And coming to the big screen are Scott’s type treatment and titling for “The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys,” from Jodie Foster’s production company, Egg Pictures. Directed by Peter Care, this film focuses on Catholic school boys who first get into trouble for creating erotic comics and then plan a heist to get into even bigger trouble. (Jodie Foster plays Sister Assumpta.) The two main influences Scott worked with are comic books and William Blake, the poet and painter who is one of the protagonist’s heroes. As Scott tells it, he wanted to create a stylized typographic metaphor for the mental processes of the boys, so he worked with three fonts — one standard computer font and two he drew by hand that were influenced by the mystical Blake.
Fractured typography conveys a sense of menace in Ride’s title frames for the film “The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys.”
Ride also developed a teaser site for the film — atomictrinity.com — basing it on the film’s mood and comic book references. (Note the type treatment in the intro here.)
As you can tell, I’m a fan of Scott’s work — I included Ride in my book “Type Graphics” — and I’m not alone. Rides work has been acknowledged by the design press, such as in a recent “Step-By-Step Graphics” interview by Laurel Harper. The interview focused on the thought process behind and design of the studio’s promotional book “Untitled,” a vivid compilation of its range of design.
These spreads from Step-by-Step Graphics magazine illustrate Ride’s multi-layered approach to type and images. Click here for a larger image.
The cover for “Untitled” was also picked for Print’s Regional Design Annual. Ride Studio’s next promotional book, “Natural Selection,” (and these are always collectible) is on the drawing board. You can preview some of the work on Ride’s Web site.
For the upcoming book “Extreme Graphics” written by Spencer Drate and published by North Light Books, Ride is not only included, but Scott was asked to do the cover — and to make it “extreme.” The images of briars are the perfect biological metaphor to complement his soft-focus type. As Scott says, “Briars are extreme.”
Ride’s design for the cover of Extreme Graphics features a recurrent theme for the studio: organic imagery and suggestive typography. Click here for a larger image.
I want to share a hand-written note Scott sent me ages ago. In it he says, “I like materials, layers, thoughts, emotion. Putting hands on the image keeps it warm, living. There is something about a CG (computer-generated) image that lacks life. There are no marks (mistakes?) that tell the viewer you created this piece.” I would say there is no doubt that Scott is in every piece he creates.
So, Pamela, if the question is, “Can a snowboarder living with his wife and two sons in the remote capitol of Oregon find a world of success in design?” then the answer is, if it is Scott Clum, absolutely.
More from this next coast, next time.
This article was last modified on January 3, 2023
This article was first published on March 2, 2001
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