A big thank you to true-indigo for taking these movies.
Sunday, June 5, 2011
Indigo: The Colour that Seduced the World
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| Indigo by Catherine E McKinley will be published in August 2011 |
via delancyplace
“Until the most recent times, color dyes were rare and precious commodities upon which power and fortunes were built. Indigo, the brilliant blue dye made from plants, was one of America's slavery-based cash crops. But long before it was exported by America, indigo dye had been one of the world's great treasures for thousands of years. Referred to by some as blue gold, it caught the imagination of connoisseurs, and merchants and colonialists with its power to bewitch and its transcendent beauty — and the value and demand for indigo became ungovernable. It sparked bitter trade wars, and touched off impassioned European and North American legislation and political debate and became known as The Devil’s Dye.”
Read the rest here.
Making Faces: Metal Type in the 21st Century
via nytimes“Making Faces: Metal Type in the 21st Century is a new documentary by Richard Kegler. It is a video document of the late Jim Rimmer, the Canadian designer of almost 200 typefaces. In the film, Rimmer, who died in 2010, painstakingly demonstrates the lost art of pantographic type making. The pantograph is a mechanical device, based on parallelograms, which allows the movement of one pen, in tracing an image, to replicate that movement with a second pen. A craftsperson can draw on one side at a particular size, and on the other the type is “reproduced” at a chosen point size…”
“Is producing this display of vintage technology simply hanging on to the old for dear life, or is there a good reason for designers to know these processes? Kegler responds: “In any field of expertise there is a history and a cumulative reason that things are the way they are. How many Adobe Illustrator users know that kerning, leading, picas and points are terms that should have absolutely no relevance on the computer, but do, since they are direct analogies to the terms and processes of hundreds of years ago? The more time that designers spend on the screen, the more valuable the hand processes become. There is great subtlety and unique flavor in heirloom typefaces.”
Read more about the making of the documentary here, the DVD is available for order here, and the blog of Making Faces is here.
It’s hard to throw away a race number...
via the mehallo blogTurn your Tivek racing numbers into custom clothing; a cap or windbreaker. By Rick at ElevenGear.
Info/order here.
99 Bottles; Their Caps on the Wall
via things neatly organized“Arizona-based artist, William LeGoullon collected 99 bottle caps from one of his state’s remaining drive-in movie theaters as part of his Intermission series.”
See more of his work here.
Saturday, June 4, 2011
Friday, June 3, 2011
Jim Cosgrove: No Mother Could Give More
via NPR“This is egg laying season, if you're a bird. If you're an octopus, particularly a giant Pacific octopus, you've been there, done that. In fact, you died doing it, in what is the saddest mommy story I've heard in a long while. It comes from biologist Jim Cosgrove who describes it all in a lecture he calls, “No Mother Could Give More.’ ”
Read the rest here.
The Art Of Reproduction: 17 Ladies with Ermines
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| Lady With Ermine by Leonardo Da Vinci |
via Visual Hint: Color of Data
“The web can seem like the perfect museum, holding all the world’s art. Type ‘Danae Klimt’ into your favorite search engine, and you conjure up a high-resolution image of Gustav Klimt’s Danaë: tan limbs, a shower of gold, red hair. Or did you find pink limbs? Or were they gray or even green? There’s the rub: the seemingly perfect museum holds dozens of Danaës—with dozens of different palettes. Even the shape changes as reproductions are subtly cropped.
Curious just how far reproductions stray from each other, we began an investigation. For a set of famous artworks, we downloaded all the plausible copies we could find. Then we wrote software to reconstruct each artwork as a mosaic, a patchwork quilt where each patch comes from an individual copy.
The discontinuities of color, texture and frame tell the story of the inaccuracies in reproduction, forming a tapestry of beautiful half-truths...”
Read the rest here, and visit the site here.
Thursday, June 2, 2011
Celebrating Linotype, 125 Years Since Its Debut
via the atlantic“Around for a century, Linotype machines were made obsolete in the 1970s by changing technologies -- but they have not been forgotten…”
Read the rest here.
SLR Camera Simulator
“Want to play around with SLR Camera settings and see how it affects your photo, but without actually using an SLR? Well, you can do just that with the Online SLR Camera Simulator. This simple application allows you to choose the lighting, ISO, shutter speed and aperture. A great tool to teach someone the basics of photography.”
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
Should You Work for Free?
“It's a question that creative types encounter frequently, and the answer? Well, it depends. New York-based designer and illustrator Jessica Hische helps you reach an informed decision with her handy online flowchart, "Should I Work for Free?" Using only css and html (for speedy loading and Google-powered translation into 52 languages), she assists site visitors in analyzing their particular situation, whether the potential payment-free project is for a legitimate business, a charity or non-profit, your friend, or your mom. (That last one is an automatic yes.) Start from the middle of the chart and work outwards by answering yes or no questions -- Will they give you creative freedom? Are you masochistic? -- until you reach a clear answer, delivered with a morsel of parting advice from Hische.’
Works best with Firefox, here.
Who Did That?
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| Albrecht Durer’s monogram |
via imprint
“Anon, short for anonymous, is as common in art history as Smith is in American telephone directories. Yet for a specific work to have its maker buried in an unmarked grave in history’s Potters Field is a sad epitaph indeed.
Credit implies ownership and accountability. Around the eighteenth century art became more commonly a function of individual creators who received credit. The term Anon is less commonly found in art histories of this era. In fact, the signature became an important component of a work, even for lesser artists.
While not on the lowest rung of the art hierarchy, illustrators and cartoonists of the nineteenth century started signing their wares as much for their personal satisfaction as for the recognition it afforded them in an increasingly competitive marketplace. And not only did the illustrator’s signature appear, so did the engraver’s and printmaker’s — akin to the lengthy acknowledgments found in contemporary graphic design annuals...”
Read the rest here.
Practical Principles
via letterology“From an alphabet of tongue twisters originally published in 1836 and revised 100 years later by the Mergenthaler Linotype Corporation. This 1936 edition of Peter Piper’s Practical Principles of Plain and Perfect Pronunciation was designed and illustrated by some of the most celebrated typographers and designers of the day…”
See more examples here, and see the entire book on view at Dr. Chris Mullen's amazing site, The Visual Telling of Stories, here.
Hobo Type
“This written language for hobos was a system of symbols developed as a code to help them cope with a difficult lifestyle. Hobo signage was often written with chalk or coal and might include directions, information and warnings such as a dangerous dog or the homeowner has a gun. Three diagonal lines signified it was not a safe place, the cross indicated angel food, which was food served to hobos after a sermon, two shovels indicated work available and a cross with a smiley face with one corner meant the doctor was willing to treat hobos for free.
In 1889 at the National Hobo Convention, the Tourist Union #63 adopted a concrete set of sixteen ethical by-laws to govern the Nation-wide Hobo Body. Oh what a wonderful world it would be if we all lived by this Hobo Code…”
Read the rest here.
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