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Comic Con is now over. It was fun, and hectic, and full of work, and some booze, and lots of cool, cool people. One of the highlights for me, as with Comic Con New York, was to meet so many awesome people who I either know only through IM or Twitter, or who I don’t know at all, but am familiar with their work. Among the former group, Tobias S. Buckell (one of our writers at Tor. Go check out his work now, you won’t be disappointed) and I found that we have even more in common than we thought before we met face to face and had a few drinks. Among the latter, I got to meet Charles Stross and Vernor Vinge, two of my favorite authors. Additionally, Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders from io9 turned out to be some of the coolest, most gracious, fun, and genuinely kind people I’ve met here. I’m honored to have them as colleagues.

And then there are the illustrators. I’ve met and gotten to know many people whose work I’ve admired from afar for a very long time, such as Gregory Manchess (whose demo was fascinating. Watching him work is awe-inspiring), Jon Foster, Terry Moore, Donato Giancola, Dave Palumbo, Rebecca Guay, Dan Dos Santos, Todd Lockwood, and Stephan Martiniere; and have found them to be wonderfully witty, gracious, intelligent, and incredibly interesting, to a person. As I sat at a hotel lobby bar last night, having a beer with all these cats (and trying not to nod off due to lack of sleep), I couldn’t imagine that I could be luckier. Who would have thought, five years ago, when I was grinding through and drowning in the advertising world, that I would be sharing good times with the very same people I’ve admired from afar since I first went to college, waaay back in 1998?

Speaking of luck, my flight back to NYC last night was canceled due to weather, so I’m ‘stuck’ in San Diego until tonight. This means that I get to go to the San Diego Zoo later on in the day, as I’d originally planned to do before the Con started, but didn’t have the time. Even better: I get to go with a bunch of the aforementioned illustrators. Life works out, sometimes.

The not-so-super-seekrit project that’s been sucking down so much of everyone’s time over at Tor Books finally goes live today. Tor.com is a new science-fiction and fantasy themed community site, where a whole lot of luminaries from the SF/F fandom community will be contributing content about ‘Science Fiction. Fantasy. The Universe. And Related Subjects.’, as the tagline says.

Tor.com started as a glimmer in the eyes of Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Irene Gallo, and Fritz Foy, over a year ago. With the design direction of regular badass Jamie Stafford-Hill, they’ve been working tirelessly, quietly, and sometimes not-so-quietly on it since. Tor.com will feature original content from some of SF/F’s most talented voices, such as John Scalzi, Charles Stross, and Cory Doctorow; as well as blogging from both genre authors and genre fans (including yours truly). It also features a kickass gallery of SF/F artists, with work from cover artists, game designers, conceptual artists for film and TV, you name it. Additionally, the site is a social network, so you can create a profile and connect with artists, writers, and fellow fans.

As launch date loomed closer, and it came time to recruit bloggers and beta testers, pnh and Irene approached me to see if I would be interested in contributing, to which I replied “Yeah!”. Once they realized that launch date would be the same week as Comic Con San Diego, and that they’d need people there to cover what is probably one of the largest fandom events of the year, Irene popped into my office and asked me if I wanted to go to Comic Con, to which I replied “Fuck yeah!”.

So I’ll be going to and blogging from Comic Con San Diego this week. Don’t hate me too much.

Aside from reportage, I’ll also be posting about other SF/F-related stuff on Tor.com, including a regular column which was originally planned for this site. A while ago, the crew in the art department at Tor realized that there really was no SF/F-specific book cover review blog out there, and we felt there should be. After all, SF/F book design is a very particular thing: we are much more illustration heavy than other genres, we have a particular visual language and ideosyncracies that may be beyond (or beside) the scope of traditional book cover reviews. I shot off an email to my co-workers proposing to start something up, and it became incredibly obvious that the perfect home for a feature like that would be Tor.com. So there you go. Here’s a link to the initial post for that, outlining all the ins-and-outs of how it’s gonna work.

Irene Gallo has blogged and posted some pictures of yesterday’s Tor.com silkscreening session in the conference room at Tor. She says I worked my ass off, but really, I just had a blast. Having everyone bring in their shirts and other materials, showing them how to pull a print, and seeing the looks of surprise and glee once they lift up that screen and grok the results of their work was worth it, tenfold. We have to do it again sometime, and soon!

Cory Doctorow alerted me to some pics he snapped at the University of Washington Bookstore of this badass cosplay costume based on the print I made, which was inspired by Cory’s latest Tor book, Little Brother. To paraphrase Irene Gallo, I’m digging the creativity that’s coming off of this book. This is so, so awesome. Click through for Cory’s photoset, wherein he plays the role of Marcus, complete with slinghshot!

Lorenzo Homar (along with his sometime collaborator, Rafael Tufiño) is one of my favorite artists, ever, and a huge inspiration in my own work. Imagine my delight to see BibliOdissey showcase some of his works from the Homar collection at the Princeton University Library. Shiny! Go check them out, and enjoy!

Over the last few weeks I’ve been seeing the new poster campaign for the Public Theater’s summer productions of Hamlet and Hair, mostly in the subway. Irene Gallo posted an image of the subway ad on The Art Department, and Brand New featured the re-branding (or ‘reinvigorating of the current brand’) of the Public on Friday. Brand New, in turn, pointed me to the Pentagram blog, where the entire scope of the project is chronicled, followed by a retrospective of the posters for productions of years past.

Scher’s work is more of a refresh of the existing brand, and as such, the changes to the brand are subtle. The logotype has been re-set in Knockout, that beautiful, varied and versatile multi-weight sans-serif grotesque from H&FJ, which is so evocative of the old-time wood type that Scher used as inspiration for her graphic approach. This approach still works very well, despite the many, many knockoffs that this particular work has inspired over the years (including some of my own work back in the early oughts–what was that saying about flattery and imitation?).

The posters and postcards showcased on the Pentagram blog are also very attractive. They imply a system that takes its inspiration from both the woodblock type, letterpress broadside tradition of American printing and from the strict use of rules and a grid championed by early-to-mid-century modernist European designers (De Stijl, Bauhaus, etc). The use of halftone imagery with solid colors underneath, although starting to get played out now that everyone has been doing it (I’ll be sad to see it go, I like this aesthetic very much. But I digress.), still serves its purpose well: it hearkens back to the wood–type days (thus, it makes a lot of sense to use within the context of the Public’s identity, ubiquitousness be damned), but also connects with modern design trends. The result is a system for design that, as Scher points out, can be applied by any designer, and lends itself to endless variation on the same theme, resulting in very dynamic layouts which all keep the distinctive Public Theater brand front-and-center.

Abi Sutherland, Making Light contributor and bookbinder extraordinaire, asked me for some of the off-register misprints from the first Little Brother edition, in order to put them to some good use. Well, she’s designed and made a kickass binding out of them, and showed me the pictures today. I then proceeded to run around the office like a thirteen-year-old showing everyone I could find her beautiful work.

The dynamic between Camera Head on the front cover and Marcus on the back works beautifully (check out Abi’s Flickr photoset for images of the spine, the back, and the open spread), and the layout of the type is bold and in-your-face, true to the spirit of the book.

This is a perfect example of why sharing your work and letting others remix it rawks.

A full graphical re-design for this blog is under way, in order to make it a bit cleaner, easier on the eyes, and make it fall in line with my traditionally minimalist gray look for the site (I like the design to get out of the way of the entries as much as possible). The template I’m using right now served to get my feet wet, in terms of how WordPress templates work, but it’s not really visually in line with what I’d like it to be.

So, hopefully within the week I’ll unveil the new, custom-designed look of The New Sleekness, featuring the return of widgets and social media content. In the meantime, here’s a small preview:

This is the final iteration of my Little Brother piece. I’ve re-worked the Camera-Head, and added some more detail to its blazer. In the end, as soon as I realized that I was designing a poster (for myself) as opposed to a mass market book cover (for the particular needs of the mass market), I decided to leave the idea of a textural background aside. For similar reasons, I’ve also replaced the Neil Gaiman blurb with the book’s tag-line, and integrated the arphid graphic from the spine of the cover design.

I’m diggin’ it.

Tomorrow, I’ll go get myself some ink and figure out the separations. I’ll get the seps printed on Friday morning, and hopefully will be in the print shop at Pratt by mid-afternoon. I’m itching to get back in there—it’s been way too long. . . . 

Here’s a progression of that Little Brother sketch I put up a few days ago. This is what happens when I have a weekend to myself. I’ve had lots of fun putting this together, particularly including little easter eggs (hints: run the binary through a translator; check out the ‘maker’s brand’ on the arphid on the spine, etc.). It’s not done—there’s still much work to be done on Mr. ‘Camera Head’, and I feel like it needs some textural elements, possibly in the background. Myabe a city-scape? Some DHS-type seals or other government type printed matter? Who knows, I’m still turning it over in my head.

Most likely this will not be used for the actual cover, but in any case the feedback so far has been good, so I’ll definitely be making silkscreen prints of it at some point.