Firebelly Design

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

The studio is ramping up excitement around our 5th annual Camp Firebelly. We are inviting the brightest & most talented design students & recent grads to join forces inside our Chicago studio. Camp offers the next crop of socially-minded designers the chance to use their talent and creativity to make a difference, experiencing what professional life is like Firebelly-style. For 9 days, 10 campers live and work with us to craft a strategic design solution for a nonprofit client, from initial research to final implementation. Camp Firebelly challenges students and recent grads to address social issues through a collaborative project of their own design.

The original hand-lettered Newberry sign is still perfectly intact, and just as beautiful as ever.

Nothing is better than ending a week of hard work by investing a morning at one of Chicago's greatest institutions, The Newberry. Years before Will Miller or I worked at Firebelly several projects from the studio were accepted into the Newberry's collection. Last week Friday, we met with Paul F. Gehl, Custodian of the History of Printing wing, to enter some current Firebelly work and get a tour of the Archive.

The current show is the 26th annual Juried Exhibition of the Chicago Calligraphy Collective. We saw that our friend and colleague Rick Valicenti was a juror for the exhibit. Included in the show is his My Move piece. 

A personal favorite in the archives was the calendar works of Oswald Copper for Bertsch & Cooper. These calendars were created annually as a promotional piece for the studio and were extremely sought after for their excellence and detail in type. Below is an example of the original mock-up.