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.

Instead of having the circus come to town once a year, what if it was a monthly deal in the backyard of an old house- showing the bizarre instead of the banal? That’s what’s been happening at Bruce Cartier’s Technomania Circus a few blocks from Miriello Grafico, here in Barrio Logan.

Here’s what Cartier says about it, “Technomania Circus is difficult to explain, but easy to enjoy. You never know what you’ll find happening in the Blackyard: blacklight illusion, performance art, dance, puppetry, music, and more. Whatever you find, it’s never ordinary. From our inception in North Park’s Xanth Club in 1999, to a several-year stint in the Bay Area, to the current location at the Center for Amusing Arts in Barrio Logan, we’ve been breaking down the barriers between performer and audience, between culture and crudity, and changing everything you thought you knew about theater in the process. We strive to remain all-inclusive yet retain our edgy and experimental nature.”

I’m making it part of my 2010 entertainment plan. Gotta love the grassroots, underground energy behind it all. And besides I seemed to have outgrown the Barnum’s thing a while back.- RM

My friend Sean Kelley let me in on his fondness for the story of Yvon Chouinard, the man behind Patagonia. Over our fruit-plate lunches at Patty’s here in the Barrio, he shared with me the background of the soon-to-be-released movie called 180° SOUTH, that retraces Chouinard’s road trip to South America and Patagonia in the 60’s.  I particularly like the line in the trailer “It’s not an adventure til something goes wrong.”

Talk about a story that has stayed true to the brand, Patagonia is more a brand that has stayed true to “The man”, Chouniard himself.

180° SOUTH is the story of one of the most unique and prolific environmentalists of our time -Yvon Chouinard. Rather than re-living Yvon’s story through old photos and his life’s work with pie charts, 180° SOUTH weaves Chouinard’s tale through a modern day expedition. This expedition was inspired by the rumor of a legendary trip in 1968 and the proof that came with it when the lost cans of film that documented the trip were recently discovered. The old footage captures Chouinard and best friend Doug Tompkins in 1968 as they explore untouched mountain ranges and un-surfed coastline on a 5000 mile expedition from California to deep Patagonia. For the two men, the original ‘68 adventure still stands as “the trip of our lives.”

Thanks Sean.

It can be refreshing when a business is flat-out honest about it’s limitations and what it can and can’t do well. Especially when being frank and honest helps make that business wildly successful when most everyone else around them is floundering or bankrupt.

Michael O’Leary President of RyanAir, the European low price air carrier, doesn’t hold back or play nice with his customers, quite the contrary actually. He has made a brand personality out of delivering on the bare minimum people want from air travel; cheap, on-time and no lost luggage. Expect to get lip or up-charged for just about anything else you ask for, including using their in-air bathroom.

Here’s a complete article from the New York Times on what makes the RyanAir brand tick. And it’s not their customer service, attention to detail, or added value. It’s their no frills, bare minimum basics at a cheap price that seem to be the mantra of the current economy. Stay tuned.

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.

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 editor of Top Estate magazine from the Ukraine is Lubov Franchuk., a sharp and professional editor of one of the leading life style magazine in the region. He just sent us a copy of the latest edition which features a wide selection of highly creative architecture and design from far flung places. The Miriello Grafico office is in between a spread on the Bordello Bar from London and Al Rostamani’s latest real estate mega development in Dubai.  Rich visuals throughout, and absolutely no idea what the stories might be about.

Share in the confusion at Top Estate’s website : http://www.top-estate.com.ua

In the September 08 edition of Wired magazine there’s a small article on a very cool little Germany company called Fluidforms. These guys have wired together Google maps + CAD cutting technologies and a web interface to allow some very amazing one-of-a-kind things to be made. I just went to their site www.fluid-forms.at and ordered a topographic CAD cut wooden bowl-form of our home village in Italy- Radicondoli (Si).

The Fluidforms site allows you to enter a place or zip code like Google Maps, but then renders the location into topo form so you can preview it’s potential as a sculptural object. A very innovative combination of technology that creates a company “brand” that’s both customer centric and entirely made-to-order.

Here’s what they say about themselves: “Each part of the earth is unique in then design of her heights and depths. Fluidforms enables customers to have a piece of this singularity on a table at home. The different contour lines of a chosen area define the shape of the bowl. An expedition into landscapes and cities only known from hiking. The earth becomes a sensory experience, that can be filled with the fruits of the earth.”

When I travel I try to connect with craftsmen whenever I can. (Here are a few photos of a Rome woodcarver and Pisticci shoemaker, two of many I’ve managed to pester, befriend and often then take to lunch.) It’s been a way to learn and connect with real people in far away places. The tools that craftsmen use have also been a fascination. I come home with cool jewelry shaping anvils or wood chisels, just because they were so well designed and impeccably crafted. So when we got a call recently from Craig Winer and Garry Chinn from Garrett Wade in New York City asking if Miriello Grafico might be interested in helping their “tools for enthusiasts” catalog perform better, the answer was an easy “yes”.

Garry has been traveling the world for decades sourcing the coolest, best-made hand tools the world has to offer. Japanese specialty saws, Swedish carving knives, re-issued British tools made from the original metal molds, all the hard to find, form-follows- function tools that transcend their original functional role.

We’re in the process of diving deep into the Garrett Wade brand and catalog design. When the product is as good as this, the design work is more about setting the stage than fabricating a story. I love working when it feels like play.

Garry and Craig’s Garrett Wade site is : www.garrettwade.com

Coming on the heals of this Spring’s 2008 AIGA Y-Conference on Sustainability in Design was the recent AIGA San Diego Student Portfolio Review event. These two events seemed connected in my mind by how they both contributed small puzzle pieces of what I’m sensing is a rethinking of what will make design more relevant, or meaningful, in the coming years. (You might say brands and marketing are more relevant now than ever, but hold on.) Both events moved the design conversation away from “trend-talk” and, instead, showed how designers willing to apply their unique powers of influence and communications will undoubtedly change-thinking and stimulate positive action. (Lord knows there’s a huge market in our growing national “change needed” sector.)

The AIGA Y-Conference on Sustainability began the conversation shift. And Michael Osborne layered onto it when he spoke about the pro-bono efforts of his San Francisco studio MODSF, and how his team is efficiently directing some of their energy and skills to causes in need of a louder voice. I see a consciousness shift beginning in the new crop of designers - and it’s exciting. Osborne is a kind of design pragmatist, willing to share his abilities with as many as he can, rather than insisting they always go to the highest bidder. It’s a Target-like, egalitarian approach. In fact, his currency seems to be highest-need rather than fattest-wallet. And it doesn’t hurt that he’s an astute business man, creating the success that can fund the causes of choice.

The “shift” happens when the talented designer recognizes their most valuable currency is in their ability to reach people, to communicate. Michael Osborne and Free Range Studios are examples of studios changing the design dialog by shifting their intentions.

Learn about Michael Osborne at www.modsf.com/ Visit Free Range Studios at www.freerangestudios.com/