Summary

This is a school project I worked on during my InDesign class at Berkeley Extension, and it was a very exciting one because my background in journalism and design came here together to tell a visual story. This is a story of ISKRA, an adventure magazine for those who appreciate art, tech, spiritual awakening and enlightenment, literature, and culture in general.

ISKRA is named after Iskra newspaper, a political newspaper of Russian socialist emigrants managed by Vladimir Lenin, first published in Germany in 1900. Iskra quickly became the most successful underground Russian newspaper, launching a battle for political freedom from the Tzar regime that had been well established in Russia for centuries. Iskra also often viewed as cause of socialist revolution and later - USSR. Not that I’m a huge supporter of Communism - far from that - but the true meaning of Iskra for me lies in the mass awakening that it advocated. It was a time for social changes, for revisiting what doesn’t work, for giving equal rights to the poor, for education, and for dreams. Today America is facing similar problems in many ways. In a country where the government spends trillions of dollars on the military and prison industrial complexes, while more than forty million citizens live in poverty, where the average employee needs to work more than a month to earn what the CEO earns in one hour, there is definitely a need for social and economic changes. ISKRA is aimed at addressing these issues, and much more.

ISKRA layouts use black, white and red colors (after all, red is a color of revolution), Superclarendon as a typeface for the headings and Futura in a body text.

Summary

In this mini project I designed a CD cover for a San Francisco based singer and composer Chris Gleckman. The name of the album is Summer Fog, and I wanted Chris to be lost in it. It’s a San Francisco summer after all! I also wanted San Francisco to be a coauthor of the music as well because it inspired the album, by incorporating the city image into the CD cover itself, on the main cover and on the insert.

For the typography, I used ITC Avant Garde Gothic Pro Book typeface. I needed a typeface to compliment the dreamy look I was going for, and it immediately caught my attention because of its openness. The bowl of an O resembled a circular shape of the CD, and to me represents the unity of human beings with the environment.

Summer Fog was a collaborative project with a photographer Ksu Postolnik who followed Chris and his guitar in San Francisco lost in fog.

Summary

I worked on this project during my typography class in Berkeley Extension, and designed a typeface and a typography poster, which was a challenging but rewarding task. It’s when you actually design the whole collection of letters and numbers that you start to get what typography is all about. Proportions, tiniest details, shapes, and relations.

Meet LADA, a typeface inspired by the early Cyrillic alphabet and named after the Slavic goddess of creation. I wanted to create a typeface that will be playful and yet tough. That’s why the decorative elements here add playfulness to the sturdiness of the letters. Ying and Yang, in a Russian way. Lada is best used in large sizes - posters, banners, advertising. And, perhaps, flowers.