printing
Clem Snide “The Meat of Life” CD
I was fortunate to be asked to provide some design and layout for Eef Barzelay and Clem Snide’s forthcoming album, The Meat of Life, due out on February 23. The painting was done by my very talented friend Jen Uman, who has also posted some information about her process on her blog. The album is fantastic too—check it out when it’s available.
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? [↩]
Josh & Alyssa Wedding “Save the Date” Postcard
My fiancée Alyssa and I are not typical when it comes to our wedding planning. For one thing, we’re getting married at an unconventional venue, the Los Angeles Natural History Museum. Moreover, we both work in design, and there’s no chance in heck that we’d buy any prepackaged save-the-dates or invitations. No sir. So we’ve spent the better part of the year planning out how our wedding will look, from the décor to the communications, and the first component of this gigantic undertaking is the “Save the Date” postcard that you see before you.
Original photographs that became our silhouettes (Photo by Sakura Koontz)
We want our wedding to feel like a party. Not just any party, mind you; more like a 1960s-concert-in-the-park-meets-prehistoric-hipster-safari. Or something like that. We’ve been scouting inspiration from far and wide, and one of the first ideas that hit us was to create a “gig poster” or a vintage-style handbill to inform our potential guests of the basic logistics in advance of the invitation. I’ve designed a whole bunch of save-the-date postcards for Gallatin at NYU (as you can see on the portfolio), but this was obviously a lot more personal. We decided it would be an adventure to silkscreen the invitations ourselves using the “split fountain” technique. It was a popular method of decoration for old concert or boxing posters, but it was usually used in the background to create a bright, colorful gradient on which black type would be set and printed on a letterpress. To stick with the theme, I used a combination of different type and lettering styles, some of which mimic the rough letterpress style of printers like Hatch Show Print in Nashville and Colby Poster Printing Co. here in Los Angeles. Other lettering comes from House’s Photo-Lettering site, such as the “Save the Date” script at the top. We referenced old show prints as well as movie posters (for the “Dino Vision” logo, a pretty blatant rip of the Cinerama logo and the Sinclair dinosaur mark. For the central silhouette illustration, we combined vector traces of two photographs taken by our good friend Sakura Koontz.
The process was remarkably smooth. We’d both done some screenprinting on t-shirts before, but neither of us had any hands-on experience with serigraphy on paper. The stock we chose is French Paper’s Mod-Tone in gray, which comes with a pre-printed pattern. We designed the card to be printed without bleed, 2-up on an 8.5″ by 11″ letter-sized page, allowing us to make a very simple cut and end up with a finished product. (We printed the back side on the cheap using inkjet). Using a Photoshop mockup of the design, we determined that Pantone Orange and Rubine Red would make a nice, yummy “Tequila Sunrise” gradient. Our comp wasn’t far off the mark, but the real-life result was far better than the digital version. Before we knew it, we’d printed up about 150 of them. The right side of the screen had some imperfections in the emulsion which led to some interesting artifacts, while the left side was nearly perfect. I think the variation between different prints is one of the beautiful and lively aspects of hand-printed serigraphs. So even though we sacrifice a bit of legibility, I think we’ve really hit the mark with our attempt at creating a vintage, imperfect look.
Tune in some months from now to see what we do with our invitation!
A confluence of two posts
Life With Letters by Edward Rondthaler
I love when I discover that two places, people, or things that I am interested in separately have something in common. I’m currently making my way through Life With Letters …as they turned photogenic by the late, great Edward Rondthaler, co-founder of Photo-Lettering, Inc. I came across this passage today (on page 60):
… Occasionally we would photo-letter tightly fitted lines of caps for typographers who did not want to subject their metal type to excessive saw work or “notching.” Perhaps the most unexpected request for type came from Mr. George Macy at the Limited Editions Club. He wanted the unique 22-point cut of Caslon 471 photo-lettered in 60-point. It takes a man of his typographic sensitivity to appreciate the niceties of that 22-point cut, but we were a jump ahead of him and had the plate already made up just waiting for such a call…
And so we happen upon the confluence of two subjects I’ve devoted posts to in the past: Photo-Lettering, Inc., and Mr. Macy’s books. I would have never realized that one might have been a client of the other.
Barton Bee Line Legs Box
I just love packaging from the ’60s. This one may have been printed later (it says “Series ‘76″), but I’m pretty sure it had to have been designed in the 1960s and used a few years beyond its intended shelf life.
Vintage matchbook collection
At my fiancée’s grandparents’ house, I recently photographed a treasure trove of vintage matchbooks that her grandfather has collected over the years, mostly from gambling joints or local establishments in SoCal. He’s quit smoking since and these have just been sitting in a cupboard…until now.
(I think the Space Needle might be my fave.)
Hand lettered Italian wrapping paper
One of my favorite things is… well… brown paper packages tied up with string. Well, perhaps not so Sound-of-Music-literally. But I love getting interestingly-packaged items in the mail, especially from foreign countries. For example I wish I had taken pictures of the post-Soviet Belarussian packaging that my first fisheye lens, the Peleng, came in. (Luckily, others on the Internet have, but I swear the packaging mine was wrapped in was a lot more idiosyncratic.)
Anyway, the other day, my fiancée’s wedding shoes arrived from Italy, wrapped in this wonderful one-color patterned wax paper. “Calzoleria-Pelletteria Acessori POLUZZI, Bologna,” it proclaims, in beautiful hand-lettered and manually drawn style, touting Poluzzi’s “Vasto Assortimento” for ladies, men, and children. Clearly this design has probably been in use for decades upon decades. It’s dripping with mid-century, Old World charm… the kind of understated elegance that Italian fashion designers and shoe purveyors seem to naturally effervesce.
I love that they have this paper. I love that they still use this paper. I love that someone is still printing up this paper.
Perhaps I’m a bit overexcited. It’s just… for every single design relic of yesteryear, there have to be hundreds of needless rebrands. I applaud Poluzzi for keeping this artifact around. Even if only to inspire me from across the ocean.
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- 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
- The Alphabet Thesaurus, Vol. 2
- The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst
- The Graphic Artists Guild Handbook