paper
Carnival Poster “Rescue”
Some people hoard animals in need of a good home; I hoard posters. While my friends (link 1 and link 2) were in town, we headed over to Olvera Street in downtown Los Angeles, where a street fair augmented the already-festive atmosphere of the oldest part of LA. I spotted this hard-to-miss, day-glo poster and recognized it immediately as the work of the Colby Poster Printing company. They’re still using “old school” methods to create advertising posters, including letterpress and silkscreen, and I think it’s just plain fantastic. It was posted in several places along Olvera, but I didn’t have the cojones to even ask anyone about it, much less steal a beautiful work of public literature. Luckily, my friend Noah has nerves of steel, and asked the hostess at one of the restaurants there if he could have the poster that was taped to their lectern. It was that simple. I’m going to have to do that more often.
Stylistically, the poster interests me because of the fluorescent inks (which seem silkscreened?) and the beautiful mix of type (quite possibly letterpress printed, but possibly silkscreened), from the workhorse condensed gothics, to the bifurcated Tuscan type of “CARNIVAL,” to the brilliant rising-slope “thru” sort of the date span. The archaic, cartoony illustration is clearly a product of another [um, diversity-free] era, but it’s charming and joyful nonetheless. This whole thing simply isn’t done anymore. And that’s why I love it.
Second 1958 World’s Fair Poster Restored
After restoring my 1958 Dan Reisinger poster from the Brussels World’s Fair, I immediately sent off this poster for similar treatment. Depicting the Atomium, the still-standing symbol of the 1958 Expo, this poster seems to have been issued in a number of different languages (as was the Reisinger poster). I have the German edition—Weltausstellung Brüssel. The poster is signed “D’Hooghe,” but I have not found any further information about the designer/artist.
The typeface used for “BRÜSSEL” is a very close match to Vendôme, designed by François Ganeau. Vendôme is one of my favorite serif typefaces, and has been ever since I first encountered it in The Elements of Typographic Style
François Ganeau was born in Paris and was principally a sculptor and theatre decorator with numerous public commissions to his credit. He was a friend of Maurice Olive, the proprietor of the Fonderie Olive in Marseilles, where Roger Excoffon was the chief designer. François Ganeau’s typeface Vendôme was cut at the Fonderie Olive in 1951-4. It is believed that Roger Excoffon assisted in the design of this face.
And according to U&lc:
Excoffon played a dual role in supervising the production and marketing of a new type named Vendome which had been designed for the Fonderie Olive by a stage designer named Francois Ganeau. With no previous experience of type design, Ganeau had managed to create a fine design which was refined and improved by Excoffon. To publicise it, Excoffon designed one of the most beautiful and elaborate type specimen books produced by any French typefoundry in the 1950s. It was produced by La Ruche, his favourite printing house in Paris where the craftsmen took exceptional care with their presswork and did complete justice to his unusual range of coloured inks.
Boy, I’d love to get my hands on that specimen.
The secondary type used on the poster is the much older, much more ubiquitous Franklin Gothic, and although I have not yet found an exact match for the “1958″ numerals, they belong to a family of type styles called “Swiss Gothics” according to the Photo-Lettering Alphabet Thesaurus.
Restored 1958 Dan Reisinger Brussels Exposition Poster
It’s taken me a while, but I finally got around to having my Dan Reisinger 1958 Brussels World’s Fair poster restored. “Restored” is perhaps a strange term here—when I received it, it was in its original condition: folded five times. These posters advertising the 1958 Exposition in Belgium had been mailed out in envelopes, and so in order to get it to look good in a frame, I had it professionally linen-backed. The folds were ironed out, and so the composition of the poster really shines now. So I’d say it’s more “improved” than “restored.” Unfortunately I wasn’t able to get a very good shot of it on the wall due to reflection, but hopefully at some point I’ll figure out a way to capture this thing in all of its glory. (Update: new clear photo above, thanks to Alyssa’s ingenious suggestion to shoot from the floor.) Check out how it used to look in the original post.
A Link to the Past
NYU Gallatin AlumniLink Mentor Program Brochure
I’ve been on a bit of a “ribbon lettering” kick lately. For this brochure/identity design, I was heavily inspired by a number of different sources, both old and new.
I wanted to conjure the notion of “link,” without using a cliché chain illustration in the process. The idea of roads and paths intersecting felt apropos to the concept of mentorship, and after doing some Wikimedia Commons research on such structures, I came up with a lettering style based on the look and feel of junctions or interchanges.
"Link" lettering, process
I wanted the composition of the piece to be simple and adaptable. For inspiration, I perused my copy of Meggs’ A History of Graphic Design (best textbook ever), and came across a simple-yet-gorgeous modernist poster by Lester Beall designed in 1937 for the Rural Electrification Administration. According to Philip Meggs, the poster was intended to be “understandable by illiterate and semi literate audiences,” and although my derivation was a bit more complex, I figured it would probably get the point across fairly easily to very literate university students.
After the basic concept was designed and approved, my brother Devin Korwin helped out with some last-minute Cassandresque shading, just as he had for the “Listening to Wine” poster.
3D Ribbon Script Lettering
I’m always looking for innovative ways to set text, and in the process of creating this postcard, I thought I’d give 3D lettering a try. I wanted to use a three-dimensional “ribbon” to mimic the movement of the pen or brush in the process of cursive writing. I also wanted to reinforce the feeling of papercraft in this piece, inspired by sophisticated pop-up books, especially given the recurring theme of Gallatin’s Alumni Day activities, “Return to the Great Books.”
While the process was somewhat laborious, it was interesting to play with 3D tools to create lettering in a somewhat unconventional way. It allowed me to direct the stroke through loops, and to tie knots inside of letters. There’s something rather Tron-like about it. Perhaps I’ll try “light cycle” lettering next time, or experiment with the smoke trails left by skywriting airplanes.
3D ribbon lettering, before red color was added
Holiday present: A.M. Cassandre Photoshop Airbrush Tutorial
A reader wrote to me today to find out more about how the airbrush effects were achieved in the Gallatin “Listening to Wine” poster design. The design had been based on the feel of many wonderful posters by Adolphe Mouron Cassandre, whose dramatic shading effects defined an era of 20th century advertising posters. As a holiday present to all who may stumble upon this post, here’s a quick and dirty tutorial to help you experiment with the stippled airbrush texture effect made possible by Photoshop’s dissolve blending mode:
- Start with a new Photoshop document, with a blank white layer as the background.
- Create a new transparent layer on which you will use your “airbrush.” (It’s a best practice to create layers instead of destructively airbrushing directly on the background.)
- On the new, transparent layer, create a circular selection using the Elliptical Marquee tool.
- On the Layers palette, click the “Add layer mask” button (looks like a shaded rectangle with a white circle inside). This will create a layer mask from your circular selection, allowing you to work on the layer without having to worry about losing the original selection shape.
- Click on the Layer 1 thumbnail to make sure that the layer itself is selected and not the layer mask. It’s sometimes difficult to tell which is currently “active.”
- Select the Brush tool from the tool bar (or press “B” on your keyboard).
- From the Brush palette, select a brush that is soft, round, and large. The exact size will depend on the application, but you can use the [ and ] keys on your keyboard to scale the brush up or down while you’re using it.
- Also from the Brush palette, use the Mode drop-down menu to change the brush’s blending mode to Dissolve.
- Make sure that the Foreground Color is set to something other than white (black is a great color to practice with), and then click and drag your brush tool across the canvas. You should see a speckled effect on the feathered edges of the brush. If you were using the “Normal” blending mode instead of dissolve, the feathered edges would be soft and clean and would lack the texture that “Dissolve” offers.
- You can vary the effect by changing the brush size and also by altering the Brush palette’s Opacity or Flow settings. Experiment in order to find the effect that works best for your application.
- Use additional layers and layer masks just as you would use vellum and stencils in the real world. Layer mask “stencils” help to define the boundaries of the shading effect, but the brush itself defines the look. Another advantage to using layer masks, rather than simple selections, is that the “overspray” is accessible if the mask needs to be moved at any point in the future. It’s like having a stencil that can travel through time!
Dan Reisinger Brussels Exposition Poster, 1958
Just scored this wonderful Dan Reisinger poster on eBay, from the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. It even came with the original envelope in which it had been mailed to Sarkes Tarzian, Inc. / WTTV in Bloomington, Indiana, from Brussels, Belgium in 1958. According to Wikipedia, Mr. Reisinger won first prize for this poster design for the Palais International de la Science (International Hall of Science). I’ve actually had quite a difficult time finding any other images of this poster anywhere else on the Internet, besides the French version depicted on danreisinger.com. I’m looking forward to learning more about it—but I think the first step is to have it linen-mounted and framed.
NYU Stern Orientation Program print photos
This project has been previously detailed, but I recently photographed the actual booklets for posterity. Here’s how they came out.
More vintage matchbooks
After the last treasure trove of matchbooks I came across, the idea of starting a collection of my own has been on my radar. I found a few on eBay that were from Torrance, California, the current location of three steps ahead and a subject of particular interest to me. The same seller had a bunch of interesting ones, so I figured I’d scoop up as many as I could.
Nintendo hanafuda cards
I don’t mention it often, but I’m a gamer, and a lifelong fan of Nintendo. After purchasing the New Super Mario Bros. Wii game (which is fantastic, by the way), I found out that Nintendo has a reward system called Club Nintendo, where users can register their Nintendo consoles and games, and earn “coins” doing so. Among the handful of exclusive prizes available to those of us who have spent several hundred dollars on video games, the most “expensive” reward caught my eye: a set of Nintendo hanafuda cards.
Hanafuda means “flower cards” in Japanese. The cards and their associated games have a colorful history, and it’s definitely worth reading the Wikipedia article to learn more. But the interesting tidbit here is that Nintendo goes way back. They were founded in 1889 as a manufacturer of handmade hanafuda, about one hundred years before the dawn of Mario. So these cards are not merely a novelty, but a link to the past1.
I could tell from the Nintendo website that there was something interesting about these cards; they seemed to have a quality quite different from what you’d expect of today’s promotional products. The thing that really caught my eye was the way that the graphics were printed; the offset fills and strokes seemed anachronistic, especially when paired with characters like Wario. From what I can gather, it seems like Nintendo cleverly substituted their trademark characters to replace the “standard” hanafuda graphics (like cranes, etc.), while maintaining traditional backgrounds. So I registered all the games I have, and happily reached the 800 coin mark. The cards came only a few days later, and I’ve documented the unboxing and some detail shots to show off the cards’ vintage look.
Lovely pattern in the title graphic courtesy of néojaponisme.
- Get the reference? [↩]
Subscribe |
Search |
Categories |
Archives |
Associated Sites |
Friends |
Recommended Reading |
- Ed Rondthaler's Life with letters …as they turned photogenic
- House Industries: The Book
- Iron Fists: Branding the 20th-Century Totalitarian State by Steven Heller
- Meggs' History of Graphic Design
- Paul Renner: The Art of Typography by Christopher Burke
- The Alphabet Thesaurus, Vol. 2
- The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst
- The Graphic Artists Guild Handbook