Mapersand!

My daughter-in-law knows my love of ampersands and sent me the link to this recently:
“From one design capital to another: This month the Amsterdam-based interior design magazine Eigen Huis & Interieur published a special ‘New York Design Guide’ issue that highlights landmarks of the New York City design scene. Pentagram’s Luke Hayman and his team recently redesigned EH&I and established the masthead’s ampersand as an icon of the brand. Each month a different designer is invited to interpret the ampersand for the opening of the ‘Interieur’ section, and for the New York issue, Hayman created an ampersand inspired by Massimo Vignelli’s classic 1972 map of the New York City subway system. In the new version, the lines of the ampersand playfully connect contemporary and historic New York designers, agencies and institutions, from Milton Glaser, George Lois, Ruth Ansel and the Museum of Modern Art to Karlssonwilker, Local Projects, Dror and Pentagram (of course).”
Learn more about it here, and download a PDF of the map here. Thanks, Amy!

Image of the Day: Caslon and Goudy

Two of my favorite ampersands, Caslon and Goudy in PMS 659

Inking Ampersands

For my birthday, my son and daughter-in-law gave me some metal and wood letterpress ampersands to add to my collection.  A few weeks later the head pressman at work [Ron] was cleaning out the area where we store leftover ink used on past printings.  I asked if I could have one of the containers in order to ink up my collection, and Ron’s eyes lit up when he saw the ampersands.

A little ink goes a long way. You can see some of the test prints I made of each individual ampersand.

I arranged the ampersands in a ‘cloud’ for printing, inked them up, then used a brayer  to get smooth impression.

Holding the group as I inked up.

Pantone 659; a pretty sweet color.

Ampersand Punch

I have a couple of metal ampersand punches. They are identical to each other, but I received them years apart. Terri got inspired and used one on her belt. 

Open Source Ampersands

via brainpickings

“Open Source Ampersands is essentially a single-character font — a font file that only contains glyphs for a single character — using the ampersand. Each of the ampersand characters is real text, not an image, and can be selected, copied, pasted and applied CSS to. The ampersands scale as you zoom the page and work in every browser, even ancient versions of Internet Explorer. The project serves as a statement against licensing limitations on the web and aims to celebrate open standards and open source. And though the folks at shit ampersand may be less than thrilled with many of the designs, it’s still an admirable project.”

Visit the site here.