I should have grabbed this book called The Handy Book of Artistic Printing when I was at Barnes and Noble last week… it looked awesome! and I can’t stop thinking about it since… I mean, look at the cover and the subtitle — “a collection of letterpress examples with specimens of type, ornament, corner fills, borders, twisters, wrinklers, and other freaks of fancy.” — aww sounds super! (and I looked inside a little and I just couldn’t look at it all because it was too good to just flip through!)

I am ordering one after posting this picture of the book I took when I realized that I didn’t have the B&N gift card with me and thought I could find it online so I didn’t have to carry it around… can’t wait to get this!!!

Posted under Inspiration, letterpress, typography

I am super honored to be a guest blogger over at sfgirlbybay today!! Come visit me there :)

I am sharing one of my favorite cafe books around my house…

and I am going back to Japan this New Years!!! I am super excited :)

If you are coming from sfgirlbybay, welcome to Heart Fish! We cover lots of letterpress, graphic design, typography, arts, crafts, NYC, Japan and everything in between. I hope you enjoy your visit here, too! :)

Posted under Inspiration, Japanese

I mentioned that I’m participating this project with Samantha Hann at Maquette in the beginning of the year and it is finally live! It was a “Love” book project — Samantha asked 25 artisits and writers to submit a piece inspired by their idea of love and I was somehow included (THANK YOU SO MUCH!!) and she just published them as a book on blurb!!

Here is an amazing list of contributers:

Hannah Stouffer, Lilly Piri, Aaron Hogg, Lisa Butterworth, Dan Funderburgh, Samantha Hahn, Erin Loechner, Jesse Breytenbach, Kate Miss, Jessica Gonacha, Kelly Lynn Jones, Yasmine Surovec, Shira Sela, Matthew and Sandy Lynn Davis (Treatzone), Maditi, Amy Sahba, Ez Pudewa, Hijiri Shepherd (me!), Marisa Haedike, Lisa Congdon, Holly Becker, Kate Neckel, Katie Sokoler & Kate Bingaman Burt

The cover (by Samantha – picture is taken by her, too)

Thumbnails of some of the work inside:

and….. my work!

My copy is on its way right now, I can’t wait to see the real book! You can order yours here, just in time for Valentine’s Day, it’d make an amazing gift!

Posted under design, project

I found this interesting exhibition that is going on right now at Cooper Union called “Art of the Book” and of course I checked it out and took some pictures for my inspiration and to share with you guys here.

This work below was my favorite – it’s simple, but strong and most interesting, I thought. A pair of shoes and a roll of paper. Shoes have stamp on the sole, one says “I’ll go on” and the other says “I can’t go on” and it looks like this person walked on the roll of paper one step by one step to make a book of… life, perhaps. I love that it tells story (a deep one) by just looking at this work and you can imagine the thoughts that this person must have gone through, how he was walking on this paper etc. it is a great piece, I thought.

What a cool idea!

I saw a lot of creative books, too, and here are some that caught my eye.

Cool openings. Love the mixture of different size of texts.

Very cool typographic books with pencils.

Love the box.

A chainsaw book?

Its cover – cool wood!

Posted under art

You might already own this book, have seen it, have heard of it… so you know that it is filled with thousands of hand-lettering (from 55 typographers and graphic designers!) and it is such an inspiring book. Makes me want to get into hand-lettering more!

Posted under typography

I got this book a while ago at the New Museum book store, and not only I was interested in making books from this book, but also I was in love with the graphic design of this book so I thought I would share it here for Friday morning inspiration.

The cover:

I love this bold and fun layout and the wood type texture:

Content page – lots of fonts combination, but not busy at all:

and I love the illustration! I didn’t know you can make book like this:

Each chapter has own look:

This is a very cute alphabet book idea:

Posted under design, typography

How fun and cute is this book? I love cupcakes, they are just so sweeeet in every way. This book looks so creative, I would love to try making (simple) one!

More information here.

For more elegant occasion, you can try these Cupcake Wrapper from Paper Orchid. You just wrap it around the cupcake and the result is so pretty!

Posted under fun

After eating out all the time for like 2-3 weeks straight, I wanted to cook something and eat at home so badly. Now that my kitchen is almost all set, I’ve been enjoying cooking. Today, I found a link to this Spanish cooking book called “1080 Recipes” and I just love the website design and the illustration of the book so much that I want to buy one. I can cook Spanish food and enjoy the design at the same time! You can download some sample recipes from the website, too.

The designer, Javier Mariscal’s Estudio Mariscal website and their work is soo very impressive, too!

Posted under Inspiration, design