Van Lanen, Matthew Carter, and Ampersands

Van Lanen deliberately printed off-register in two colors .

via imprint

An Interview With Matthew Carter:

“. . . The Hamilton Wood Type Museum in Two Rivers, Wisconsin released Carter Latin (now called Van Lanen), your first-ever wood type. Can you explain who initiated the design?

MATTHEW: This project began in 2002 thanks to Richard Zauft who was teaching in Milwaukee at the time and advising the Hamilton Museum. He suggested to Hamilton that they should revive a few of their old wood types and commission a new one as a way of earning revenue. On a visit to Boston he invited me to take on the new design and I jumped at the opportunity, mainly out of curiosity about a kind of type that I had never dealt with before.”

Read An Interview With Matthew Carter — here. The Van Lanen’s ampersand makes me stop, look, and smile.

Black Raven Brewing Company

spotted on the edible raven blog

Gray crest logo style t-shirt

“Ravens have long been held in high esteem by brewers, particularly in the British Isles. A famous London brewery once had a tame ‘mascot’ raven named ‘Joey’ that was thought to bring the brewery good luck. Many years ago while home brewing, our brewer/owner came across an old photo in an online stock photo database entitled ‘Brewer with tame raven.’ That photo was the inspiration for continuing the mystical brewery–raven connection, hence the Black Raven Brewing Company.”

More about their story here.

Keep Calm and Carry On

In light of the recent announcement by Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett’s proposed budget for 2011-2012 that would cut annual state funding for Penn State roughly in half, and President Graham Spanier’s response, I was inspired to update the classic British poster from WWII.

Desktop image in red, that I am using at work.

. . . and a version in blue.

In my opinion, the best thing I can do is ignore the swirling and escalating rumors, do my job, step up to the plate when necessary, and just keep focused on the task at hand. I do not get a lot of foot traffic in my office, but perhaps anyone who sees my desktop [for now] will be influenced.

. . .


From wikipedia: “Keep Calm and Carry On was a poster produced by the British government in 1939 during the beginning of World War II, intended to raise the morale of the British public under the threat of impending invasion. It was little known and never used. The poster was rediscovered in 2000 and has been re-issued by a number of private sector companies, and used as the decorative theme for a range of other products. There are only two known surviving examples of the poster outside of government archives.

The original 1939 poster

The poster was initially produced by the Ministry of Information in 1939 during the beginning of World War II. It was intended to be distributed in order to strengthen morale in the event of a wartime disaster. Two-and-a-half million copies were printed, although the poster was distributed only in limited numbers. The designer of the poster is not known.”

Read the rest here. More about the original 1939 poster here and here, and also here from the BBC. Parodies of this poster design can be found here, here, and here. The original wallpaper design that I modified for the top two wallpapers can be found here.

CMYK Highway

via printeresting

“Approximately 16,000 pounds of ink cartridges from the Flint Group, an Indianapolis-based company selling printing and packaging products, was bound for a newspaper company in Portland, Maine. Red, blue, and yellow ink cartridges were inside the truck, but Ferson said there is no evidence the yellow ink was released.

Go to the story here.

K Chronicles: Socks and the Sleeping Mouse

Yet another reason I really enjoy Keith Knight’s strips.

Image of the Day: At 25 or 6 Before

Taken at 35 m.p.h. on my College Avenue commute this morning. I am amazed how well the shot turned out!
“Ooops, I forgot the word ‘of’ — I’ll just add it above!”

What is Your Favorite Color?

via Triiibes Press

“Once a child was asked, ‘what is your favourite colour?,’ a common enough question . . . yet a stunning reply . . . ‘today,’ she said softly, ‘it’s yellow.’ I have remembered that forever and it has released me from the pain of choosing just one colour to be my favourite when there are so many to enjoy every moment.”

— Sarah Farrugia, Strategist, Thinker, Writer, Progressive

The Brilliant Line

via communication arts

“This collaboration between the Rhode Island School of Design [RSID] Museum of Art and RISD’s Interactive Media Department serves two separate needs: to entice visitors to the exhibition and to display at the exhibition as a way for visitors to learn more about the art and printmaking.

A map interface offers a unique user interface that allows for all the artworks to be displayed at the same time it offers information about their origination. There are two modes for viewing the artworks—one enables viewers to enlarge the art and the other allows them to analyze it by layering the etching lines to see how the artist built up the form within each piece. ”

Read the rest of the post here. Explore The Brilliant Line here, enjoy the “Analyze Lines” option, and watch the video of the engraving process.

Image of the Day: Electro • Touch

Rufous rust, yellow peeling paint, and a cool name —Electro • Touch — all topped off with a lightning bolt with indigo highlights! Spotted near where I park at work.

Ads Worth Spreading

via TED

“The 10 winners of TED’s inaugural Ads Worth Spreading initiative have been announced from the stage. Selected from more than 1,000 submissions from around the world, they are some of the most creative, compelling and out-of-the-box communications of the past year. The winners are a truly diverse group — from major agencies to tiny boutiques to college students and non-profits, hailing from around the world.

Chris Anderson had this to say about the effort: “We’re seeking to reverse the trend of ads being aggressively forced on users. We want to nurture ads so good you choose to watch – and share. On TED.com, ads run after our talks, not before. As well as avoiding the annoyance of interruption, this positioning means they can run longer than the TV-standard 30-seconds. And that’s the key — in 2-3 minutes, there’s more time to tell a story, share an idea, make an authentic human connection. These winning ads, many of them long-form, powerfully demonstrate these strengths. We think they represent an exciting new way for companies to engage with the world in the internet age.”

Read the rest here, and watch the videos here.

Edinburgh Civic Survey (1949)

via Ace Jet 170

“This huge book (280 x 360mm & 111 pages) is full of the incredible post-war maps of Edinburgh. Prepared by Patrick Abercrombie and Derek Plumstead for the Town Council, the book contains detailed data for traffic, health, education, recreation, population density and so on, beautifully depicted in a series of maps, charts and diagrams.”

More about the book can be found here. I especially love the compasses that sit at the foot of each map under the key.

Kodak Moments

This weekend has been filled with Kodak moments. My father-in-law is working on recreating the top portion to a wooden tripod that was built before 1914, and he shared his progress with us.

On the left,  a similar tripod top found at an antique store. He is using this 1914 version as a guide for recreating a larger version. He fabricated the brass fixtures himself.

The Folmer & Schwing tripod top -- with an ampersand stamped into the wood.

Close-up of the ampersand.

Demonstrating how the top goes onto the legs of the tripod.

We also set-up the Crosley slide and negative scanner on their Mac as well. Above is the set-up using a Kodak Transparency Illuminator to view the slides. The slides here were processed October 27, 1965 and cost 10¢ for first class shipping.

More on Kodak’s Folmer & Schwing Division, their professional apparatus division, can be found here.  See a Kodak Folmer & Schwing No 8 Cirkut Outfit Cycle Graphic wooden tripod here.

Elsa Mora’s Papercuttings

The Ride

via a friend

Visit Elsa Mora’ blog dedicated to the magic art of papercutting here; more of her work here. Makes me smile.

Pillows and Maps

via The Bright Side Project

“Cath Young of My Bearded Pigeon creates organic throw pillows that are so beautiful you may not want anyone to touch them. The combination of vintage images and modern organic textiles are inspired . . . ”

Read the rest here, and visit My Bearded Pigeon here.

James Blake’s CMYK EP

via printeresting

“This release from James Blake was apparently issued in three transparent vinyl colorways . . .”

Business Cards: Page XIV

[Top Row] White on tan can be elegant, but never works in low light situations.

[Middle Row] The type stacking treatment almost works for The Dwelling Place -- it was a great store in Lewisburg none the less. Creative Lighting -- I was 99.9%% sure this design is from Art Nouveau design, and modified for the card. The type on the card is just a bit too crowed overall. A quick Google search for “light bulb ephemera + art nouveau” led me to this 1907 ad for AEG metallic filament lightbulbs. Thanks, Google!

[Bottom Row]  pictureline — I'm not usually a big fan of all lowercase type treatments, but this works.

Rock-Paper-Scissors: You vs. the Computer

My results playing 13 rounds this morning

via nytimes

“Computers mimic human reasoning by building on simple rules and statistical averages. Test your strategy against the computer in this rock-paper-scissors game illustrating basic artificial intelligence. Choose from two different modes: novice, where the computer learns to play from scratch, and veteran, where the computer pits over 200,000 rounds of previous experience against you.”


Play it here.  Now I wonder how the computer would do playing Rock Paper Scissors Lizard Spock?

Contest for Pi Day

via green chair press

“The websites Serious Eats and Instructables have held a Pi Day Pie Contest the past couple of years. (Pi Day commemorates the mathematical constant π — 3.14159… — and is held on March 14.)”

Read the rest here, and find out how to enter the 2011 Pi Day Baking Contest here. Visit the official pi day site here,  and read more about the background and history here.

Ada Lovelace Day: 7 October 2011

“Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of celebration of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths. This year Ada Lovelace Day will be held on Friday 7 October. Ada Lovelace was one of the world’s first computer programmers, and one of the first people to see computers as more than just a machine for doing sums. She wrote programmes for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, a general-purpose computing machine, despite the fact that it was never built. She also wrote the very first description of a computer and of software.”

Find out more about Ada Lovelace here, and here.

The 15 Most Important Women in Tech History

via make

No. 2: Grace Hopper
“In addition to inventing the first computer complier in 1952, Admiral Hopper developed COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language), was credited with popularizing the term ‘bug’ and ‘debugging’ – reportedly when she had to remove a moth from the inside of a computer, was instrumental in the creation of FLOW-MATIC language for the UNIVAC I and UNIVAC II computers and was quoted as saying ‘It is easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.’”

Read more about Admiral Grace Hopper, and the other 14 women, here.