Low Tech
Around 2012 I began working on projects in the bike industry. I’m not sure exactly how that found me, but when I started doing this stuff, I was all in on skate and snow, eventually I was just taking what I could get, considering I wasn’t getting those gigs. I started by making hang tags for an apparel company that eventually got squeezed out of the industry. Mountain biking was a big part of my life, so that may have been it, but I was so green to everything. A few years later, I was working on projects that were logos and complete branding projects with-in the industry.
Our 2 children were attending City of Lakes Waldorf School, Minneapolis. I was between freelancing, working at Angry Catfish Bicycle around this time. Taking on more work, especially work that’s unpaid wasn’t really a possibility, but when I was asked by the school to help with their Bike-A-Thon fundraiser. I had to say yes.
If you’re not familiar with Waldorf education, they don’t use technology. A screen-free school was important to us, as we learned that our son suffered from epilepsy early in life. We were guilty of babysitting them with screens to catch up on chores, but eventually called it quits completely. Instead we got more creative with how we included them with chores or just accepted the messy house. This added to the busy schedule. I couldn’t quite figure out a good concept to get this started.
Eventually, I was riding home from school drop off (we were car-free), and it clicked as leaves were falling. Let’s use the seasons. The school celebrates with the seasons, the art should too. When I got home I started just picking all the things around the yard. and created a composition from found materials.
Way back in the day, I didn’t have my own computer. A lot of projects were very scrappy. I used stencils, press type. I would make toner transfers from copy machines, anything I could to make interesting typographic treatments. Mostly, I used friends’ computers, work computers, school or Kinko’s. Who else spent time designing at Kinko’s all night, because your buddy gave you all the free computer time. Eventually, I got one of those candy colored iMacs. That lasted a year.
This project, I tried a few things. Experimented with calligraphy, and drawn, but I wanted to be a little child-like mixed with clean type, so I started to cut stencils. I photographed the bike I assembled out of natural materials, created a lake out of watercolor and made a PNG of the type and dropped it behind the composition. The computer came out for the logo add-ons of the sponsors and the completion of the composition. Otherwise, this was pretty low-tech. It was labor of love. It was well received and I worked on them until 2019.
Blend of work from the 4 years of this project.