David Baker Architects commissioned us to design an imaginative manual to present the firm’s “9 Ways”—their wide-ranging philosophical approach to creating multi-family housing. [+]

A monograph for artist, poet, and architect, John Marx. The book is a series of diptychs, pairing watercolors with poems. The poems use a variety of expressive typographic techniques to function like a musical score for reading. Each poem incorporates a different typographic device to suggest its relationship to the watercolors, as well as to communicate subtle shifts in meaning.

The panoramic photograph distorts space, re-making our perceptions–and our memory–of familiar places. For Tom Schiff’s monograph of San Francisco panoramas, we curated the portfolio into 9 sections, each a meditation on how the panorama’s warp captures a certain shared truth within each type of public space.[+]

Rebalancing the Modernist narrative to create a more human city. Cover and interior illustrations for the Architectural Review, as part of a new monograph on Form4 and the idea of 2nd Century Modernism.[+]

Produced in association with the Architectural Review, the Form4 Architecture supplement was conceived as both an exploration of the practice's diverse body of work, as well as a critical analysis of the legacy of Modernism in urban design.

For SFAC’s Passport exhibition, MD developed an Augmented Reality rubber stamp. Viewing the stamped impression through a smartphone reveals two short films. Together, the films represent the cycle of prosperity and displacement that defines SF as an icon of the boom and bust town. [+]

MD was invited to produce the Winter cover for UCLA Extension's esteemed ‘Masters of Graphic Design’ series. Instead of attempting to depict ‘winter’ through representational imagery, the design attempts to shape abstraction into the emotional experience of winter: a flat sun captured by leaking light across film, wind as diffuse, broken lines, falling temperatures intuited through cold color. [+] Here winter is a constellation of visual sensations; an approach to design that posits abstraction as more elemental, more interpretable, and more human than traditional representation.

A limited edition of 1000 prints announcing the opening of Southern Exposure’s new gallery space. The color was continually modulated throughout the print run to make each print unique. [+]

The completed prints were crash-numbered, 0001 to 1000, to underscore each print’s status as an original. A collaboration with Eric Heiman of Volume, the idea was to produce a limited edition of unique prints using offset lithography, a printing method traditionally used to ensure sameness.

Dimensions: 17.5 x 24.25 inches

The campaign for the 32nd installment of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (SFJFF) uses alliterative English-Yiddish phrases to underscore the spirit of humor, inclusiveness, and multiculturalism that defines the festival. [+]

The visual language contrasts these linguistic non sequiturs with a deadpan graphic Modernism, making the phrases that much more ironic. The video spots translate this minimal aesthetic into off-speed visual gags with deliberately flat audio effects, further animating the knowing humor.

A commission by SFMOMA, this poster contrasts two alternate views of the human body in motion: the stressed and idealized body of Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia vs. the loose and languid body of Hollywood’s Fred Astaire. [+]

An ongoing series of posters announcing different public programs for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. For each poster MendeDesign developed a unique visual language and composition to telegraph the curatorial vision behind each program. [+]