Category: 2012

May 6, 2012

Letterpress Workshop at MassArt

I’ve always felt like kind of a fraud for getting through a bit of art school at BU and MassArt’s graphic design program without having taken a printmaking or letterpress class. What kind of artist am I? Well, consider myself righted after taking an amazing full-day course for alums at MassArt’s letterpress studio with the fantastic Keith Cross.

Keith started off with an intro on the room itself: about 350 cases of type and one of the largest academic letterpress workshops in the country. I remember visiting one of the smaller studios when I was a student but apparently the disparate rooms were merged in 2004 and voila! An oddly organized disorganization that I want to pretty much visit every day.

Project one: learn the very basics of letterpress (parts of each letter, measurements, etc.) by creating one or two words on a job stick, centering the words by using spacers called quads to fill a 25 pica space. Check it – if you can’t read upside down, my words are Super Fisticuffs. Double bonus points for getting a ligature in there, right?

The class stacked all their words into the press while Keith showed us how to squeeze all the furniture (wood or metal blocks of various sizes) around them, applying pressure to keep everything stable while the press runs.

Type has been inked by letting the rollers run over them a few times. With paper properly fed into the grippers, it’s time to crank the cylinder so the paper is pressed onto the inked words…

…til they print! I used to think this was magic but really, it’s more about math. A lot of math. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve never minded math. I just have to dust off that part of the brain first.

Post-lunch part deux: rooting through all these drawers and figuring out what I wanted to design, set and print. Of course, I texted my girls to get some ideas for words and phrases. The contenders included: old-fashioned, mellow yellow, chillax, tough it out, honey badger don’t care. Man, they’re good, but I went for the stand by. The phrase I say pretty much every day, to everyone, about anything: Suck it.

Keith has some much patience helping me and pretty much everyone else set their type correctly and with all the furniture to make it pretty damn tight. If it wasn’t for him, my favorite phrase would be printed upside down, backwards and certainly not consistently placed over multiple pages. Literally.

Purple ink! Of course – even got to brand my Suck It poster. Sigh. But tell me that isn’t a gorgeous color?

Wow, I did it! Didn’t want to hog the machine – or ask Keith to help re-ink since my letters were so huge and probably needed it after a few passes – so I made 5 prints. One is already at home in the studio. The others may be gifts for friends or frienemies; the message crosses all divides really.

Now for some beauty shots of my new favorite place. Keith has many letterpress classes and workshops coming up, especially in the Fall. Do it.

This is just the chest of type drawers below where I stood all day. Imagine at least 10 more of these and you have half the room.

Ornaments – hmmm... next time I might try to just grab a bunch of these and make a patterned paper

Did you know the space between lines of text is called leading? Well, this is the lead – yep, it’s a real thing, not just an InDesign thing.

A pretty organized and pretty full type drawer

More wood type – I love all the different tones from all the years of who-knows-how-many ink runs.

May 3, 2012

Going Cuckoo

Although only 4 years old when I visited Disney World, I remember being particularly unimpressed by the “It’s A Small World” ride. The lifeless, jerky motions of the dead-eyed robots, repeating the same annoying song over and over (and over and over…) left me looking forward to the riding comparatively spine-tinglng excitement of the flying Dumbo for what would probably be the 12th time that day – hey, I was 4. What do you want?

About a decade later, when visiting Munich as a part of a high school group, I waited with my friends for the top of the hour, to see the world-famous Rathaus-Glockenspiel. It was just one on a long list of “must see” sites for us tourists. I was expecting to be similarly unenthralled, so imagine my surprise at the complexity of the story the 32 automaton figures told over the course of 15 minutes (!!), and how precisely they moved. All of this heightened by the fact that they were crafted over 100 years ago.

I was recently reminded of these experiences when watching the movie Hugo. Besides the story – which was fascinating, beautiful, and sad – I fell in love with the aesthetics, and wondered how I could bring some of that inside my own house. Although unrealistic to move to 19th century Paris, and building a life-size automaton is pretty far outside my realm of expertise, my thoughts turned to cuckoo clocks. As appealing as traditional carved cuckoo clocks can be (even despite their depictions of dead, hanging game - not exactly what I was picturing in my decor), I found a number of them that satisfy my need for automated moving parts, and yet still manage to be sophisticated.

Love the traditional silhouette of this one.
(hmmm…do I spot some dead animal silhouettes? I don’t even care!)

Bright, fabulous colors. A real statement.
The texture and pattern of this one is particularly striking.
The all-white clock really draws my eye to the red cuckoo. Love.
It’s an art piece, clock, and little bird friend – all in one!

April 28, 2012

Doing my part: 2012 AIGA Student Portfolio Review

Year two of volunteering to critique work at the AIGA student portfolio review. Last year was interesting. I fell in love with the typography and personality of Erika Decker; I would totally have hired her if I could but think a big agency snapped her up instead. A fellow BU grad to boot! Sigh. I also had high expectations for the RISD seniors. What I found instead monotony – in color, typography, scale. It was pretty surprising.

Now that I knew what to expect with the caliber of student work and speed dating format, this year I was looking forward to seeing the trends in curriculum projects and meeting some great people.

2012 AIGA Portfolio Reviewers - Getting Ready for Some Fast Crits

Students Getting Ready to Prep Their Tables with the Best of the Best in Their Portfolios

I got to meet with 6 students this year and here are my top three:

Gabrielle Benzie from Lyndon State College. This girl really had It. First, I loved the way she presented. With a perfectly comped small portfolio book as a guide, she turned to a project page to start the discussion, then pulled out the real piece, leaning it on an easel or handing it over to peruse on my own. Gabrielle’s variety was great (branding, packaging, products, posters…) as were her comping skills; her hand bound books were incredibly professional. Unfortunately, her website doesn’t reflect her presentation but hopefully it’s a work in progress.

Jennifer Ricci from MassArt. Surprisingly, one of only a few students showing some of her work on an iPad; she used it at just the right times – for interactive work only – and didn’t overdo it. Again, a great breadth of projects: identity, magazine (including her own photography), book jackets (including illustration work) and websites. Jennifer has great concepts which she talked through effortlessly. I also liked how she asked her reviewers their opinions on her business card; you can tell she has a lot of respect for design and designers.

Anthony Cormier from Curry College. I really wasn’t expecting to like anyone from Curry based on my experience last year. But Anthony is completely charming, had some very professional work (including a real piece he designed, art directed and even photographed for the New England Book Show) and seemed to genuinely absorb my feedback. While Anthony had his posters as small scale comps, I was blown away by the photos he showed of them on an iPad! He styled them so well with appropriate accessories and clean lines. He knows he needs to work on his business card to more accurately reflect his personality. But in my experience, and for most designers, designing for yourself is the hardest project.

April 2, 2012

A REAL to do list

There is a graphic floating around this week – it’s pretty spot on for what a REAL to do list looks like. I think my procrastinate area is a little bigger but the size of the rest of the diagram? Accurate.