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| 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. |
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Saturday, April 9, 2011
Ampersand Punch
Word of the Day: Bumf
via A.Word.A.Day with Anu GargMEANING: Noun: Unwanted or uninteresting printed matter such as governmental forms, legal documents, junk mail, promotional pamphlets, etc.
ETYMOLOGY: Short for bum fodder, slang for toilet paper. Earliest documented use: 1889.
“A mortgage loan can generate 200 pages of bumf, most of it so boring and repetitious that no one has the energy or the time to read it all.”—John Gilmour; Lenders Use The Hoover Principle; The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia); Jan 20, 2001.
Friday, April 8, 2011
Image of the Day: Periodic Table of Typefaces
4CP | Four Color Process adventures deep inside the comic book
via letterology[From the 4CP blog] “. . . Lately, I've been trying to master the relationship between dot patterns and the finite color value options of vintage four-color process. Typically there were only three basic values for cyan, magenta, and yellow: 100%, 50%, and 25%, which were combined to create the optical illusion of 45-65 colors. (70% was also used sometimes.) These values account for the way a constituent color may appear as large or small dots or as what looks like a solid color with dots knocked out of it.
When you blow up process printing, you eliminate nearly all of the intended colors. There is no illusion of anything anymore, and no human intention behind what you’re seeing. It’s just the rudimentary building blocks of an inexpensive mechanical printing process, thrown into accidental relationships at the microscopic level.”
Discover more images here.
Earworm of the Day: The Only Living Boy in New York
Listen to it here.
Thursday, April 7, 2011
The Dun Emer Press
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| Elizabeth Yeats standing at the iron handpress, with Beatrice Cassidy rolling out ink and Esther Ryan correcting proofs at the table at Dun Emer Press in 1903. |
via letterology
“Elizabeth ‘Lolly’ Corbett Yeats (1868-1940) was the first commercial printer in Ireland to work exclusively on iron handpresses. She was also an art teacher and member of William Morris’s circle in London and studied with the Women’s Printing Society there. In 1902 she established a private press at the large home of Evelyn Gleeson in Dundrum near Dublin and was placed in charge of managing the new Dun Emer Press. With her sister Lily, a skilled needleworker, and Evelyn Gleeson they also began the Dun Emer Guild to train young women in bookbinding, printing and other craft trades so they might earn a living. In 1908, Elizabeth and her poet brother, William Butler Yeats started the Cuala Press, publishing over 70 fine edition books of Irish writers including 48 works by her brother William. . .”
More can be found here.
Eric Whitacre: A virtual choir 2,052 voices strong
via TED“In a moving and madly viral video last year, composer Eric Whitacre led a virtual choir of singers from around the world. He talks through the creative challenges of making music powered by YouTube, and unveils the first 2 minutes of his new work, Sleep, with a video choir of 2,052.
Watch the TED talk here, and Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choir - Lux Aurumque here.
Planet eBook
Planet eBook hosts a growing number of iconic works of classic literature — free to download without needing a log-in or membership. 82 books are currently hosted in the library as PDF files, which can be opened and read on any computer or smartphone. The books served up on Planet eBook are all public domain material; meaning they can be downloaded, copied, printed, and shared without requiring authorization from the author or publisher — as long as you do not modify the content or sell them for a profit.
To read the novels on Planet eBook you will need a PDF reader. Visit Plant eBook here.
Nephew Art
A copy of B. Kliban’s art has had traveled with me and hung in the offices I’ve worked in since 1982. It has aged well over the years.
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Fifteen More Minutes of Fame
via the Nightly HellerFifteen More Minutes of Fame at the Union Square Greengrocer’s Market in NYC — “The Andy Monument,” produced by the Public Art Fund is by Rob Pruitt and will on view until Oct 2. Bring your own soup cans!
Read and see more here.
Nerd Merit Badges
via PRINTERESTING
Printer Hero“How does one earn this Nerd Merit Badge for being a ‘Printer Hero?’ It may appear that one must slay the Savage Printer, but apparently that sword is a reference to Arthurian legend. You don’t earn this badge by fixing printers and copiers. You earn this badge by being willing to try.”
Family Tech Support
“Requirements: You provide hardware, software, and telephone support for family computers and electronics—voluntarily or involuntarily.”
Visit the nerd merit badges site here.
Reno Dakota & Pantone 292
via a capital idea“. . . A friend has recently rediscovered the Magnetic Fields, a favorite band of mine. We had a fun discussion of the song Reno Dakota, which includes the lyrics:
Reno Dakota there’s not an iota
Of kindness in you
You know you enthrall me
And yet you don’t call me
It’s making me blue
Pantone 292
Listen to it here.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
The Pilcrow
via Shady Characters: The secret life of punctuation“…Taking pride of place at the head of every new paragraph, the pilcrow had carved out a literal niche for itself at the heart of late medieval writing. Boldly inked by the rubricator, pilcrows grew ever more elaborate and time-consuming to add. Unfortunately the deadline is not a modern invention; occasionally, time would run out before the rubricator could complete his work and the white space carefully reserved for the pilcrow went undecorated. With the advent of the printing press, the volume of printed documents to be rubricated grew exponentially and it became increasingly difficult to attend to them all. The pilcrow became a ghost, and the indented paragraph was born in its stead.”
Read Parts 1, 2, and 3 here.
Monday, April 4, 2011
Aldus Prepress Group
While searching through a box of my son’s Legos for people to use as part of an art project, I came across this pin. I must have picked it up at a trade show, very likely On-Demand in Philadelphia in the early 90’s. I would brought back bags of nifty free give-aways for my wife and son — usually pens, highlighters, mousepads, and such from my visits with the vendors there. We used the the Aldus products PressWise and TrapWise for many years at work. Finding this pin brought back fond memories of the early days of Penn State Printing Services.
“The Aldus Prepress Group was started by Ranjit Mulgaonkar and Michael Reiher in 1990. Under the leadership of Ranjit Mulgaonkar in three years time the group built the industries first desktop prepress software to perform operations such as color separation, imposition, trapping and automated work-flow. The Aldus Prepress products were used by trade shops and service bureaus around the world. These products were also OEMed by print industry Giants like DuPont (1993) and Agfa (1993). After the Adobe acquisition/merger of Aldus Corporation, the product-line was acquired by Luminous Corporation on January 12, 1996.”
Watch videos of their products here.
1962: Proposed Interrobangs
via welovetypography“…Frustrated with the growing tendency of copywriters to combine the exclamation mark and question mark to yield a surprised or rhetorical question — “Who would punctuate a sentence like that?!” — [Martin K. Speckter] penned an article for Type Talks to offer a solution. ‘Making a new point, or, how about that…’ appeared in the March-April 1962 issue and argued that there was a need for a single punctuation mark to replace this ugly, jury-rigged construction. As the article went on to explain, this putative symbol was intended to convey a particular mixture of surprise and doubt…”
Read the rest here.
360º Panorama is the largest indoor photo in the world
via letterology“Read a fascinating story from Wired about a 360 degree photograph of Prague’s Philosophical Hall, a Baroque reading room in the city’s 868-year-old Strahov Monastery Library. And then view the 40 gigapixel photo produced by photographer Jeffrey Martin here. This room is a repository of rare books and is typically off limits to the public. Martin received special permission to spend the five days of shooting it took to make the composite image. The camera took another 111 hours of post-processing in order to stitch together the nearly 3000 images of the final 360 degree photo. You can actually scan the entire room of the finished photograph and zoom in close enough to read some of the titles on the rare books.”
Sunday, April 3, 2011
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.
Saturday, April 2, 2011
Mimetoliths of the World
via wired“Rocks weather and erode into all sorts of shapes that the imagination can interpret as familiar objects. Like clouds, these rock formations, sometimes called mimetoliths, may look like different things to different people. But some are unarguably humanoid. . . ”
See some examples of mimetoliths, here.
Friday, April 1, 2011
New York Public Library to hold 500-person scavenger hunt in honor of 100th anniversary
via mybug “It's every book worm’s dream—a night at the New York Public Library. For the first time ever, the library said Thursday it will let select members of the public roam its main branch for a special after-hours event.
On May 20 the 42nd St. location will host a giant, modernized scavenger hunt to help commemorate the library's 100th birthday. ‘Find the Future: The Game’ will allow 500 contestants, split into teams of eight, to search for historic objects within the library, according to the library officials. The groups will use smart phones to get clues, leading them to items like a draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jack Kerouac’s glasses or Charles Dickens’ letter opener, fashioned out of his dead cat Bob’s amputated arm.”
Read the rest here, visit the New York Public Library site here; registration to participate starts at 9 a.m. today.
Visibility: Spotty
via shorpy“Washington, D.C., circa 1911. ‘Flights and test of Rex Smith biplane flown by Antony Jannus. The plane with Rufus R. Bermann, wireless operator, and Fred Aubert.’ Whose somewhat pixilated appearance can be attributed to mold on the emulsion. Harris & Ewing Collection glass negative.”
View full size here. I love the almost surreal effect that the mold has created — it reminds me of early transporting in Start Trek.
How to Steal Like an Artist and 9 Other Things that Nobody Told Me
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| 1 + 1 = 3 |
via HOW
“I love it when creative people explain how their creativity works. Artist and writer Austin Kleon gave a presentation called How to Steal Like an Artist and 9 Other Things that Nobody Told Me yesterday at Broome Community College in Binghamton, New York, and was kind enough to share the slides.”
See the presentation here.
“What is a Typeface?” Alex
via speak up“On Wednesday, November 7th, 2007, the show Jeopardy presented its 5,328th show, the quarterfinal of the Tournament of Champions. In the Double Jeopardy! Round, the three contestants were faced with the following category: Knowledge of Fonts. . . ”
See the answers and questions, here.
Kurt Weidemann Passes Away At Age 87
via the font shop“. . . During a discussion at Swiss Mediaforum in 2010 [Kurt Weidemann] literally said: ‘There are ten, maybe fifteen very good typefaces, with which one can at least make do. There are 30,000 on the market, of which 29,990 can sink in the Pacific Ocean without causing any cultural damage.’ ”
Read the entire post here.
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Cryptanalysis: Help Solve an Open Murder Case
via Federal Bureau of Investigation“On June 30, 1999, sheriff’s officers in St. Louis, Missouri discovered the body of 41-year-old Ricky McCormick. He had been murdered and dumped in a field. The only clues regarding the homicide were two encrypted notes found in the victim’s pants pockets. Despite extensive work by our Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit (CRRU), as well as help from the American Cryptogram Association, the meanings of those two coded notes remain a mystery to this day, and Ricky McCormick’s murderer has yet to face justice. “We are really good at what we do,” said CRRU chief Dan Olson, “but we could use some help with this one.” In fact, Ricky McCormick’s encrypted notes are one of CRRU’s top unsolved cases. “Breaking the code,” said Olson, “could reveal the victim’s whereabouts before his death and could lead to the solution of a homicide. Not every cipher we get arrives at our door under those circumstances.”
Read the rest, and see the other note here. More on the story from the NYTimes here, and a follow-up on potential leads here.
Make a Custom Brush for your Watermark
via thephotoletariat“Like many necessary tasks, uploading your photos to your blog can be tedious: after a while, all that resizing, tagging, and watermarking gets old. But there are lots of ways to make this process more efficient, and one of my favorites involves making your watermark a custom brush. Custom brushes give you more flexibility (color, size, placement, etc.), and you can watermark your images in a fraction of a second.”
Read the rest here.
Raw Color: Printing with Vegetable Ink
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| Inkjet print made with (C) Red Cabbage, (M) Beetroot and (Y) Pumpkin. |
via colourlovers
“The work of Daniera ter Haar & Christoph Brach, who have become better known by the name of one of their projects, Raw Color, is highly prismatic, covering the spectrum between art, design, photography and color research by mixing the powerful colors of vegetables, innovative color harvesting processes, with unique applications for print and textiles. The Eindhoven, Netherlands based team uses color as the connection between their different practices posing questions like ‘what is the nature of a color and what is the connection to its physical state.’”
Read and see more of this work here.
“If you want to go quickly go alone, if you want to go far...
via quotevadis“If you want to go quickly go alone, if you want to go far go together.”
— African proverb
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Gas Ghosting
“Gas ghosting, also known as gloss ghosting, is the transfer of a printed image from the front of one sheet to the back of another. The transfer is caused by a chemical reaction when vapors from ink drying on one side of the press sheet interacts chemically with dry ink or paper coating on the other side of the sheet. Gas ghosting can also result when the ink drying on the second side is accelerated or retarded by fumes given off by ink on the first side. The problem is typically solved by changing the chemical properties of one of the variables in the process.”
I recently experienced this ghosting at work. Here are the specs:
Final size 8"x8" booklet cover
Printed two out
Sheet size 20"x28"
100# Productolith Dull Cover
Work and Turn
PMS 877 [Silver], PMS 295 [Dark Blue], flood dull varnish
Printed on Heidelberg SORZ
Wet trapped
The photo shows the gas ghosting of the lion shrine statue [it appears almost like a negative on the solid dark blue area]. It showed up predominantly only one side of the printed sheet. Next year, we plan on printing PMS 877 silver first, let it dry a few days, then come back with PMS 295 [dry trapping]; after that dries, run the varnish. This would be a very cool technique to do on purpose; I wonder if anyone has created a gas ghost intentionally on a printed piece?
More on ghosting can be found on Gordon Pritchard’s blog, “Quality in Print,” here and here.
A+B=C [Atoms+Bits=the neue Craft]
via Adobe Museum of Digital Media“John Maeda, one of Esquire’s 75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century, examines some of the history that connects the worlds of analog creativity and digital creativity. Set in the museum’s freshly constructed auditorium, the lecture is brought to life with interactive projections, animated infographics, video clips, and mini documentaries of various hands-based Rhode Island School of Design workshops, such as glassblowing and letterpress.”
Watch his talk, here.
Obsolete Occupations: 7 Short Films
spotted by a friend in NYC“Buckminster Fuller famously said, ‘You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.’ And the new models of the digital age have been making increasingly more old-timey crafts obsolete. But there seems to be something remarkably poetic about these dying professions. Over the past few months, we been noticing– and noting — a number of beautifully shot microdocumentaries romanticizing this impending obsolescence. Today, we’ve curated seven of our favorites. . . ”
Read about and watch the seven short films, here.
Design Council UK Explains What Graphic Designers Do
via @Issue Journal of Business & Design“Probably more people know what a microbiologist does than what graphic designers do. Undoubtedly your aunt and grandma – and possibly even your mother – don’t have a clue. They’ll look at a printed piece and praise the photography, the illustrations, the writing and sometimes even the feel of the paper, but they aren’t quite sure what role the designer played in this. That’s why we are grateful to the Design Council UK for producing a video that succinctly explains what graphic design is and what graphic designers do. We recommend that you forward it to every member of your family especially just before a holiday gathering, and perhaps selectively to a few clients.”
Watch it here.
Monday, March 28, 2011
Little Giants
Miniature famous people made of vinyl in the Little Giants collection by Alphine Northcote are produced by the Jailbreak Collective.
See them all here.
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Weingut Ampersand
via creativepro“While the word ’Weingut’ may not sound particularly lyrical to the ears of English speakers, the Weingut font family is certainly pleasing to the eyes. This decorative display typeface, created by Georg Herold-Wildfellner, blooms with delicate buds, leaves, and tendrils.”
“Weingut Script Flourish is a decorative display font with high contrasts, perfectly drawn to the tiniest details. The font is trimmed to fairly large font sizes and is highly suitable for chapter titles or book jackets as well as Headlines, Invitations and wine labels :), although also impressing with an astounding legibility in small typesettings. Inspired by the hand drawn Blätterschrift from the 19th century Mettenleiter’s Schriftenmagazin, its basic structure is related to the English Script. The creative process started in summer 2009 and after 600 hours of work, over a 2 year period, Weingut now unfolds to reveal all its charms.”
Read more about it here.
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Vote for My Wife's Video . . .
My wife writes, “A couple weeks ago, the authors of the book Run Like a Mother boldly asked for short videos about how we run like mothers. A handful of us rallied: big thanks to all you cinematographers out there. There are eight videos on their site — each less than two minutes each. Check them out, then vote on your favorite at the bottom. The top three vote receivers win either a new badass mother runner hats or visor.” She’d really like to win a hat or a visor to keep her hair out of her face while running!Her’s is #3
“Now I'm a Diva!”
Vote early, vote often!
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Trompe L’oeil: Crows in the Hawthorn
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| Crows in the Hawthorn III |
Ron Isaacs painted Trompe L’oeil constructions
See his Crows in the Hawthorn V
acrylic on birch plywood construction
21 1/2” x 19 1/4” x 5 1/4”
Read an interview with Isaacs here.
Monday, March 21, 2011
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Business Cards: Page XVIII
[Middle Row] Wood•Mode: a safe but effective type treatmet.
[Bottom Row] SASCO card; Jerry Gay is my mother-in-law’s brother, who I met on one of his visits ‘up North’.
Linoskala
via Blue Pencil“…Linoskala from Linotype GmbH, a two-sided volvelle (wheel chart) used to find out characters per cicero for 25 Linotype typefaces (presumably hot metal rather than Linofilm) at a series of [Didot] point sizes. The sizes vary from typeface to typeface with most being available in 6 pt, 7 pt, 8 pt, 9 pt, 10 pt and 12 pt while a few stop at 10 pt and Excelsior additionally offers 7.5 pt and 8.5 pt. Oddly there is no 11 pt.
There are two parts to the volvelle. One is a bright orange wheel with a handle and a viewing slot that has the list of typefaces and the cicero increments (in black) as well as Linotype’s logo. The other is a larger light gray wheel with the typeface names and point sizes in black arranged around its edge.
The volvelle is not dated but it is most likely from the early 1960s since Optima (1958) is among the typefaces.”
Read the entire post here.
Saturday, March 19, 2011
Billboards Converted To Swingsets
“Paris Architect Didier Faustino created this epic swing set out of a converted advertising billboard for the Shenzhen-Hong Kong Bi-City Biennial of Urbanism and Architecture. ‘Double Happiness responds to the society of materialism where individual desires seem to be prevailing over all. This nomad piece of urban furniture allows the reactivation of different public spaces and enables inhabitants to reappropriate fragments of their city. They will both escape and dominate public space through a game of equilibrium and desequilibrium. By playing this “risky” game, and testing their own limits, two persons can experience together a new perception of space and recover an awareness of the physical world.’ ”
Business Cards: Page XVII
[Middle Row] Middle card of Richard Waters. You have to hear this instrument to truly appreciate it, and we are lucky enough to have one.
Friday, March 18, 2011
Super Moons and Perigean Tides
pointed out by my father-in-law, via nasa“On March 19th, a full Moon of rare size and beauty will rise in the east at sunset. It’s a super ‘perigee moon’—the biggest in almost 20 years. ‘The last full Moon so big and close to Earth occurred in March of 1993,’ says Geoff Chester of the US Naval Observatory in Washington DC. ‘I’d say it’s worth a look.’
Full Moons vary in size because of the oval shape of the Moon’s orbit. It is an ellipse with one side (perigee) about 50,000 km closer to Earth than the other (apogee): diagram. Nearby perigee moons are about 14% bigger and 30% brighter than lesser moons that occur on the apogee side of the Moon’s orbit.
‘The full Moon of March 19th occurs less than one hour away from perigee—a near-perfect coincidence that happens only 18 years or so,’ adds Chester. A perigee full Moon brings with it extra-high ‘perigean tides,’ but this is nothing to worry about, according to NOAA. In most places, lunar gravity at perigee pulls tide waters only a few centimeters (an inch or so) higher than usual. Local geography can amplify the effect to about 15 centimeters (six inches)—not exactly a great flood.
Indeed, contrary to some reports circulating the Internet, perigee Moons do not trigger natural disasters. The ‘super moon’ of March 1983, for instance, passed without incident. And an almost-super Moon in Dec. 2008 also proved harmless.”
Read the rest here. Watch a ScienceCast on super moons here. The exact time of the next full moon is: NEW YORK = Saturday * 19th March 2011 * 02:10:06 pm (EST). I just love the sound of the phrase ‘perigean tides.’
Collection of Pop-ups
via Paper Forest“The Allegro Movable Book Collection is Australia’s largest and most comprehensive collection of movable and pop-up books covering over 300 years of published history. Corrie Allegro is releasing books from this collection to the public, collectors and institutions. This book site contains articles, news and related links to the genre of ‘movable’ books.”
Six Degrees of Moby and Oliver Sacks
via wired“On his upcoming effort Destroyed, Moby constructs synthetic symphonies out of sounds coaxed from broken-down gear during dead-of-night sessions in hotel rooms. It’s an insomniac artist’s way of making sense of the world during a time when the music industry, and everything else, seems to be falling into chaos. . . .
Wired.com: You serve on the board of directors of the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function, which works with Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain author, neurologist Oliver Sacks. What would Sacks think if he heard Destroyed?
Moby: Oliver is an interesting guy, who I hold in the highest regard. But he can be a little cranky. He mainly likes classical music, so my honest answer is I think it depends on if you caught him on a good or bad day or time. If you caught him at a time where he was really relaxed and open-minded, he might take the time to listen to Destroyed’s classical and melodic influences. But I have a feeling Concetta Tomaino, the IMNF’s executive director, might be favorably disposed to it. . . .”
Read the entire article here.
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