IS MY BIRTHDAY.

Art Direction & Design: Josh Baker
Layout: Cara Walsh

Art Direction: Josh Baker
Design: Josh Baker and Cara Walsh

Art Direction: Josh Baker
Design & Layout: Cara Walsh

A massive project scoping the life of the great master, Tom of Finland. This was a personal labor of love.

Art Direction: Josh Baker
Design & Layout: Cara Walsh

Art Direction: Josh Baker
Design & Layout: Cara Walsh

This project was simply fun, much in the same way that Sex to Sexty is a designer’s dream since the material calls for the layout and design elements to be playful. Highlights were: outlining figures from magazines to stick into text, piecing together items from different articles to make the backgrounds for the table of contents, the back cover, and the line-up, and especially shooting fake blood to drip over the montage of mugshots we selected for the case of the book. But the most time-consuming and rewarding part of the process was this. The results are found on the first page of the book in the ransom letter title page, as well as on the chapter opener pages.

Art Direction: Josh Baker
Design & Layout: Cara Walsh

Art Direction: Josh Baker
Design & Layout: Cara Walsh

Art Direction: Josh Baker
Design & Layout: Cara Walsh

This project was just a taste of the tome of Tom to come…I was excited at the prospect of working on Tom material from the outset at TASCHEN. These were sent to me on my birthday while working on the book.

Art Direction: Josh Baker
Design: Ethel Seno
Typography: Cara Walsh

Here I developed two different type treatments for the title, mirroring neon signs. I used two fonts as a base – Mexcellent and Santa Fe – and tweaked them in Illustrator to make them unique, then took them into Photoshop, which was effectively an exercise in chemistry. It took weeks of editing and print tests to come up with the final result. Special attention was payed to details that occur in actual fluorescent signage, like breaks in the tubes and some areas being brighter than others. Beyond being my first design assignment at TASCHEN, this is also my first experience in developing typography. The direction was used in gold embossing on the cover, spine and case, and in other iterations on the DVD, translations booklet and special print edition by R. Crumb.

Art Direction: Josh Baker
Collaboration (Design, Typography): Cara Walsh

Art Direction: Josh Baker
Collaboration (Layout & Production; Typesetting): Cara Walsh

Art Direction: Andy Disl
Collaboration (Typesetting: Texts, Captions, Appendix): Cara Walsh

This title was one of my first projects at TASCHEN beyond production and editorial research, and my first real experiment in typesetting. Due to the sheer size of the book, it was imperative to properly flow Bill Buford’s fantastic introduction over a massive page. Proving more difficult was adjusting the complex appendix, in which Walton’s inspiration for particular pieces were layed out with text and image references.

…Walton Ford, who could captivate anyone…myself so much so, he gave me a temporary tattoo on my wrist, hand-drawn by the master himself.

Art Direction: Josh Baker
Design: Tyler Flatt & Nina Wiener
Collaboration (Typesetting: Main Texts, Captions, Timeline, Jacket): Cara Walsh

Art Direction: Josh Baker
Design: Marco Zivny
Collaboration (Typesetting: Main Texts, Captions, Timeline Jacket): Cara Walsh

I designed this for a silkscreen series I was working on in 2007 and just came across it on an old hard drive. The faces and other elements came from a compilation of poetry and writings by obscure Latin American authors I found in a thrift shop, called “Vamos a America.”