There’s cheezy mixtape metaphors galore in the current issue of LAB (and some fantastically cheezy mac & cheese box covers), which brings potential for a bit of embarrassment at some point in the future, when mixtapes are all played out. Again. Meanwhile, we’re going to revel in the renaissance of mixtape culture and B-side nostalgia.

Cassette from my ex serves up some bitter-sweet mixtape memories. From the site description: They were into you, so they made you a tape. Today you don’t have a cassette player, but you still can’t toss that mix. We share the stories and the soundtrack to your earliest loves.

Here’s a comic about a mixtape gone wrong from Nate Beaty, the bloke responsible for the coding voodoo behind LAB‘s online robot body.

Maybe in the mood for some fresh(er) mixes? Check out muxtape, where you can create & share mp3 mixtapes, the way the kids do. Out with the old, in with the new. Or maybe: in with the old in the form of the new.

Ketchup on the Carpet; Blue Slushie Tongue; Unicorn Toupé; Candy Necklace Crisis; Mississippi Mud Crunk… all good names for this issue, if it were a mixtape—a nitty-gritty mix of creative culture grilled on a butter-brushed grid. Kicking off side A, we’ve got a brassy track on Indian street graphics by Meena Kadri. Horn please OK! Followed by an avalanche of color in Sudeep’s Army of Gods photo essay. Next, Kicey’s architectural constructs, stitched together with crunchy cliq-hop glitch beats. We get some authentic Memphis grit all up in our grill with Geoffrey Ellis’s photography of deep-fried Americana. Soothing our optic nerves, Joe “Saxy” Sayers lays down a silky smooth jazz groove for chill midnight relaxation. The highlight of the next track is Bingaman-Burt’s implementation of an exotic instrument: a can of compressed air! On side B, a wunderkabinet of visual oddities: pocket protectors, mac & cheese boxes, casino carpet—all make for a lush hypnotic percussion track, followed by a solo fantastico on extant design by Andrew Filer. Finishing the B side, some lovely cuts: a chat with a couch-surfing librarian, a folk artist who performs with a crochet alligator (who is interviewed by a terry-cloth monkey), and a Benedictine monk who builds paper model polyhedrons. So pick a nice summer evening, stick a mixtape in the boombox, grab some cheesecake, sit back on the porch, and let life be good to you.
Joseph Robertson, June 2008

Hooray! LAB 02 is out. LAB continues to change and evolve. This issue is being published via MagCloud, a new print-on-demand service for magazines. Which means you can now subscribe (oh how patiently you’ve waited!). Derek Powazek does a great job of explaining MagCloud in this Magazineer post.

Also new this time around: the print version and web PDF are different lengths—58 pages and 100 pages, respectively. We condensed the print version to keep the cost of the issue down. The free web PDF is the full version of the issue, with extra features and extended versions of articles.

In keeping with LAB‘s spirt of Slow Making (see intro to last issue), aka crockpot design, we handlettered all titles & displays; scanned over 200 mac & cheese box covers; invited all interviewees to participate in the editing process (via shared Google docs); made from scratch all hummus and bread consumed during the process (wait, that’s Slow Food); created three custom hand-lettered custom typefaces (Handvetica, TacoTruck, and Multitudinous); and, to slow things down to a pace between that of a banana slug and a sloth, made the page markers by hand with watercolor brushes (yep, all 100).

Those fantastic cover photos are from Meena Kadri’s photo-essay on Indian street graphics. Her flickr photostream is chock full of vernacular goodness and powerful portraits.

In other news, we’re pleased as punch that all the contributors involved with the Traveling Librarian article have agreed to release it under a Creative Commons license. This means you can print it, distribute it, and even remix it, as long as attribution is provided and its usage is not for profit.

Finally, mucho thanks to Nate Beaty for fixing a slew of last-minute technical glitches.

Matt Soar discusses the invaluable aspects of failure over on Design Observer:

For example, Jonathan Hoefler says, “Increasingly I think about the work that I do not so much as a directed effort, but as the ability to recognize accidents and interpret them productively. Even failures have their place, since without them there’s no progress: anything that’s truly ‘experimental’ has to run the risk of failure.” Hoefler describes these moments as “happy accidents:” “Several times a day, some misstep on the computer produces an unexpected result, and sometimes these results are fetching, intriguing, even provocative.”

Where does blue end and red begin? The folks at Dolores Blog asked people to name random color swatches, then processsed that into a color-label space.

How color is perceived may be objective to a point, but there’s obviously some kind of shared common perception / color space.

(via Kevin Kelly’s Lifestream)

The NYT has a nice write-up on Linzie Hunter, who turns spam into fantastic hand-lettered prints :

She found a way to convert commercial entreaty and flimflammery into something pleasing. That is, she made spam into art.

Alphabet: An Exhibition of Hand-Drawn Lettering and Experimental Typography, an exhibition at The Cooper Union, features what you might call a plethora of interpretations of Ye Olde Alphabet.

All these variations on 26 letters, yet we haven’t see many proposals for new letters in some time. Not that there hasn’t been attempts in the last few centuries: Benjamin Franklin, Jan Tschichold, and George Bernard Shaw are among those who proposed expanding the alphabet, according to…

What do you collect? Why do you do it? What have you collected in the past, and what did you do with it? Share your collections and obessions with LAB for Project 7. For more details, check out the Projects section.

We’ll be showcasing a collection of collections in the next two issues of LAB. Submit by Nov 1st, 2007.

The Processed Word is a set of photos of vernacular signage and typography in various states of decay. It’s part of a larger, ongoing series called Someplace Else. From Craig Hickman, author of Mars Observations and maker of D-, the interactive spelling wrecker, among other things (Craig is also the creator of the original KidPix program).

We’re pleased to say LAB is now at the library. And not just any library— a traveling library, run by the The Itinerant Poetry Librarian (founder of the Poetry Cubicle). As she passed through Portland, The Librarian (AKA Sara Wingate Gray) installed a temporary library at Reading Frenzy, the IPRC, In Other Words, and several other locations. In its last year of travel, the library has signed up nearly 500 members from 10 countries and 14 cities. Find out more about the project here.

LAB joins a collection of eclectic and obscure small press books, pamphlets, magazines, and ephemera as the library hits the road and heads to its next destination: Seattle, WA. And if you’re the type who enjoys getting any kind of excuse to zoom around in Google Earth, then voila! : track the nomadic library’s sojourns via this nifty link.

Ray Fenwick and Julie Jackson, kingpins of the shady industries of illustration and cross-stitch, have combined their crafty perspicacity into a beefy new cross-stitch kit: Meat for the Beast. Can it get much better than this? It can and it will: the gory-yet-playful design glows-in-the-freaking-dark. Bone-chomping awesomeness! The kind that inspires fits of typing phrases-connected-by-dashes.

More meat for the insatiable browser monster: check out this redonkulous Craft Query interview with Mister Fenwick on Subversive Cross Stitch. A tiny sample of the meaty innards of the interview:

CQ: Will you start carrying a man purse when blue Q comes out with those excellent Fenwick coin purses?

RF: Are coin purses not masculine? I am so clueless. I guess the word purse implies feminine, but whatever, I would totally carry a coin purse. I would carry my brass knuckles and PCP in it. Open the purse, take the PCP, put on the brass knuckles, and then just go for it! I know PCP is not something to joke about. I’m sorry. But do you really want to make fun of the coin purse of a dude who is amped on Angel Dust and swinging his brassed knuckles around?

David Byrne, in the introduction to Sensacional: Mexican Street Graphics:

As true perfection appears on the horizon, as the fruits of the enlightenment and of centuries of scientific progress appear within grasp, we take a bite of the perfected tomato or a huge flawless strawberry and realize that something has been lost. Flava. Soul. Humor. Funk.

He adds:

Perfection, one must conclude, is not acutally perfect at all. In fact, it is almost the complete opposite. Perfection is bad. But bad is good. But bad perfection is not good, only good bad is good. It’s all very simple.

You can find the whole essay here: When Bad Art Is Good
(republished in Utne)

The seventh issue of the ANP Quarterly is out, sporting an ecstatic Phyllis Diller on the cover. (Scroll down below the first fold of the ANP site for the intro to the current issue) The ANP is a free, sans-advertising quarterly (published by RVCA) that promises to “bring forward people and phenomena that deserve acknowledgement and coverage regardless of their place in time.” Yarly! In Portland, you’ll find it at Reading Frenzy, Jackpot Records, Motel Gallery, and Ozone Records.

An excerpt from the interview, with Miss Diller talking about what she paints:

Whatever comes out of my head. It all comes out of my head. Now my natural thing is a face. I see faces, faces, faces. Millions of faces. And faces are the part of the body that’s the most expressive. We have body language but faces are the most powerful beams you give out.

And Phyllis sure knows how to beam some powerful stuff. I’ve had to keep the magazine upside-down on my desk so it doesn’t give me the heebie-jeebies everytime I walk into the room. Yowza!

After interviewing Deb ‘Boss Lady’ Dormody (of If’n Books) and Ray ‘jazzy funk’ Fenwick (of Drama Club infamy) in issue 0.5, we introduced the two, dropping numerous clumsy hints about the unstoppability of a potential collaboration. And the result? Deb and Ray have teamed up to create this hot jammin’ smacker journal: DANCE IN2 THE POSITIVITY. Fresh! It’s a hand-numbered edition of 100 available through Etsy— better get your electric boogaloo on crazy-fast, girl.

In Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant, Daniel Tammet writes about an experiment which investigated a possible link between visual patterns and the sound structures of words:

The researcher, Wolfgang Kohler, a German-American psychologist, used two arbitrary visual shapes, one smooth and rounded and the other sharp and angular, and invented two words for them: takete and maluma. Subjects were asked to say which of the shapes was the takete and which the maluma. The overwhelming majority assigned maluma to the rounded shape and takete to the angular one. Recently, Professor Ramachandran’s team has replicated the results using the invented words bouba and kiki. Nintey-five percent of those asked thought the round shape was a bouba and the pointed shape a kiki. Ramachandran suggests the reason is that the sharp changes in the visual direction of the lines in the kiki figure mimics the sharp phonemic inflections of the word’s sound, as well as the sharp inflection of the tongue on the palate.

Maybe that’s how Ikea comes up with the names for their furniture designs. Then again, maybe not.