Thanks to one of my new favorite blogs, The Jealous Curator, I just discovered TypArchive, an amazing collection of images of hand-painted, neon and dimensional signage. Aside from being really nice to look at, I think it could be a great resource if you are looking for a little typographic inspiration. When Owen and I travel, we are constantly snapping pictures of cool typography; perhaps we’ll need to submit a few images.
TypArchive is an image library primarily focused on hand painted signage. The objective is to amass a comprehensive global collection of a high-quality images and produce hard-copy volumes.
Amidst a landscape of vapid strip malls and sterile signage, hand-painted lettering retains a soulful aesthetic to be treasured. Like other crafts dissolving in the digital age, sign painting is a fading occupation. Today it’s easy for any layman with minimal computer knowledge to produce a sign within minutes, but the skill acquired to artfully produce hand lettering took years of apprenticeships, dedication and true talent. – RD Granados
These astronomy photographs by Jason Blaschka are amazing. I love that some of his photos are a bit abstract (and almost look like paintings), while others are so crisp, clear, and detailed. Enjoy!
San Francisco has a super special new thing going on this summer. Levi’s Workshop/Print (a two-month pop-up community letterpress/silkscreen printshop) has opened in the Mission. I went to the opening night and stopped in again on Saturday, talked a bit with a few of the staff, and can’t stop thinking about how great it’s going to be.
The Workshops are places for creation, inspiration, and collaboration. We’re excited to bring the first of these experiences to life right in our own backyard. Located in San Francisco’s iconic Mission District (home to one of the first Levi’s® factories), we’ve opened up a community print shop. During July and August we’ll be hard at work teaching classes on classic letterpress machinery, screenprinting designs, setting type, and getting our hands dirty.
The facade: I love that they whitewashed and reclaimed the existing Biltmore Laundry sign with its classic Americana shape (see a great slideshow here) and mostly am a fan of the exhaustive list of types of workers (including blogger) on the facade, paid off with the Holzer Truisms-esque neon sign “Everyone’s Work is Equally Important.” But I am disappointed that they put it up in a handwriting font and not either traditionally handlettered or, if it has to be type, at least use the much more well-done Pettibon/McFetteridge-esque handlettering type used all over the site’s css.
My analysis: So normally I’d have a fair amount of skepticism for such a display of big-company-throwing-money-at-coolness, but there’s many ways that this is distinct from your average marketing exercise from the likes of Nike.
Levi’s is a San Francisco company; their original plant was operating at 14th and Valencia until 2002. Plus of course, jeans were worker’s attire before becoming the greatest American sartorial export, making both the location/community and the “work” theme are not just genuine but resonant.
The overall feel is much more public, conversational, accessible, educational and positive than it is branded-marketing-pushy. Which I hope is a sign of changing attitudes towards marketing in general.
In an era of “new media” being everyone’s buzzword, it’s heartening to see this embrace of old media, of “getting one’s hands dirty.” Though no doubt twitter, facebook, blogs (not to mention jumbotrons) will amplify the message, the media in question isn’t apps and Mafia Wars but real ink, screens and presses — newspapers, broadsheets, posters, books, public propaganda. Both letterpress and arts education are under constant threat of disappearance and this public celebration is welcome. It’s easy to see how this will translate into other workshops: photography and music have both gone digital as surely as printing, and a space for darkrooms with, say Jonathan Kozol or for 8-track masters with Jack White is a beautiful idea.
I have no reservations saying that this workshop is a fantastic thing, and I’m hoping that it becomes the textbook example of corporate social responsibility, (cultural edition). I am excited about the next two months and only sad that it won’t become a permanent fixture of the Valencia corridor. After August, they’ll close back down, some version of the Slanted Door will move back in, and a new Levi’s workshop centered around photography will open in New York for two months.
Some of the programs I’m particularly interested in after the jump.
In high school, I bought boxes of Pilot V5s at Staples, and told anyone who seemed to care that they were the best writing pens to be found. Now the geniuses at Pilot have turned to the web and made a site/tool that’s pretty interesting. You just write letters on a printed template, hold it up to your webcam and it makes a ‘font’ of it that you can write e-correspondence with.
I tried it and well, it’s both pretty rad and really weird. I mean I made a half decent handwriting “font” in a matter of minutes. Using a webcam! On the other hand, the automated tool picked up some false positive images which screwed up several letters, there was no preview before saving and no editing after saving. Plus the editing tools are really pretty bad — the “A” looks funny because it didn’t read that so I moused it in using their odd editing tool. Plus of course at the end you don’t have a font, you have uh, your own handwriting which you can only use to write notes…
Then again, why should I expect perfection out of something that was free and took ten minutes? And when was the last time I made a font, even of my handwriting? As if I haven’t been interested since forever: thanks Pilot for giving me a chance to try it.
The long days and warm evenings of summer always make me want to go to a carnival. This week’s Schmetsy is inspired by the iconic revelry of these festive affairs.
Row 2: Caramel Apples Photograph by alicebgardens; Funny Cat ‘n’ Crow Rollercoaster Note Card by 3crows; Felt Corndog by BeckyM
Row 3: Ferris Wheel Letterpress Set of 5 Folded Notes by paperlovelypress; Cyclone Original Aquatint Etching by piroteki; Jubilee Ride Ticket Thin Wood Cuff by ruthmikos
Row 4: The Knife Juggler Print by Roadside; Pink Careless Love Carnival Letterpress Print in White Letterpress Vignette by YeeHaw; Blue Ice Cream Print by inventorysupply
It is no secret that I love stationery and I love embroidery, but I also love kits. So when Laura from Curious Doodles emailed us a few weeks back about a new project of hers, I was instantly intrigued. I’m a big fan of Laura’s screen-printed work, we featured her 2010 calendar in our calendar Schmetsy, Counting the Days, but these new DIY Stitches Kits are super charming. The cards are available in 2 sets, one that reads: feel better, love you, oh baby, miss you, and congrats, while the other reads thanks yo, fo shizzy, whatevs, luvz ya, and word. I mean really, who doesn’t want to get a hand stitched fo shizzy card in the mail?
We’ve posted about Famille Summerbelle’s maps in the past, and while I think they are all lovely, Julie Marabelle has really outdone herself with her new world map. I would love to see it in person to see all of the darling illustrations and details. Check out the video below for a peek into Julie’s process.
Printing technologies are forever cannibalizing one another; letterpress to linotype to film to desktop publishing. Dotmatrix printing was one of the first printing technologies I was aware of — with the Mac 128 and the ImageWriter and the bitmap typefaces of 1984 — and the first and quickest to be made obsolete in my lifetime. However – much as letterpress got a new lease on life with artisanal printers, and pixel-aliased typefaces got new play with flash and web and portable devices – dotmatrix is back. The people who brought it back? Programmers with robots.
The example making the rounds on the blogs this week is the closest to my old ImageWriter… but it’s cobbled together using Legos and a felt tip pen. Adorably geeky.
Hello World is of course a basic output program, and so it’s not surprising to see it here as well, on this giant scale paintball gun dot matrix, with which you can message a neighboring building quickly. Designboom has a great writeup/photoset of a later iteration of this paintballer called the facade printer that even semisuccessfully printed in full color.
Similarly, from a few years back, someone hooked up a chalk-output dotmatrix that printed SMS messages from the back of a moving bike. I particularly like the lack of precision in these letterforms – warped by speed and tilt of the rider.
Of course it was only a matter of time before a technology so cool would be co-opted by Nike. Their Chalkwriter is much slicker, and quite impressive. I’d like to see Jenny Holzer ride up and down the streets of the Mission on one of these.
Finally, waterfall printers: they send timed bursts of water down so that the falling water makes shapes; the combination of crisp typography and the elemental nature of water/gravity is pretty breathtaking.
As a bunch of print designers we’re unnaturally inclined to be fans of process colors: CMYK, from which all colors are printed in, say, a magazine or newspaper. However, it’s not just people who have Evelin Kasikov prints on their wall who are in love with these classically fresh color combos.
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