The Phase Collective

Anders Creative: Letterpress

Here are a couple of recent letterpress cards. The type is a handset wood Gothic Condensed typeface for the “Thanks” and handset foundry Huxley Vertical for “Anders Creative”. As for the elk… just a random line cut. Long live letterpress!

The thank you cards are available for purchase here.

Old Magazines

Hadn’t broken away from the computer in a while, so I pulled out an old magazine, shredded a few pieces, cut a few pieces, and glued it all down. Of course it comes back in to the computer and gets tweaked up a bit. Just a bit though. Sometimes a quick (and otherwise pointless) side project is the perfect fix.

Tags: art, collage, typography

Happy New Year

Happy New Year from the Phase Collective. Get in touch if you’re looking for cool projects or collaborations in 2010. We’ll have plenty.

Best wishes from California!

Tags: digital illustration, happy new year, pixels, polar bear

Image Corruption + Collaboration

So after months of occasionally digging around for this imagery on Google, I finally captured my own snapshots (iPhone). These are the amazing and elaborate visual effects that come through on a corrupted digital cable signal. This stuff fascinates me—the TV ‘fuzz’ of the new millennium. If only I knew what to do with it now that I have it. Have some thoughts? Some collaborative inklings? Let me know here @GabeRuane.

Tags: art, digital, pixels

iPhone Wallpapers 01

Just posted a couple sets of iPhone wallpapers, including some stuff from the never-published Phase04 Habitat PDF mag. Also threw in some Midei City stuff, and some work from my in-progress side project called ‘Upload’. Head over to the link below for downloads, and enjoy:

www.gaberuane.com/wp.html

And shoot us an email if you have some freebies that you’d like to share.

Tags: design, iPhone, Midei City, mobile, typography, wallpapers

Georgia 11pt

Another experiment from Gabe – zooming way in on the pixelated character set of Georgia at 11 points on screen. So the pixels were scaled up, then rebuilt as circles in a blue/black/gray palette to match the anti-aliasing you get in your browser. Small sizes read a lot like regular on-screen type, but you get some interesting abstractions when the characters are presented at larger sizes.

This is one of many side projects that has come together off of earlier projects and experiments. One element from wherever (in this case Phase 02 | Community), revisited and enhanced, then served back up in a place like the Phase blog for the hell of it. Maybe this comes out at some point on client work, but for now, its innocence is intact.

Tags: design, geometric, pixels, typeface, typography

Beantown Katakana

A quick experiment from Gabe at the Phase Collective  – mashing the typographic style of the Red Sox wordmark (going back nearly a century) with the corresponding Japanese Katakana characters.

Tags: baseball, boston, japanese, katakana, red sox, typography

The Phase Collective is re-official!

The Phase Collective is officially re-official! After quite a long break, we’re back at it in 2009, and we’re feeling pretty good about that. Here’s a self-reflective Q&A to catch you up on the last year or so:

Phase Collective: Where have you guys been?

Phase Collective: We’ve been here. In California. San Francisco and San Diego. Working hard on the less-fun stuff that pays the bills. Feeling kind of guilty about dropping off so abruptly – mid issue in fact – but not that guilty really.

Phase Collective: So what happened to Phase Magazine?

Phase Collective: Well, that beast took a lot of time and coordination to curate and design and prepare for distribution. We had to full-on commit to getting it done in its entirety whether we had the time for it or not. Eventually we stalled out completely on what was looking like another great issue, and we’ve realized that the same content is much more likely to get out to our audience if we break it up into bite-sized pieces. Short and sweet for us to publish, short and sweet for everyone to soak in.

Phase Collective: And you think now things will be different?

Phase Collective: Yes. We think so. Change is good.

Phase Collective: What does “change” mean this time around for the Phase Collective?

Phase Collective: This new iteration of the Phase Collective will be all about showcasing cool work from artists, designers, musicians, writers, photographers, film makers, animators, creative thinkers of all stripes. Just like before, but served up blog-style in small and engaging releases. Lots of visual reviews, some interviews maybe, some links here and there, and then of course some original Phase Collective experimental work, open collaborative projects, whatever we feel like bouncing out to the creative classes. The focus will remain on side projects, client-free work, free-reign creativity in all its forms. The things that we/you do to stay fresh and express our voice above and beyond the day job. Not so much about the people behind the work, or about generating a bunch of heated responses to the post, but just a nice shot of cool shit from your global creative counterparts that we think you should experience.

+++

So that’s the deal. We’re excited, and still pressed for time, but that’s cool man. We’ll work it out. So jump on the RSS feed and check back often. Email any time with your creative side projects (jpgs, links, PDFs, however you want us to experience it), and we’ll see about putting your work out there.

Welcome back!