I love weird side projects.
A little inspiration, late hours, coffee and whisky, and a new side project gets added to the list.
Local Crush
The last truly affordable souvenir
We've been collecting pressed pennies for years, and always thought that more places should offer these kitchy little keepsakes. So... we bought one, and made souvenir designs for our favorite spots in downtown Lawrence KS.
Local Crush is a moving penny press; The machine moves to a new location every month, and every quarter is donated to a charity of the host store's choice.
Dracula Daily Book
Yes we printed the newsletter
The Dracula Daily newsletter was a surprise hit in 2022, spawning a huge response on the internet. The new print edition includes the full text of Bram Stoker's Dracula, but rearranged in my strictly-chronological order, and includes a healthy sampling of my favorite memes, jokes, and artwork created by the internet community in 2022.
In the Stacks, by Robin Sloan
A New Year's diversion presented by Brand New Box
To celebrate the new year, I commissioned a new short story by Robin Sloan, best-selling author of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore and Sourdough. It's a bit of a love-letter to Lawrence KS, and a celebration of learning new things. We printed nice copies and gave them to clients and Friends of BNB.
We also made an online version with a little synthesizer toy! You can read it here.
Dumb Cuneiform
Clay-Tablet-as-a-Service
You can send me your dumb tweets and I'll inscribe them into a clay tablet and send it to you in the mail. Really, I will. I'll even transliterate it into Old Persian cuneiform.
The oldest written messages from humans are utterly banal: receipts, accounts, nagging and beefs. I loved reading some translations of ancient cuneiform tablets and I thought: this is just like Twitter.
The project got a good bump of press when it launched - dozens of articles, The New York Times, a public radio interview in Canada, and a million tweets.
Dracula Daily
Reading Dracula in real time
Bram Stoker’s Dracula is an epistolary novel - it’s made up of letters, diaries, telegrams, newspaper clippings - and every part of it has a date. The whole story happens between May 3 and November 10. So: Dracula Daily posts a newsletter each day that something happens to the characters, in the same timeline that it happens to them.
Now you can read the book via email, in small digestible chunks - as it happens to the characters.
I wrote about it in a bit more detail here, but really the thing to do is just go check out the substack (if it still exists).
The Charles Williams Library
You've probably never heard of him
I designed and published really nice copies of semi-obscure books.
As an outgrowth of my involvement with the Charles Williams Society, I got funding to design and print collector's hardback editions of Williams novels. They're really great, despite their esoteric reputation.
The books-as-objects themselves are fun: they're exactly the version I always wanted to buy but never existed.
Tilman Riemenschneider
You've probably never heard of him
I love this one particular sculptor from the late medeival period, and there's not a ton of resources about his work. But it should be better known! So I made a site that's starting to catalog his work, in hopefully an engaging format.
I got to spend a few days in Germany touring the region where he lived - the majority of his extant work is still in Bavaria!
Mighty Oak
Artisinal Itch Relief
After being driven bonkers by the itchy oak mites that beseiged the Midwest, Erika found a magic formula of nice-smelling essential oils. She kept making batches for neighbors, so in 2017 we put a brand together.
They're now carried in a couple of retail locations, and available from our website. We did the branding work together, and Erika created a series of beautiful watercolor smoodges.
Proposition Party
It was a different time
In 2008 some friends and I started a series of parties that examined the California ballot propositions. We made a site to share this good idea for other elections since. After 2016's results, however, it seems like maybe our efforts should have been spent elsewhere.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The Charles Williams Society
Promoting the Third Inkling
The Charles Williams Society is an incredible group of scholars, readers, clergy and fans that supports an overlooked author. I helped with our website and eventually joined the board. Williams himself was literary friends with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, and wrote novels, poetry, plays and more.
I managed the website for a while, got to visit the society in Oxford a few times, and now run an infrequently-updated newsletter and an occasional book series.
The Lost Kingdom of John
Never heard of 'em
I spent a few years fixated on a historical figure that never existed and everyone forgot about: Prester John, King of the Indies. He's mentioned in Shakespeare and Maro Polo, but somehow we've collectively forgotten about him.
I ended up giving a few talks on the man, which included doing some extremely overwrought slide designs
Samuel Johnson Essays
dead man blogging
Samuel Johnson wrote some killer blog posts 260 years ago, but he published them in a newspaper. I helped him do it right this time.
This project time-shifted hundreds of essays, and ran over a six-year time span. I wrote a summary of the experience here, but you can read for yourself. It's used now as a reference by a few college courses, which seems weird.
The Westminster Shorter Catechism
designed
A while back, I was trying to get my head around the Westminster Shorter Catechism, a series of theological questions-and-answers. I tried my hand at designing my way thru the series, with mixed success.
It was also an excuse to rip off some Sagmeister.
In Vestimentis Ursum
wolves in bear's clothing
When I first became a 'professional' product designer, I was very interested in the mechanical workings inside those articulated stuffed animals that can sing and dance. So I took some apart.
The resulting little microsite, which got a lot of coverage at the time, ranges from 'Huh' to 'OK, a little weird,' to 'NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE.'
Ex Unum Pluribus!
Designing a better nation-state
It's more obvious than ever that our country would be better off if we split the union into smaller, more functional nations. Ex Unum, Pluribus! is my grassroots movement to do just that. I started the site in 2004 and people are STILL submitting proposals.
You can peruse maps that others have proposed, or you can download a template to carve up the US.
