Welcome!

This is Annie Szafranski. I’m a graphic designer, typographer, and aspiring type designer based in San Diego, California. I work directly with artists, small businesses, and non-profits to help visualize ideas, whether it’s through editorial layouts, zines, and works of ephemera, or custom type design, logos, and visual identites. This is also a space for my own work, because I love to use my skills to make things and communicate my own ideas too.

I’ve worked in-house as a designer with varying titles throughout the years: production designer, graphic designer, visual designer, senior designer, senior brand designer—you get it. All of them very much jobs for larger companies and startups. None of that work is represented here and that’s intentional. The many years I’ve worked in-house have warped my passions and made me believe my skillsets are only valuable to them.

I hope for Metal Flowers to be a space to show what I love most about graphic design and typography, to push myself, and take on more unique and collaborative projects—no matter how small. The smallest projects can offer something more meaningful and inspiring to people, because graphic design is social and political—not just commercial. I hope to collaborate with people working to build a better world, who are making something meaningful to them, and help play a small role in bringing ideas to life in the best way I know how—through type, layout, and ideally in print.

Over time, I hope to develop more type design work here as I continue to learn the craft and find my place within it. You can watch that transformation happen as I add new projects and blog posts here, gaining inspiration from what’s mentioned above. Maybe a small, custom, glyph set will be ideal for your project? Who knows!

With this, I welcome new design opportunities, collaborations, and friendship! If you want to collaborate, but don’t know on what yet, let’s discuss together! If you’re local, let’s get coffee.

For inquiries, or to just say hi, please get in touch: annie@metal-flowers.com

Colophon

This static website is designed and built by Annie Szafranski. The logotype is set in Pirelli designed by Masahiro Nakamura and Weichi He. The primary headlines are set in Resonay by Andrej Dieneš. The primary body copy and smaller headlines are set in Utile Narrow and the secondary body copy is set in Odile—both of which are designed by Sibylle Hagmann of Kontour Type.

Why Metal Flowers?

The name is pulled from the title of a rather brief essay, “Metal-Flowers”, by Edward Rowe Mores, featured in Books and Printing: A Treasury for Typophiles.

Despite the underwhelming essay itself, “Metal-Flowers” always stuck with me, with its simple two discordant words that, together, compound and represent something I longed to get closer to—even if I didn’t quite know what that looked like.

To me, now, it represents something even more than just a rich history of typography and craft, but beauty and resistance, which can all be so deeply connected.

Quote pulled from Letterpress Revolution: The Politics of Anarchist Print Culture by Kathy E. Ferguson.

Metal-Flowers will be my enigmatic guide, and I hope to show you what it looks like and means to me, even if it isn’t so literal.