In early 1996, while I was in design school in Boston, I took a Graphic Design internship at a magazine called Stuff. This wasn’t the macho/meathead Stuff that arose later, this was a Boston-based culture/fashion/music/literary monthly that got distributed (for free) at hip Northeast locations, including boutiques, galleries, record stores, book stores, etc. It was an over-sized, predominantly black and white magazine, printed on paper that was a couple steps above newsprint.

A few months later my internship was up, and they hired me as a freelance designer. A few months after that the art director left. As the only one involved who knew the production process, and nuts and bolts of the magazine, I ended up filling the position temporarily… which came to mean about two years. I had some sense of what I was doing. Some.

My time at Stuff was the tail end of when magazines were still made the “old way.” These days, everything is done on a computer, and layouts barely see paper until it hits a press plate. Printers don’t even have a real pre-press (film to plate) phase anymore. Everything is direct to plate. For this reason, it’s gotten a LOT cheaper to make a magazine.

So there I was, waxing layouts to boards, shooting things with a Stat camera to halftone them, and repeatedly stabbing myself with X-acto knives (not on purpose). But, somehow, I was making a magazine. The old fashioned way. As time went on I started pushing things farther and farther with typography, bringing things as far as the publisher and the parent company would let me. I had a lot of leeway. This was a time when Neville Brody, David Carson, Art Chantry, Martin Venezky, P. Scott Makela and others were making some really progressive typographic magazines. The Face, Beach Culture, Blue, Speak, Raygun, Bikini, Sweater, etc. These were magazines that where pushing visual interpretation as far as they could, offending a lot of design purist, and making a lot of others happy.

Stuff went all over the board as I had pretty much open reign to fuck things up. Some of it, looking back is really terrible, but most of the stuff I hate is the stuff that wasn’t experimental. Some of it is still some of my favorite work that I’ve done. I was blowing things up on the copier, running things through the fax machine, even taking other people’s trash from the Stat camera room and reusing it. I started learning photography at Stuff as well, so really, that magazine was my education. There is no better way to learn than doing something. While I was going to school during that time, the real stuff I was learning was at the magazine. In school you learn the rules. At Stuff I could break the rules. Sometimes people got in arguments over it.

In the middle of 1998 they hired a full-time art director. I continued to design the poetry page (Re:Verse) for a few months, but I otherwise focused more on school, and the magazine I was starting with Brian Tunney, Nine-Ninety. Later that year the publisher who gave me all the opportunities along the way was fired, and ultimately the magazine was rolled into a nightlife publication called Stuff@Night. This is a collection of work from “The Stuff Years.” Still some of my favorite work, over ten years later. Thanks to Robert Birnbaum and the rest of the crew for some good times.

Aaron from Sweepea is Camping Party and needed a gig poster, so we utilized the bakery to whip something up. Turned out fun.

Before personal computers sat on every desktop, “Helvetica” meant little to most of society. Now, the typeface designed in 1957, is a packaged “System Font” on just about every personal computer around the globe.

Originally designed by Swiss type foundry Haas (and called Neue Haas Grotesk), Helvetica was created to compete in the Swiss type market against Akzidenz Grotesk, a leading Sans Serif typeface of the time.

Unless you’re a design geek, this is of little interest. But either way, you’ve seen Helvetica everywhere. From Target Dept. Stores to subway signage in major cities, wherever you go, you’re bound to run across it.

Amongst designers Helvetica has a love it or hate it quality. There is even a documentary about it. As well there should be. It’s an iconic, simplistic design that has crossed into the everyday of lives of, well, everyone.

The designer in me appreciates Helvetica, and while it has its time and place, I almost always gravitate toward one of the equally well designed alternatives, and there are many. These are well designed typefaces you will not find on the free font sites that have take over the web. They are typefaces created over years of refinement using great precision. Thought went into every stroke, every curve, every ascender and descender. The negative space is equally as important to the type as the letters themselves. Helvetica uses the same precision, but I look elsewhere.

Here are a few of my favorite alternatives to Helvetica. There are of course, more than this, but these are a few of my favorites. Each has its own “voice” and potential uses. I’m not anti-helvetica, however there are many options I’d explore first.

Gotham: Designed by Tobias Frere-Jones in 2000, and originally comissioned by GQ Magazine, Gotham was inspired by mid-twentieth century architecture signage. Most recently Gotham was used on Shepard Fairey’s iconic Obama Campaign Posters.

Frutiger: Designed by Adrian Frutiger in 1968 and commisioned by the Charles De Gaulle International Airport in France for a direction sign system.

Futura: Designed by Paul Renner and released in 1927, Futura is based off the geometric shapes and elements of the Bauhaus design style.

Franklin Gothic: Designed by Morris Fuller Benton in 1902. Benton also designed News Gothic, another of my favorites which I left off this list, as well as over 200 other faces. Gothic is an old term designating a “Sans-serif” typeface.

Gill Sans: Designed by Eric Gill in 1927, Gill Sans, like Helvetica is distributed as a system font in Mac OS X and is bundled in some versions of Microsoft products. Gill Sans was designed for London and North Eastern Railway’s posters and publicity material.

Interstate: This is one of my favorites. Designed by Tobias Frere-Jones between 1993 and 1999 and based on an alphabet drawn for the US Highway Administration in the 40s.

Akzidenz Grotesk: Released by H. Berthold AG type foundry in 1896, Akzidenz Grotesk heavily influenced the design of Neue Haas Grotesk, later called Helvetica. Often confused for Helvetica, Akzidenz Grotesk has many subtle differences, including a lower x-height (distance from the baseline to the top of the lowercase x). Contemporary versions of Akzidenz Grotesk have numerous variations.

Univers: Another designed by Adrian Frutiger, Univers came before Frutiger, designed in 1954. In 1997 Frutiger reworked the whole Univers family in cooperation with Linotype, creating Linotype Univers, a family which consists of 63 fonts.

Meta (sans): Designed by Erik Spiekermann in 1984 and commisioned by the German Federal Post, Meta was designed to be a readable sans serif at small point sizes.

Some more alternatives can be found over at Font Shop: Font Shop’s 13 Helvetica Alternatives

The big snowboard tradeshow is about to begin (SIA), and YoBeat.com needed a media kit for its relaunch this year. I redesigned the logo/wordmark prior to relaunch, and with little/no budget, they needed to make something cool happen to solicit advertising.

The low budget stuff usually ends up being the most fun. I suggested doing it in the form of an old-school print zine (I saw old-school because now most people are lazy, and have blogs) since that was the opposite — in a sense — of YoBeat. YoBeat has never been a print zine, but it was one of, if not the first online snowboard zine way back in ’97. So a zine it was. The antithesis of a web site, but still true to YoBeat’s nature.

We did a hand silkscreened, gray/silver on black cover, with a xerox interior. The “zines” get poly-bagged with some die-cut stickers, and business cards. In addition to the boring “media kit” type numbers and ad rates, the zine has some fun, recent content from the web site. It turned out pretty cool, and was probably more fun to work on as a result of the limited budget. The die-cut stickers we produced in house, as well as the screen printing and design, so the whole thing cost under $200 in materials for the entire run. Not bad. Of course that doesn’t account for the time value, but you get the idea.

Below are the sheets of die-cut stickers after running through the cutter. In this stage they’re still uncut. A layer of application film gets applied over these before cutting, which allows the user to transfer them to whatever object they want.

Above is the word mark redesign we did recently for iconic(?) snowboard site YoBeat‘s relaunch. Apparently YoBeat is, or was a big deal. Then the internet took off and they got lazy. Good timing. Anyway, they’ve relaunched and it seems to be operating in full swing.