This week’s installment of Oh Great Yet Another Portfolio That’s Better Than Mine is brought to you by Matt Lehman, a ridiculously talented designer, illustrator, art director friend from Nashville. He’s spent the last three years making CMT/MTV Networks look good fulltime, and he’s open for other business.

This week’s installment of Oh Great Yet Another Portfolio That’s Better Than Mine is brought to you by Angus Macpherson, a third year graphic design student at Leeds College of Art. Top-notch typographic and print layout work, as well as photos—and not just “for a student.” The sky’s the limit for talent like this.

Allow me to tell you a little story…

Once upon a time, in a Chattanooga far, far away, a boy bought a domain because he saw a phrase in a dream that brought some measure of delight to his literary soul. Eventually the boy’s computer died in a fiery crash and with it went his swashbuckled copy of Corel Draw, his first app love/hate, the only vector graphics program he had ever known. Thus he began to wage war with that Adobian beast Illustrator, with the aforementioned domain serving as a battlefield. All manner of color, typography and wit was spilled in 200+ illustrative fist fights. And then he migrated the war over to Tumblr, to make it easier for you to follow along or RSS or favorite stuff. And everyone lived happily ever after. The end*.

So yeah, Prom Night Fist Fight is back. Here are a few personal favorites to hopefully whet your appetite: Hear!, Purple Explosion, Minimum Minded Meme, Dour Words for Cowards, Glory & Grace, The Art o’ Fist Fighting, Sum of Parts, this one, this one, Antoinette, Prog Rock, La Dolce Vita, Psalm 8, Thor!, Word, Booty, Speak Up, Mmm. Vector., this one, and Music to My Ears.

*OR IS IT?

My exceptionally-talented designer friend Matthew Wahl has a snazzy 60s-inspired display font called Second Wave that just went up for sale on YouWorkForThem.

It’s been enjoyable to watch this face taking shape in the materials for the Next Conference on Matt’s Flickr account, and now see it available for the masses.

And it’s only $24.95, friends!

There’s a 30×10′ curved wall in the NewSpring student building that’s been blank and lonely for far too long. I can’t wait to see this thing come to life at full scale next month.

My hand hurts, the old scanner is tired, and I killed my fair share of Bic GripRollers in the last two weeks. I’ve never worked on a project where I said, “Oh, it’s almost done… just one more hour” so many times. Then again, I’ve also never gotten the chance to run amuck with 300 square feet of environmental graphics that will visually anchor a public space either, so who’s complaining? Not this guy.

This is the second in an ongoing series of posts about bbbbrands.com, a new project I’m working on with my good friend and fellow brand loyalist Noah Stokes. If you missed it or just need a recap, here’s part 1.

As Noah and I began to talk through the initial gist of bbbbrands and I started some sketches and typography explorations for an identity, I also began the task of thinking through taglines. Not every brand needs a tagline, but in this case it made sense to craft a line of copy that described the site’s core functionality to the user and helped us have a clear mission as we design and build it. A statement of purpose helps the user know exactly what value we’re providing to them and it gives us a main identifier for decision-making (e.g. does X or Y feature fall into what the tagline describes us as? If not, kill it.)

Here’s the first round of tagline attempts:

All of these more or less describe what the site will be full of, but there are problems with them, too. There’s way too much “brand” in there. The site name already has it, so repeating it in the tagline, especially twice, is overkill. These choices are passive. They’re a description of something, not an action or a call to participate. Some of the language of each individual tagline doesn’t hold up. What’s a label recommendation (#2)? What if they aren’t actually new recommendations (#4)? Are they really the best (#5)? All of these fall short.

As Noah and I bantered back and forth on IM (this is a bicoastal operation we’re running here) we settled on the concepts of sharing and discovering as the main verbs we want our users to engage in. Are you looking for recommendations for a new messenger bag? We want you to discover trusted brands on bbbbrands. Do you absolutely love your new American Apparel Tri-Blend Track Shirt? We want you to share that on bbbbrands.

The passivity is gone, but #6 still suffers from word overkill, #7 feels awkward, and #8 is just too long. #9 is close, but stops just short of what we want for users—sharing and discovering the brands themselves, not just the reviews of the brands. And then there was #10. Short, sweet, active, bold, truthful. If we do our job to build a site that attracts like-minded brand loyalists, then they’ll naturally share the best brands with one another. And over time our catalog of brand recommendations will become a playground for discovery.

On a design note, I initially fought myself on #10. Then I realized I was doing it for the wrong reason; I simply liked the typographic lock-up of the lowercase serif “from” in there. I liked how it looked. But this isn’t solely about letters and aesthetics, it has to act as a rudder and identifier. Ultimately, the content has to be more important than the form, even if it hurts.

We want our users to share and discover the best brands, so that’s our working tagline. But is it the best? Are we missing a better opportunity? We’d love your feedback.

An interview with Kyle Blue, Design Director of Dwell Magazine. Despite my once and current misgivings about Dwell‘s recent redesign, Kyle and his team have been one of the more consistent design inspirations for me over the last 6 or 7 years.

I couldn’t think of anything to write about yesterday, so I asked the hive mind.

Mike Boutté asked me to write about blogger’s block, so here we are, my friend. Answer: leverage your friends to find content that meets needs.

Michael Harrison asked what I’m doing at this year’s Unleash Conference at NewSpring Church. Answer: I’ll be doing a breakout session with our Communications Director Suzanne Swift talking about communications and web strategy for churches of any size. I might also be speaking one other time, but it’s on the sly. I’ll also be walking around, meeting people, hopefully helping people, and generally being amazed that thousands of talented, passionate folks think we have have something to teach them.

Adam Spooner asked about choosing complementary serif/sans typefaces. Answer: I’m in way over my head, but I typically go for contrast, readability, and faces that have somewhat complimentary general angles/shapes. I also play the very annoying “until it looks right” card. You should probably listen to people who are smarter than me.

Sean Berger asked about Twitter + eCommerce Strategy. Answer: you’re asking the wrong guy. I use Twitter to make people laugh. I don’t know how valuable that’ll be in trying to sell them anything. (But it think that highlights the fact that there is no one way to use Twitter.)

John Flowers asked why I thought creativity was essential. Answer: I don’t think I’ve ever thought of it as an essentiality, I just like to make things and think of things and solve problems.

kjellnygren asked why content management system ExpressionEngine is so awesome and he wanted some tutorials. Answer: EE has a wicked learning curve, but a brilliantly simple payoff. Between it and CodeIgniter, there’s not much you can’t do fairly quickly and elegantly. Since I’m a problem solver, not a developer, you should look into EE Insider, EE Screencasts, these EE video tutorials, and Ryan Irelan’s blog. They’re all awesome.

Ooooh, pretty! Yulia Brodskaya makes gorgeous typographic illustrations. FROM PAPER. Paper!

It’s like 3D swirly awesomeness and craft time all rolled into one.