You may recall I recently wrote up a review on the Font­Feed of Brave­font, the Exten­sis Suit­case Fusion 2 viral pro­mo­tional video. What I wasn’t aware of was the bril­liant pro­mo­tion that Exten­sis did to coin­cide with the launch. When the new ver­sion was released in Sep­tem­ber they announced that anyone pur­chas­ing the new Suit­case would receive a free laptop skin by Greg Lamarche, until sup­plies would run out. Much to my sur­prise, I received one of those laptop skins in my mail last week.

When Exten­sis went look­ing for a typog­ra­phy artist to work on this project (code­name: SKIN) there were many to choose from. They even­tu­ally selected Greg Lamarche. Greg took a very inter­est­ing path to artis­tic great­ness. A Queens native who now lives and works in Man­hat­tan, Greg started in the art world as graf­fiti artist SPone and became widely rec­og­nized as one of the key play­ers in NYC’s rev­o­lu­tion­ary ’80s-era graf­fiti move­ment. Known for his flaw­less letter con­struc­tions and vibrant mixed-​media col­lage work, in 1992 Greg founded the highly-​influential graf­fiti ’zine, Skills. Today his focus is on urban art projects, and gallery and com­mer­cial work. Having worked with com­pa­nies like Mass Appeal, Jux­tapoz and Zoo York, most of Greg’s work is intri­cately cut out col­lages. He is heav­ily focused on letter forms, making him a great choice for a type-​oriented project for type lovers. Greg designed the spec­tac­u­lar typog­ra­phy piece below that was quickly pro­duced into a lim­ited edi­tion laptop skin.

Exten­sis con­tacted Greg Lamarche through his web­site this past summer. Greg sus­pects they got open on a design he did a while back for Poketo. The brief for this project was very open – to create a lim­ited edi­tion laptop skin as a pro­mo­tional piece to com­pli­ment the new ver­sion of their Suit­case font man­age­ment soft­ware. Since so much of Greg’s work uses let­ters and fonts it seemed like a per­fect fit. He wanted the design to have an ambigu­ous com­po­si­tion so that it did not specif­i­cally spell out any­thing. It is meant to be viewed more as a whole rather than a bunch of indi­vid­ual let­ters. Each letter was made from scratch and a lot of frag­ments, shadow, 3-D and neg­a­tive space were used to create a sense of move­ment. The design betrays a gen­uine inter­est in the abstract pos­si­bil­i­ties of letter forms.

Unti­tled (Sp.one series), 2003 | Paper col­lage, 8 x 16 inchesPri­vate Col­lec­tion © Greg Lamarche

Jim Kid­well told me the laptop skin pro­mo­tion ended a while ago, and they went quickly.

“We knew we were on to some­thing when we had to hide our stash from the grem­lins at Extensis.”

Exten­sis VP of Cor­po­rate Mar­ket­ing, Amanda Paull had this to say about the pro­mo­tion and why they chose Greg for this work.

“We had a really pos­i­tive reac­tion to this pro­mo­tion – our audi­ence con­sists of heavy type users who have an appre­ci­a­tion for orig­i­nal art­work, and this seemed like a per­fect pair­ing. We con­tacted Greg after doing some research. We wanted some­one who had more than just a dig­i­tal back­ground, but who started with hands-​on art­work. Greg used to be exclu­sively a graf­fiti artist, then began using that same style in col­lage art – mostly uti­liz­ing letter forms. He then slowly took his craft dig­i­tal. These days he does a mix – any­thing from instal­la­tion graf­fiti, to com­mer­cial projects, to fine art and exhi­bi­tions.
Anec­do­tally, every time I’m in a coffee shop using my Mac­Book Pro I get a com­ment on the laptop skin.”

New lim­ited edi­tion print Lamarche just recently dropped through Anony­mous Gallery in NYC

For those of us who are dis­ap­pointed that the laptop skin pro­mo­tion is over, there’s solace. The design has been made avail­able as wall­pa­per files in a number of desk­top sizes. You can down­load them from The Exten­sis Com­mu­nity Blog.

And now to come back to the orig­i­nal premise of this entry, and regard­ing my not so favourable review on the Font­Feed of the Brave­font pro­mo­tional video – I really don’t know how to react to the laptop skin being sent to me. Make no mis­take: I’m very happy with it because it looks way cool and every­body who’s seen it really digs it. But I was a bit puz­zled to receive one because I don’t recall ever having sent them my home address. So should I be thank­ful and hon­oured that I was sent one? Should I sus­pect Exten­sis of trying to bribe me into being a little more lenient for their prod­ucts in future reviews? Or did they just prove they know where I live and should I be very, very worried?

For the record, this last para­graph is a joke! ;)