M. Finley Designs» Blog

Ampersand Project Finish

Morgan — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 22:01:56 +0000

This was my senior project. It consisted of 24 ampersand designs which I printed in two layers on 5×7 Mr. French paper. Each is printed with transparent ink in two layers, giving the illusion of more than two shades of the color. After completing the prints, I printed a cover wrap using the three colors, and named the collection, “Another & Another & Another &.” This was the largest edition I’ve ever printed, coming in at 30 public copies and 6 artist proofs. I’m selling them for $40 apiece, if you would like to purchase a copy please contact me.

Web 2.0 Watercolor Icons

Morgan — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 02:45:55 +0000

I really love some of the hand drawn icon sets I’ve seen around the web lately, so I thought I should make some of my own. I’m releasing these icons under a creative commons license (my first) and you can download them individually from Flickr or as a a zip package by following the link below.

Download the Web 2.0 Watercolor Icon Pack

Web 2.0 Watercolor Icons by Morgan Finley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

The Ampersand Project – A Beginning

Morgan — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 23:28:43 +0000

So far this summer has been pretty laid back, but I have been keeping myself pretty busy screen printing. In the past month I began exploring a new subject matter in my screen prints— ampersands. I first became interested in ampersands as a typographic form after reading The History of the Ampersand. Shortly after reading this I started filling page after page of my sketchbook with ampersands in varying shapes and styles. In these drawings began my interest in the visual construction of the symbol. So I decided to make ampersands the subject of my senior design project.

Every good project starts with goals and limitations

In this project I will create multiple ampersand designs from both sketches and digital sources. I will then screen print them onto 5×7 cards, and compile the prints into a box book. This means designing all of the actual prints, and the box which will hold them, to work as a single unit. In order to do this right, I first need to answer some important questions, and start asking questions for further research.

How many box books should I make? More importantly, how many can I afford to make? I would like to set a goal of twenty, but I will have to research materials and construction methods.
How many ampersands should I design and print? I would like to set a goal of fifty, but it depends on what kind of paper I can find. I should probably look into an affordable cover weight paper.
How should I limit my colors and layers? I would like each print to consist of two layers of the same transparent color. I am thinking of using just three colors, although I don’t yet know what colors.

Ampersand Prints

Morgan — Tue, 26 May 2009 19:49:32 +0000

I recently read an article on the history of the ampersand, A Short History of the Ampersand, and was inspired to make these ampersand designs. After making these, I have decided to do more ampersand designs and combine them into a box book for my senior project. I will write about that as a project more in the future. In these screen prints I was experimenting with transparent ink, and I love the effect I got by overlaping the ink in the first two designs. I will have to consider this effect in my future screen prints.

Hello world!

Morgan — Tue, 19 May 2009 20:58:48 +0000

Hello, this is not the first post like this that I have written. It has taken a long time, a couple of site designs, and lots of frustration, but finally I have my portfolio online. Sometimes it is harder to design something for myself than it is to design for others. In the past I have struggled to maintain a blog, so I’ve decided that first and foremost this is my portfolio and not a blog. I may write a blog about my process here in the future, but I am not going to be strict about it. However, I am going to be strict about keeping my portfolio up to date, so please subscribe or come back soon for updates.