This is a ludlow setting stick. It contains individual pieces of brass which have etched letters on one side to help you set your line and on the reverse side they have an engraved mold that will be used to cast with molten metal.

This is the underside of the casting stick pictured above so that you can see the mold that will be filled with liquid metal

The casting stick is inserted into the Ludlow Machine, a lever is pulled and the mold is filled with the molten metal, a cooling unit flash cools the metal so that within seconds of filling the mold a solid piece of metal called a slug is ready and ejects from the font of the machine onto the tray pictured above. Because these slugs are cast from a mold you are able to cast multiple slugs of the same line of type. This can be extremely helpful as it gives you backups in case something is damaged durring printing or lost.

This is a close up shot of the slug of metal with my name on it. The type is cast in reverse so that when it is inked and stamped onto paper it will be read right. The slug pictured above has frayed excess metal on the edges. This can happen when casting in large amounts and the heating and cooling units inside the machine come out of sync. This is easily scraped right off as the metal used is very malleable.

Once all my lines were cast I locked them up inside this rectangular metal frame called a chase. The chase allows you to “lock up” the materials you wish to print tight for use on a vertical press. “locking up” your printing material into a “form” is basically packing everything tightly so that nothing will shift while being printed.

Vertical form lockup of my business card.

Closer inspection of my cast lines of type. Each line of type is cast on its own slug, my four line business card resulted in 4 slugs of type and additionally I added 4 horizontal rules which were packed in the form as well.

This was just a transfer of ink from the proofed lockup to a clean roller.

This is a shot down the center of the Chandler and Price (C&P) press that I used to print my cards. On the left you can see the form locked into place and on the right, a sheet of paper clipped into place. These clips help you keep your cards in place and precisely lined up on every single print.

This is not what they mean by handing out business cards.

This is the C&P press that I used to print my cards. If you look closely you can see my form locked up in the chase on the press.

The finished product. I did half of my business cards “properly” and the other half I gave a deep emboss to. In the printing industry embossing the paper while printing is considered a flaw and a sign of a poor job. The idea with letterpress was originally to simply “kiss” the paper hard enough to fully transfer the ink but not so hard as to leave an impression. This impression is now considered some what of a badge, proof that your product was indeed created by letterpress and not by digital printing means.

This is just a short video of the C&P press running. The machine runs on momentum which you start by spinning the giant wheel on the side with you hand. One the wheel is spinning you continue the momentum with the Treadle (foot petal) on the bottom of the machine. The spinning wheel causes the rollers to roll across the ink plate on top, down the front and across the form, automatically inking for you. The tempen then drops down with your substrate on it and presses against the form. The metal disk on top then spins as the rollers come back up to the plate on top, this keeps an even consistency of ink as it wets the rollers and comes back down to re-ink the form for every consecutive print. (sorry for the quality of the video. I used my iphone to capture this and held it vertically, a horrible way to shoot video as it creates so much negative space)

Last night I went to see the Tim Burton exhibit at  LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art). I am admittedly a horrible LACMA member, having all this time to go see the show and I wait until closing week. The exhibit drew an interesting crowd, a mixture of gallery snobs, hipsters and pop punk teens adorned with their black and white striped shirts or tights and Jack Skellington winter caps.

LACMA describes:  ”The exhibition brings together over 700 drawings, paintings, photographs, moving-image works, storyboards, puppets, concept artworks, maquettes, costumes, and cinematic ephemera, including art from a number of unrealized and little-known personal projects. Many of these objects come from the artist’s own archive, as well as from studio archives and private collections of Burton’s collaborators.”

Critic Christopher Knight wrote: “Tim Burton, the big, poorly organized traveling show from New York’s Museum of Modern Art that surveys the genesis and development of the Hollywood director’s distinctive visual style, opened Sunday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It should be effervescent. Instead, the show is a monotonous plod. In an art museum, do we really need to see baby Penguin’s black-wicker pram from “Batman,” Catwoman’s shredded polyurethane cat suit or the fluffy angora sweater used as a fetishistic prop in “Ed Wood“? Such dark or peculiar items are often outward signs of their character’s concealed inner life; but that’s catalog essay interpretation, not exhibition material. You get the feeling they’re only here to satisfy the paying movie fans. Sometimes the display looks like the Arclight Cinema lobby on steroids. Toss in assorted puppets and a few toy-like sculptures, such as a suspended flying-saucer carousel illuminated by black-lights, and the quotient of celebrity self-indulgence climbs.”

I want to wind that up by saying that I really enjoyed the exhibit. I can see some merit in what Knight wrote, it is slightly obscure for a fine art museum and the organization and layout did leave much to be desired.  The illustrations, props, maquettes and other ephemera were grouped by project which made sense and I feel that the selections made for most of the works were well rounded. The largest short coming seemed to be on LACMA’s behalf.  The floor plan left you with no sense of where to start and how to flow through the show which was pretty important for the turn out of patrons. Additionally I would have liked to see the entire show in chronological order of his earliest works to his latest. There seemed to be a little of this but again it varied depending on how you walked through.

All in all I really enjoyed everything that I saw at the show. It was a great experience to take a peak into Burtons head and see how he worked. If you havent been to the show yet I highly encourage you to try and get tickets if they’re still available.

On Sunday, October 30th, the exhibition will remain open all night, and on Monday, October 31st, it will be open until midnight. Tickets will be half-price from 12 am to 9 am on Monday morning.

Photo Credits: Myself, LACMA website and my friend Iris who sneakily snapped shots dodging the eyes of LACMAs security.

Sitting in the book arts lab I almost fell over as fellow docents carried in a beautiful Apple Macintosh 128k and sat it down in front of me.

Knowing I used to work for Apple the computer was brought in and placed before me partially in jest, it had been assumed that the machine probably didn’t work as it had been packed away in a box for who knows how long up back in some rafters.

Before me lay the machine, keyboard, mouse, external floppy drive and a stack of 3.5″ floppies.  Not knowing quite what to expect we began plugging in the components and connected the machine to power.  Flipping the power switch presented me with a flashing disk icon.

Momentarily disappointed but not surprised I suddenly remembered that the Macintosh 128k had no internal storage device.  I grabbed the 3.5″ System Disk, inserted it into the machine and the computer booted to the Finder quickly and quietly.  AMAZING! I entertained myself in my mind comparing the boot speed to later operating systems, and not until solid state drives and multi-core processors do we begin to come close to how quickly this thing starts up.

I began playing with Mac Paint and thought to myself what a game changer this was to graphic artists in 1984 when it was introduced.  Up to this point computers sophisticated enough to create digital artwork this well were both difficult and extremely expensive, upwards of $10,000 in fact.  This $2,500 machine made it possible to bring digital desktop publishing to every business.

As I started on some type setting in all the bitmap glory of fonts like Venice, Chicago, London, Geneva, New York and Toronto yet another surprise was dropped on the desk next to me.  It was the Apple ImageWriter, a dot matrix printer released in 1983.  I had absolutely no hopes that this was going to work at all.  I had been lucky enough the computer and its other components were functional but I know what happens, even with modern printers, when they sit for more than a few months without use.

We shut down the computer, plugged in the printer to power and connected the serial cable to the back of the Macintosh.  Low and behold the printer actually turned on.  Power, however, does not necessarily mean that it will print.  I fired up Mac Paint again to tried a test print.  Nothing.  I tried again just to print the catalog and this time we got a pulse.  The printer head ground across the paper and left an impressed and scratched dusty image.  This is the last that it prints and we got nothing else out of it.

I worked on Apple computers for 3 years and have always liked to tinker but I had never taken apart an Apple machine this old and never an Apple printer.  I decided to be bold, what did I have to lose?  I stripped the machine down component by component checking all the cables, cleaning all the boards and checking all the capacitors.  After 3 hours of looking like I knew what I was doing I had the printer back together and fired back up.

Making another attempt to print I was dumbfounded that I actually got it working again.  Not only was the header working again but the ink ribbon mysteriously had a little life left to it.  I was not out of the wood yet as although the machine was printing it was having a heard time aligning the images and words as it would drop line by line down the paper.

Once again I partially disassembled the printer, this time cleaning the rails and metallic pulley system that the printer header rides along and greasing the rails.  The header originally rode on felt pads but as these were in very poor condition and irreplaceable a silicon lube did the trick just as well.

Snapping everything back together I gave the print one last try.  SUCCESS. The image came out beautifully, or as beautiful as dot matrix can come out on a 90% dry ink cartridge.

I can not begin to express my elation with all of this.  It was a lot of fun to restore something that is such a major milestone in the printing world.  The museum has always focused on “antique” printing methods, at 27 years old this machine is not nearly as old as our Gutenberg presses or Heidelberg windmills but indeed made and equally important milestone in printing history.  Bringing this whole system back to life now ensures that this piece of the story is not lost and we can continue to teach its place in history.

Oh yes, and bragging writes on making it happen are pretty nice as well.

This is a comprehensive list of the integrated circuits in the original Macintosh:

• a Motorola MC68000 microprocessor at clock speed 7.8336 MHz
• 64KB of ROM in two chips containing parts of the operating system
• 128KB of RAM in 16 chips
• eight TTL chips implementing a video and sound DMA controller, plus
• two TTL chips providing a 16-bit video buffer (74166 type)
• one PAL chip generating video timing signals (LAG)
• two TTL chips providing an 8-bit Pulse-width modulation sound driver (74LS161 type)
• two analog chips providing sound amplification (MC14016 switch, LF353 op-amp)
• a Zilog 8530 chip controlling two RS-422 buses through two driver chips
• an Integrated Woz Machine 400 KB floppy disk controller plus support PAL (ASG)
• a 6522 VIA bridge chip connecting to the keyboard and clock
• an Apple real-time clock chip plus a 32.768 kHz quartz oscillator
• an Intel 8021 microcontroller in the keyboard
• bus control and extra logic including
• two PAL chips to activate the other chips (BMU0/1)
• two PAL chips to convert the 16 MHz clock to other timing signals (TSM, TSG)
• two TTL chips buffering the RAM to the 68000 (74LS244 type)
• some inverters (74LS04 type)

Over the summer Dodge Ram’s creative team decided to do a series of commercials, web design and print advertisements that would embelish the rough and gritty manliness of Dodge Trucks. The team decided on a rugged Old West theme which would tie in the grit, strength and danger of the time with the masculinity of their trucks.  To tie the era with raw machine power Dodge decided to focus on the workhorse machine of the era, letter press and wood type.  The commercial was shot at the International Printing Museum and ties an era with no automobiles seamlessly to the present with close shots of the machines at work, mimicking a modern day close up of pistons and belts in an under the hood car commercial.

Check out dodges full site with their comercial spots at http://www.ramtrucks.com/en/guts_and_glory/

Below is one of their commercial spots:

Below is a print advertisement that was in the October issue of Car And Driver:

Below are behind the scenes images from the taping of the commercials at the International Printing Museum.

The Ludlow Project is a kickstarter started by The International Printing Museum with the goal of rescuing a collection of approximately 100 full fonts of antique Ludlow Typecasting matrices.  After acquiring the collection we will catalog & organize the fonts into our working collection & digitize Ludlow Type Specimen books with notes on available fonts for letterpress projects all as part of a process to make our collection more accessible and available for the casting type which may be used by museum patrons, designers, artists & letterpress printers nationally for all kinds of projects.  The success of the project would make this the largest active collection of hot metal type in the world available to the public and this is why we need your support.

If we reach our goal of $11,000 by November 19, the additional fonts will help to continue the museum’s 23-year tradition of teaching the history of printing and book arts to as many people as possible.  Help us in fostering one of the world’s most significant collections of antique printing machines, tools and ephemera for showcasing to audiences through working demonstrations hands on workshops and theatrical presentations.

The goal of the Printers Fair is adapting and growing, originating as an event for printers to meet, buy equipment and share eachothers work, the fair is beginning to incorporate a broader spectrum of visitors, vendors and demonstrations.

This year we wanted to open up the fair a bit and try to bring in more graphic designers, crafters and DIYers, not altering the fundamentals of the fair but broadening its scope to become more inclusive.

I spent the days before the fair setting up the event and preparing the silk screen demonstrations I would be helping to run all day long at the fair.  The artwork was created by myself and fellow Night Shifters using found art from the museum itself.  I had no idea what a large success the silk screening would turn out to be; for $15 visitors could pick out a shirt in a range of colors and then choose the artwork that would be screened onto the shirt with the additional option of doing the silk screening themselves.

We have a firm belief that this inclusive nature, allowing visitors to experience the collection not only visually but in a hands on manner, increases the positive reaction, retention of knowledge and return of visitors.  we want to make people experience print in a way they have never done before and build a lasting relation with the product and the process and I believe that this years fair did just that.

The evening is going to be part printing, part history and an immersive sensory experience melded into a play in the auditorium.  This is the first year the museum is putting on the event so it should be a lot of fun.

Tales of the Supernatural by The Great and not so great writers
Saturday October 22, 2011
7:00 pm show time

$10/admission- two for one admittance for Museum members/Book Arts Guild members
Doors will creep open at 6:00 pm for those brave souls wishing to be scared early
Come and Print in our Dead Letter Department with our volunteer Zombie printers
(No children under 14 yrs. allowed)

 is for Graphic Designer is an excerpt from the article “What People Don’t Get About My Job: From A(rmy Soldier) to Z(ookeeper)” published on The Atlantic’s website. The Atlantic asked their readers to explain what it is that people don’t get or appreciate about their jobs.  The Atlantic received such a large response that they decided to turn the responses into an encyclopedic A to Z list or jobs.

UPDATE: I was contacted in the comments section of this post with some feedback and also information regarding the original source of the write up for “G is for Graphic Designer” The copy is originally written by staghorn at http://staghorn.tumblr.com/ The Atlantic had not linked to or given credit to the original authors of the content for their post which bothers me a great deal and I really want to thank staghorn for reaching out to me.

I want to point out that the article is partly satirical in nature and although it makes some well thought, well put points the ultimate goal was equally of entertainment value.  This is not to discredit the original article and those who put it together, rather to attempt to continue the discussion and increase the awareness.

I think that ultimately, for a graphic designer, the thing that people don’t get or appreciate about our field is the depth and the education.  It is my feeling from speaking with clients friends and family that they feel we are just making pretty things.  There is an absolute lack of understanding that graphic designers are passionate and educated and that although we do want our finished work to “look pretty” we also want it to tell a story, to educate, to be culturally relevant and responsive.  These are aspects of design that our clients don’t always understand but that they always need.

People tend to shrug off things that they do not understand. At one job I worked heavily with sales and product development teams who have no design background.  When it came to packaging, print ads and signage I would often get mocked for saying something was “typographically” correct or incorrect.  The general understand was that this was not a real word and not something to actually raise concern over.

More often then not I believe the frustrations of dealing with our clients comes from that lack of understanding.  A doctor has credibility because they can diagnose and prescribe using a fairly well understood and generally accepted procedure.  Designers work in much the same fashion, prescribing antibiotics to rid us of bad design.  Designers, however, tend to walk on a gray line as far as diagnosing the problems and prescribing how to rectify them because we use visual sciences that are less widely understood. Our vocabulary includes the addition of signs and symbols, colors and shapes, placement and hierarchy. This vocabulary is foreign in meaning to people not educated in the arts.

COMPOSING TYPEWRITERS

The Headliner Multi-Line 840 was considered a composing typewriter. The composing typewriter was used for camera-ready copy in quick-print businesses, small weeklies, and academic publishing where low cost and fast turn around set a higher precedence than quality. The best of these machines were capable of proportional spacing, setting justification, and handling more than one font.

Vari-Typers made professional looking camera-ready masters for offset printing, created by casting photographic type on 35 mm white photo print paper, which was then fed through a tank with photo printing chemicals.

While writing this I realized that the manual that came with our machine is for the Multi-Line 820 while the machine itself is a model 840.

On this unit the character selection is effected by rotation of a rigid plastic disk. Notches of varying depth, located on the edge of the disc, adjust the spacing of each character relative to neighbors. If the body allows, it is possible to obtain several lines superimposed on the strip of paper with a width of 35 mm.
The varitype provides a positive image of the entire text of the body 12 to 72.
The time of exposure and development are automatic and it works in daylight.

This is a re-post of sorts.  In July 2010 the iPhone 4 was released and AT&T’s networks, with all their “preparation” still crippled under the weight of activation of new phones.  AT&T had worked with Apple to try and make this a smooth and easy process but at the end of the day AT&T’s network is still garbage.  Screening calls AT&T quickly started fingering the blame on Apple and Apple had to scramble to appease customers and make things right, all along AT&T continued to give us all the finger.  I worked a 14 hour shift at the Genius bar that day. Upon getting off I decided to drain my frustration into making this illustration.

I am re-posting this as it was originally on my old blog and for some reason today I had a huge spike in visitors discovering my site through reddit.com unfortunately they were greeted with a “could not find the page you were looking for” instead, prompting me to add this to my site once more.

Ah memories.

Beton Open is a variant of the Beton family designed by Henrich Jost (10.13.1889 – 9.27.1948 Magdeburg, Germany) while working for Bauer Type Foundry.  Beton Open is one variant of a family that includes at least twelve other styles including: Beton, EF Beton, Beton Bold Compressed, Beton Bold Condensed, Beton BQ, Beton Compressed Bold, Beton Demi, Beton Extra Bold, Beton Extra Bold (Monotype Imaging), Beton Extra Bold (URW), Beton Outline & Beton Stencil.

Besides his work on Fraktur (1925), Atrax (1926), Bauer Bodoni (1926), Aeterna (1927) and Beton (1930-1936) it is believed that Jost also worked from Renner’s early sketches to add detail to his Futura typeface.

I am making this scan available as a layered PSD file, each letter labeled on its own layer transparencies finely cleaned for your enjoyment. The file is about 15mb large and is fairly high resolution.  This PSD however is about half the resolution of the original scan.  If you would like the 600dpi version please contact me directly.

If you are downloading the file please consider a donation in any amount to help me continue to provide these types of resources.

This is a letterpress poster I created to promote the Los Angeles Printers Fair.  The goal was to twist the poster to cater the style of the Night Shift.  As a group we decided that it was equally important to draw in a different crowd to the fair than is typically reached with the fairs branding and advertising.  The fair originated as a place for fellow printers and letterpress enthusiasts to meet up and share their passions but over the last year the popularity of letterpress has blown up and its important to reach out to people who are interested in print making through the practice of graphic arts and those that enjoy the craft nature of letterpress.

The entire site is designed to have a hand printed feel, evoking the letter press feel before the visitor even reads what the site is about.  Our goal this year is to try and increase the number of visitors to the fair whom are not necessarily already printers.  I used the current social interest in the letter press art as a visual interest to draw people in.  It is a bit of a controversial ploy as the Fair is really about much much more than just letter press but the hope is that pulling in folks whom are already interested, by practice or by collecting, letter press we can introduce them to an entire world of new techniques.

Please feel free to take a minute, check out the site, and definitely get your tickets for the fair which is October 1st 2011 9am – 5pm www.printfair.org

After the presentation myself and the rest of The Night Shift took the Book Arts Guild and other museum visitors out back to print some large scale wood cut movie posters using a sod lawn roller. Printing wood cuts too large to run through most presses using a steam roller is a fairly common practice. Seeing as we were printing wood cuts that are 50+ years old, most of which were not stored well before becoming museum property, we could not expose the blocks to that much stress and needed to have a bit more control over the process. Doscent Karen Haack came up with the idea and rented the sod roller for us.

I am happy to say that the process went over so well that the museum has purchased a 4′ wide sod roller that can be filled to 900lb and we will be using it to do more large format printing presentations at the LA Printers Fair (hopefully with some modifications if I have anything to do with it)

Below are a few images from the printing experience, I didn’t get a chance to take many, as you would imagine this is a bit of a process and things got rather busy and messy pretty quick. As others post images I will be sure to add or link them from here.

This infographic, “A Quick & Comprehensive Type Guide” was created by a fellow that goes by the name NOODLOR, I haven’t been able to find a website to give credit but if someone knows it or finds it please let me know so I can add a link to this persons page.

Although something like this should be fairly rudimentary to most graphic designers and especially so to any type designers I feel this definitely still has its merit.  For starters the piece is very well designed but on top of that I don’t believe this was created to educate the designers, but to educate people that did not study design.  I would put it in the same cuff as Jessica Hische‘s page “Mom, This Is How Twitter Works”

Two of the greatest inventions known to man kind, printing and whiskey.  Everyone is hopping on the letter press bandwagon these days but I’ll be damned if Jack Daniel’s didn’t do a swell job at it, teaming up with Yee-Haw Industries.  I’m personally a fan of the fact that they used the Whiskey to thin down the black ink.

The posters are currently available through Yee-Haw’s ETSY store.

CUT AND FOLD BINDING

This method only works when you are trying to bind a few pages together.  This booklet is 8 pages and you can see that the fold gets very tight and becomes less effective if you make it much thicker.

SELF STITCHED BINDING 

This method uses scraps of paper to thread together the notebook.  If you are creating a small book you can use the chatter that you cut off the end of the book to create the “thread” but if you are making it very thick you will need to cut a longer piece of paper.

STAB BINDING

This is one of my favorite forms of binding.  of course it requires that you have an awl of some sort and string and is slightly more technical it is still pretty simple and once you learn the three whole pattern it is easy to learn and create new patterns of stitching.  I am thinking of doing an instructional video on this at some point.

We started the evening with a tour of the museum, giving everyone a lay of the land and general information about what we have to offer.  After the tour the group of about 10 guys was split into two groups where we set rules for a printing game that follows the same permitters as project runway.  Everyone was given time to concept for a fictional album cover for a band called “gustav” the next step was finding and picking out any combination of foundry, wood type or use the ludlow and any blocks they would like as well to construct their concept and then print it.

The night was a lot of fun and we definitely look forward to doing it again soon.

Below are some images taken by Matthew Butterick that he had posted to his smugmug.

I always prefer to have a backup to quickly print out just in case I am off to an event. These cards are 2″ x 2″ to cut down on paper waste.

Clean, simple and to the point, the cards use my standard over-line rules, knockout typeface and hatching on the backside.

<<UPDATE>>

I also ran some cards with a QR code of my VCARD on the back side in replacement of the hatching.  here is an image.