Design Currency by Jenn and Ken Visocky O’Grady, A Book Review Husband and wife team Jenn and Ken Visocky O’Grady have done it again.  These successful university professors, Jenn a Professor at Cleveland State University and Ken an Associate Professor at…

Hello Readers! My name is Kim Finley and I have worked at Go Media for many years, but don’t usually post on the zine. Some of you may know me as the person who replies to your emails when you submit a contact form on the Arsenal website. In addition to Arsenal customer service, I also spend my time at Go Media doing payroll, bookkeeping, proofreading zine posts and proposals, and various other tasks including packing and shipping all the merch orders. You probably guessed from my last name, that I am Jeff Finley’s wife (going on five years now)! You can also see that I am not a designer here. And that’s good because my artistic claim to fame is that my famous bag of popcorn drawing is one of the vectors we sell in the stars and hearts vector pack!

Opening the new book by Kern and Burn feels like Christmas. The collaborative effort between Jessica Karle Heltzel and Tim Hoover, a soft copy of Conversations with Design Entrepreneurs arrived on my desk in crisp brown paper wrapping, so perfectly packaged it pained me to open. Diving into several layers of protective packaging and postcards, I uncovered their masterpiece, its cover design by The Heads of State simple, clean and inviting.

The countdown has begun. Google is set to drop its RSS aggregator, Google Reader, on July 1, 2013. Announcing to its devoted following two reasons for its disbanding, one being a decline in usage and two their need to pour energy into other products, Google offers Google Takeout for those needing to download a copy of their data stored from Reader.

For those married to RSS, there is life beyond Reader.

A fresh new copy of Rustbelt Almanac just arrived on my desk, the pages crisp, clean and full of goodness about all makers, doers and dreamers. This, the first issue by producers Noah Purdy and Michael Artman is being passed around and poured over by all of us here at Go Media. Just great stuff.

We’re proud, too. Rustbelt recently interviewed our very own Jeff Finley about this year’s Weapons of Mass Creation Fest.

We recently had a chance to talk to Rustbelt Almanac about their recent issue, their road to copy and the vast sprawling rusty region that they call home.

Anyone will agree that color has power. It affects how comfortable you feel in your environment, influences your opinion of the way clothes look, and is a key characteristic in describing objects. What some people don’t know, however, is that…

Sean McCabe’s passion for hand lettering and typography can be traced back to middle school, his homework littered with typographic illustrations. While others doodled, Sean shaped and sculpted his own unique letters, seeing them as shapes and curves full of beauty. His fascination with typography grew into a career, with Sean now doing what he loves most. His love for meticulous detail, attentive eye for precision, balance and composition are all in a days work.

Go Media had the opportunity to chat with Sean about doing what you love…

Cleveland artist and illustrator Angela Oster cultivates and creates a world of whimsy, filled with criminally cute, odd and wonderful beings. A graduate of the Cleveland Institute of the Art, Oster gave Go Media a glimpse into her life, her art, and some of her lovely work.

We’re big fans of Jessica Karle Heltzel and Tim Hoover here at Go Media. Designers, writers and publishers, we are super honored to have Jess and Tim on our list of WMC 2013 Speakers this year.

We recently had a chance to chat with Jess and Tim about their recent success with Kern and Burn, a recently released online and print publication that curates discussions, interviews, and essays about design entrepreneurship.

Kern and Burn: Conversations With Design Entrepreneurs is a beautiful two-color book that features candid conversations with 30 leading designers who have founded startups, channeled personal passions into self-made careers and taken risks to do what they love. In this book they share their failures, successes, and perspectives. Kern and Burn’s hope is that you, the reader, can learn from them — not to follow in their footsteps, but to chart your own course in parallel, one that allows you to thrive, add value to the world and love what you do. Dedicating the book to “those who kern, those who burn and those who embrace the risk of failure daily,” their book is available online now on KernandBurn.com.

We are huge fans of designers, illustrators and fellow Ohioans Jen and Omar from These Are Things! Recent podcast guests and speakers for this year’s Weapons of Mass Creation Fest 2013, we just cannot get enough of their inspiring story, enthusiasm and heart. We asked them to answer some questions about their very favorite things, to tide us over until we are reunited again. Enjoy!

It’s Friday. I’m hungry. One of my friends recommended a new trendy restaurant and, hey, it’s right around the corner. However, knowing that “trendy” can mean “a sole sprig of lettuce and a sprinkling of truffle oil” and I wasn’t joking about this whole hunger thing, I head to the restaurant’s site to check out the menu before making any firm plans. But, when the graphic and video-heavy site finally loads, the menu is impossible to find, as are directions to the entrance, which I’ve been told is hidden down some strange back alley. In fact, I can’t even figure out how to enter the site, mired as I am in this gorgeous yet impossible to navigate landing page, with earthy music blaring through my speakers. Frustrated, I choose another old standby just around the corner (probably ten feet from this new restaurant, but who can tell?), just to spite the first one.

Faced with the assignment to make a short film based on the question, “What’s the best thing you’ve ever eaten?” Los Angeles-based CG artist John Robson opted to put the question to a friend’s three-year-old son and film the kid’s response. The result is Supper Time! and, well, let’s just say you’ll never look at spaghetti the same way again.

For many of you this isn’t the 1st time you have heard of the Old & New Project. You may remember a post we did about the project last May which included an interview with the founders. Check it out here if you missed it.

Old & New Project returns this month with another round of religious contemporary graphic art. This time, contributors span both the globe and the current spectrum of design celebrity—with artists both well-known and up-and-coming invited to participate.

Earlier this year the creators, Jim LePage and Troy Deshano, opened a public call for portfolio submissions and several artists from round 3 are from that public call.