April: Hidden Messages

Sure, we’ll admit we’re slaves to our computers and fancy-pants design applications, but we consider them just another tool we use within our creative process. Back in the early stages of our collective careers, a number of us cut our teeth using pencils, Letraset, transparencies, and copy machines. We genuinely enjoy the process of rolling up our sleeves and getting our hands dirty in honor of creating honest design. It allows us to feel less confined by perfect alignment and precise registration and actually embrace all the imperfect little characteristics that often occur. Not to mention that we really dig apes, cats and old school hip hop. Given that, we decided to put our spin on an advent calendar and offer some thoughts or activities to make each day of April a little more fun. By printing all the type as an offline, tinted varnish utilizing Pantone 8340 (10% to be precise), we achieved a slightly “hidden message” vibe to the piece.