If any of you have wandered over to StencilNation.org, you may have noticed that there's a "guycon" for scrolling down and reading the content on each page. Antonio Gomez, the flash guru who put that site together, even gave him what we call the "yerba mate twitch" when you click on it to scroll.

Well, the guycon came from a project I started in February with room mate and artist Halsey Chiat. Halsey's a great ink artist, doodling some amazing pieces. When I approached him to redesign the Stencil Archive logo, he gave me a final hand-laid-out and inked work that was 1 x 1 feet! We had worked out the guycon idea over the weeks prior, so I was expecting one square with 25 guycons symbolizing stencil community. I got 25 squares of 25 icons instead! His inspiration made me rethink my logo, the masthead, the business card, etc. So I worked out the one guycon idea, floating in front of 25 squares that symbolize the Stencil Archive community (no we aren't all squares, but we are all connected via stencil art). And to show some of his other community clusters, I tried to work them into the new masthead design. And the favicon is a simple version of the guycon floating in front of the squares.

To make the background interesting, I took one of Scott Williams's crazy hand-cut stencils and floated with a blue negative space.

Halsey says he's going to cut out the whole 25 x 25 x 25 block of people and paint it. I look forward to seeing his xacto skills... and know that he has the patience to cut it all out.

Halsey has a show going up June 6 (he'll hopefully stop by the Stencil Nation thang afterwards) called "The State of Lower Haight" You should check it out.

PS: props one last time to Asaf Zulah for the original 2003 Stencil Archive logo. Tee shirts of that logo are still available if you're interested (I'll have them at the book events next weekend).

A short video showing the Stencil Nation book cover stencil going up. Glad the artist finally found me!