Print & Editorial.

A catalog for the art people put on the bottom of their skate decks.

Deck graphics are a mode of self-expression, and a lot of riders protect them — some will screw rails onto the bottom of the board just to keep the artwork from getting torn up. Others don’t, because they like the way scratched-up art looks, and some decks are designed for exactly that, where the wear adds to the whole thing. The book runs six skate companies and the graphics they put out, each paired with an iconic park or spot from around the US.

The opening essay is a published piece by Jacob Gallagher, typeset four columns to the spread on a tight measure, ragged right, with the running head and folio held at the foot.

Each of the six brand chapters opens the same way: a park photograph in a dark frame facing the maker's name in italic display.

Then the decks as plates on white, captioned with nothing but rider and year.

It came back from Lulu exactly how I wanted it, and being able to flip through the real thing was the best part. The interior is matte so the black-and-white park photographs don’t glare, and the cover is gloss laminate so the griptape reads as texture.

The finished book, photographed rather than mocked up. The perfect-bound spine lies flat enough that the gutter doesn't eat the inner margin.

An abandoned school I kept walking past, and the history nobody tells you about.

Lamar High School sat empty on Lindsey Hill, near where I was living at the time. I drove by it and walked past it constantly and wondered what it was, so this book became my way of digging into that piece of San Marcos history — and it turned out a lot more interesting than you’d expect. I shot it over multiple days spread out across weeks, going back to find different little photo opportunities each time. We tend to look at abandoned places and take them at face value, but behind them there’s a whole story that nobody knows anymore. I wanted to shine a spotlight on that. More of the photographs are here.

Full-bleed images are spaced throughout to break up the structure, keep it interesting, and give my favorite photographs room to be seen. The book is 22 inches across when it's open, so an empty half-spread sets the pace as much as the picture does.

The one block of text in the book — the school's history from 1868 to now, researched and written by me — set justified against a full-bleed sheet of broken glass.

The photographs I paired were meant to be seen as a pair, not two frames that happened to land on the same spread — almost a short series. Matched size, same top edge.

A guide to being vegan in San Marcos. Issue one.

A conceptual magazine I made as a guide to being vegan in San Marcos. Issue one covers what being vegan actually is and why people choose it, then gets to where you can eat around town if you’re vegan here, plus recipes, essays, and an interview — all centering on veganism. There was never a second issue; the whole thing was built as a concept. Every department is named in a stepped tab running vertically off the outer edge, so you can read the structure before you read a word.

The opening argument. Everything is duotone in tan and maroon, leaning on the school colors of Texas State, which is in San Marcos too. The livestock photographs are there to show the reality of the animals we choose to eat.

The roundup runs six entries across the spread on the same measure as the essay, each photograph overlapped by the panel its review sits on.

Classic typesetting, where you don't notice the typesetting.

This and The Typographic “Modern” were two exercises in showing two different ways of setting type. This is the classic one, and the goal was something nice and readable — invisible enough that you never stop to think about how it was set. Adobe Jenson Pro, a single measure, fleuron ornaments, and margins deep enough that the type block sits high and small on the leaf. Which also happens to be exactly what Warde argues for in the essay itself.

The first spread. A limitation statement facing the secondary title page — an edition of one, declared with the same conventions a real limited edition would use.

Pages 4–5. One measure, running heads, folios in the outer margins, and a first-line indent doing all the work of separating paragraphs.

The other half of the pair — the one where I got to have fun.

Same exercise as The Crystal Goblet, opposite goal. Here I wanted some modern flourish: pull quotes knocked out in yellow highlight straight through the text block, a wide landscape page, and column spacing and orientation pushed to make the typesetting showier. Futura against Adobe Caslon. Two goals, two pretty different results, and setting them back to back is what taught me the most.

Three days, three very different looks for the same idea.

A poster series for a hypothetical three-day conference on propaganda and persuasion, with a poster for each day. I wanted three distinct looks to show how you can take one idea and run it three completely different ways, so the display face, the information hierarchy, and the footer block of date, venue, and URL stay fixed while the image system is fully variable.

Friday is orange on red with two striped spheres staring out like eyes. Saturday is a teal moiré. Sunday is a purple field of ghosted, repeated lettering. This was a fun one to play with — weird type, transforming shapes into something hypnotic, and a good excuse to mess with color.

The rest of the system: a speaker credential and schedule cards.

A deep dive on Bodoni, four posters wide.

Bodoni was one of my favorite typefaces at the time, so I wanted to do a deep dive on it. The hero poster is the type anatomy — its main features, plus who made it and when. The other three each take a different way of showing type off: one with letters, numbers, and symbols; one setting Italian words in italic, harkening back to Bodoni being created by an Italian; and one running different weights and styles, switching between regular and italic to show every variation of the face.

The other three as a run. Same format, same framing, each one showing off a different side of the family.