Click here to listen to an interview with Richard Sennett on the Yale Press Podcast. author.http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/podcast/Addendum_Sennett.mp3

A book that attempts to explain “just what were those design judges thinking anyway.”

Rockport Publishers www.rockpub.com. and Cresent Hill Books asked Margo Chase, Alex White, Rian Hughes and Ron Miriello to co-author a new design book concept. Editor Nancy Heinonen had the idea to publish the behind-the-selection-process dialog between design judges to help readers better understand what makes a logo design work and not work. It was a smart ideas and we all agreed to pour over thousands of logo entries and cull them down to the best 500 AND document our critiques and reasoning in writing. The book, Really Good Logos Explained, is a great learning tool and logo reference. It has just been released by Rockport Publishing and is available at: http://www.amazon.com/Really-Good-Logos-Explained-Professionals/dp/1592534279

Learn more about the authors by visiting Marco Chase at http://www.margochase.com/ Alex White at http://www.tdc.org/about/white.html and Rian Hughes at http://www.devicefonts.co.uk