In late 2006 I had the great fortune to join a team (led visually by Creative Director, Jeanette Abbink) charged with redesigning American Craft magazine. The magazine is one of the longest continually published magazines in the United States so it was a daunting but exhilarating task. As we researched our next steps forward, one thing we knew we wanted to incorporate into the redesign was an artisanal quality, some type of individual characteristic that could set the magazine apart without feeling forced and that would pay homage to our subject matter.

[Image Above: American Craft, October/November 2007, "House of the Handmade." Almost all of our in-house headline treatments are based on the Fleischmann font we use throughout the publication. For this one we worked with our intern at the time, Claire Priestley, to use watercolors to hand paint the headline.]

We knew we wanted to express this intent in the typography we used. Therefore, we opted to go with Fleischmann, a typeface originally developed by Johann Michael Fleischmann in the 1700s and recently redrawn and brought up to speed by Erhard Kaiser of the Dutch Type Library in Amsterdam. With its heart in hand-drawn letterforms, we knew that this was the font we would use almost immediately.

[Image Above: American Craft, October/November 2007, "Little But Loud." In this treatment we had the headline cut out of basswood to mimic the artwork of Richard Humann whom the article is about. Architect Steven Cassell of ARO was kind enough to laser-cut the pieces for us and Senior Designer Emily CM Anderson spent a good number of hours sanding them down in our office during
breaks from the computer.]

Still, we wanted to take this artisanal approach a step further and began exploring how best to do that. Creative Director, Jeanette Abbink, and Senior Designer, Emily CM Anderson, have continually pushed us to develop unique, well thought-out approaches to the design of the magazine and in no place is this more evident than in many of the openers we’ve used. I pulled selection from the past six issues beginning with the first redesigned issue (October/November 2007) all the way up to our most recent (August/September 2008) representing the first year of publishing for the redesigned magazine. Enjoy!

[Image Above: American Craft, December/January 2008, "Spiritual Revolutionary." Here we veered away from relying on Fleischmann as a base and simply set Creative Director, Jeanette Abbink, loose on a game we came across intended to teach young children the alphabet.]

[Image Above: With help from Industrial Designer, Scott Newlin, the letterforms were
created using a rapid prototyping machine that took many, many hours to produce the final product. We were all ecstatic over the end result.]]

[Image Above: American Craft, August/September 2008, "Let Em Eat Cake." For our most recent issue that should be on the stands in a week or two, we had these letterforms laser-cut in Las Vegas. After spelling out the headline we had some fun 'decorating' it with some delicious sprinkles normally used for cakes and cupcakes.]

[Image Above: American Craft, August/September 2008, "Cranbrook, Craft & What the Future May Hold." Also from our most recent issue. Here we used plastic letterforms laser cut in Las Vegas in a beautiful glossy black. After hours of getting the letter-spacing perfect at the photo-shoot, we decided that everyone would probably not even notice that there was anything hand done about this treatment because it was so perfect. The idea for the solution came at the last minute and we couldn't be happier.]