Super-low-budget, clandestine promotional media produced as a quarterly one-color newsprint fanzine. Stacks were quietly dropped off on the flyer table of our favorite Bay Area record shops, possibly (probably) illegitimately inserted into SF Weeklys, and snuck into various nooks and crannies of hotels, bars, and hangouts throughout the city.

Team: Alan Miller, Producer; Michael Eldridge, Editor.

The brainchild of marketer/promoter Alan Miller (who went on to found the very successful music and culture rag Filter Magazine) in collaboration with music-production master and creative Count as well as a circle of literary friends. Cheeky was created in the after-hours; folding the written reviews into scrappy layouts with elements abused by concrete walls, copy- and fax-machines well through the wee hours of the mornings. Heavily inspired by the gritty digital-vs-analog typographic collisions of Chris Ashworth (Raygun, Blah Blah Blah) and Tomato (Underworld), the design work was generally pretty unhinged but occasionally resonated with something special.

Cheeky was mostly sincere - we all liked the music - it just happened that everything was from various Polygram Records Group imprints.

Alan's colophon of our last issue sums the project up perfectly: "Thanks for picking up this fourth issue of cheeky. It's our first anniversary issue and thanks to you, good music, and cheap newsprint, we've been having a ball. Perhaps you found us wedged inside your beloved SF Weekly. That will take a bit of explaining but we'll have to get to that later. Maybe we've outdone ourselves and surprised you in a hotel room. Don't look behind you, avoid mirrors and keep your voice down. Cheeky is ubiquitous. And also water soluble, so be careful when you're reading this in the shower. We were denied our UL certificate, so be careful when microwaving.

Cheeky issue 0.3? You kidding me?

We've gotten tons of letters basically saying we're great, which is what we wanted, so, thanks. We'll keep up slacking our day jobs as long as we can."

If you happen across a copy of the mythical third issue, let me know ;)

Issue 1. (The lone spread I was able to extract from the original Quark file.) Abusing the hell out of blackletter and script fonts :)

Issue 2. Main type elements set in Folio, then laser printed and subjected to all kinds of degeneration - scraped on concrete, faxed back and forth across the office, photo-copied, then scanned.

I don't remember what happened with Issue 3... none of us do.

Issue 4. Building-blocks, a serif-type extravaganza; Perpetua, Scala, Garamond... and Monospace.