FLG Font Friday – The Merch Edition!

Categories: art, design, my creative projects, typography

This year I’ve been working with an art collective called the Flaming Lotus Girls.

Started in 2000, FLG is a female-led, all-gender group that creates large-scale sculpture that moves and shoots fire. Interaction is key; we invite audience members to press buttons or pull levers that create a jet of flame or make an arm sweep out. Most of FLG’s sculptures have been exhibited at the Burning Man arts event in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. Select pieces have also been shown in Sydney, Australia; Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Vancouver, Canada; and many venues in the U.S.

Our current work for Burning Man is an evolution of a 2008 sculpture called Mutopia, envisioned as a series of seven half-plant, half-animal “pods.” The pods were arranged in a Fibonacci spiral, with the tallest (a towering 30 feet high) in the center. This year we’re taking the four tallest pods; they’ll be arranged in a diamond shape to create an inviting hang-out space.

That’s the setup.

Q: What do you need to publicize your art piece: before, during and after an event?

A: Merch!

I designed a number of stickers for “Mutopia Evolution”; the preliminary ones are here. The finals are below. The “Mutopia halo” design was also selected for this year’s FLG crew hoodie.

Photo of giant skeletal tripod plant-creatures, medium brown, emerging from a dust storm, pale brown, in the desert at the Burning Man event. Copyright 2008, Scott London.

I image-traced this photo to create high-contrast images of the skeletal Mutopia plant-creatures.

Mutopia sticker: in the center are dark blue, skeletal sketches of four mysterious tripod creatures or plants. They have an immediate yellow halo and a magenta halo further out. "MUTOPIA" is in large yellow type across the bottom, with "FLG/2023" in small yellow type next to it. Based on a photo ©Scott London.

I image-traced photographs of the installation to start off, then added color and type. Typeface is Adso from Adobe Fonts. Dimensions are 4″ W by 3″ H.

Stylized drawing of the front and back of a dark blue hoodie. The front has "FLG" with a flame symbol above it, both in bright pink. The back has the "Mutopia" design described previously: an inner yellow halo with an outer pink halo, and sketched plant-creatures showing through blue.

The hoodie will look like this.

Mutopia sticker: against a black background are skeletal sketches of four mysterious tripod creatures or plants, in yellow. At the top left is "flaminglotusgirls" run together, all lower-case, in yellow; the text overlaps "mutopia," also all lower-case, in bold red.

I used the same artwork to create a second sticker in an alternate color system. Typefaces are Futura Condensed Bold and Futura Extrabold. Dimensions are 4″ W by 3″ H.

Against a black background is a skeletal white shape of a plant. One sprout-like point is shooting a stylized jet of yellow flame. "MUTOPIA" is in white text in the upper left corner; "EVOLUTION" is in yellow below it. "FLAMING LOTUS GIRLS," in yellow, is curved over a bending stem on the right-hand side; "2023," in white, is below it.

I used the same process of image-tracing a photo to create a high-contrast graphic of another part of the sculpture, showing a “poofer” in the act of sending out flame. Typeface is Calamity from Adobe Fonts. Dimensions are 4″ W by 2″ H.

The square sticker has a black background. The sketches of the skeletal plant-creatures are in white in the lower half of the sticker. "FLAMINGLOTUSGIRLS," all caps, run together, is in a very thin typeface in white, at the top. Below that is "mutopia," all lower-case, in bold red type. "2023" is below that on the extreme right, between the descender of the "p" and the right-hand margin. It's in the same very thin typeface as the top type, in white.

A final Mutopia sticker uses the plant-creature artwork in a square, red, black and white format. Typefaces are Futura Condensed Light and Futura Extrabold. Dimensions are 3″ by 3″.

Note: Square, red, black and white stickers are cheaper from our vendor than full-color rectangular stickers, so we explored several designs in that format.