Today I am releasing a new art print in my Etsy shop. It’s called “Adventure”. Here are the details:  18×24 inches / 5 colors / edition of 65 / $40. Go ahead, buy it now!

When I was a kid I used to love reading choose-your-own-adventure style books. These were books in which you’d read along in the story and then at certain points would decide what to do next, flipping to the corresponding page and continuing on. I could steer my way through endless stories as a knight, or a dragon slayer, a samurai, or even a paleontologist. My favorite book had the best first line; “This book is a time machine.” So cool!

My faithful followers already know that this year I’ve been heavily inspired by my son Ethan, who has reminded me of the cool stuff that I loved as a boy. I’ve got another print coming soon in this same vein, and if you liked my dinosaur cutouts then you’ll be happy with this next piece.

Buy a copy of “Adventure” now, and stay tuned for the next print within the next few weeks!

1/3/2012 UPDATE: The sale went really well! Thanks to everyone who ordered a print, and thanks to you new Twitter followers for hopping on the wagon. Starting this evening I’ll be putting together everything to sending it all up to Fab, who will send out the individual orders right quick.

I am teaming up with Fab.com, discount purveyors of all things fancy and nice, for a sale on many of my prints and posters. The sale runs from December 29-January 1. That means that you have a great opportunity to make some sweet drunken art purchases.

Along with the sale I will be releasing a new art print, entitled Adventure. It’s an 18×24 screen print, 5 colors, edition of 80, $40. 50 prints will be available at a discount during the Fab sale, and the rest will be available afterwards in my Etsy store.

Here is a look at the print!

A number of years ago a friend gave me some dog-eared old issues of American Artist magazine. It was a stack of a dozen or so mildewy artifacts dating back to 1968-69, largely unremarkable except for one issue that caught my eye; May 1969.

The cover story, “Two California Poster Artists”, profiled David Osborn and Charles Woods, a pair of young designers who worked in silkscreen and offset lithography. There was a good selection of their prints featured along with a lengthy interview. The broad shapes, bright colors and loose imagery were bold and lyrical, reminding me of both Matisse’s cutouts and Sister Corita’s colorful screen prints. At the time that I first saw this, I was just beginning to make screen prints. I loved the bold shapes and overlayed colors, but most of all I marveled at how fresh and lively they looked, even in the yellowed pages of the old magazine. I tucked it away and went about the business of making screen prints for the next ten years.

A few weeks ago, in a stroke of awesome luck, I discovered a number of Osborn/Woods prints for sale on Etsy. It turns out that Charles Woods passed on recently and the estate is selling a number of posters and prints from their collection. I immediately snatched up several for myself, and they are beautiful to behold in person. They show their age a little, but for the price they were a steal. Their production process was an interesting cross between screen-printing and lithography, and you can tell that these were carefully and lovingly made.

I went back and read the 1969 article and interview in which they detailed some of their inspirations and working methods. For me it’s a reaffirming read in that the relationship between the images and the printing method, between artist and printer, was a crucial and inextricable element. In design and illustration today you can see the remnants of this relationship everywhere. Off-registration, ink spread, color overlays and tactile elements that used to be the artifacts of the printing process are now baked into images that may never be printed on paper. It’s a clever look in that when executed well it has a comfortable and authentic appearance. At the same time, limited edition printing methods like lithography, screen printing, and letterpress are often aped on computer screens and then overlooked in production for the robotic ease of giclee printing. So, while I first found the Osborn/Woods posters inspiring for their novelty, style and imagery, I see now that they are more than just beautiful images, they are Beautiful Objects.

Read the full 1969 interview below, and then go to the estate’s Etsy shop to pick up some of the prints shown here while they are still available.

Two California Poster Artists

By Glenn Loney. Originally published in American Artist, May 1969.

SAN FRANCISCO is the fountainhead of psychedelic and neo-Art Nouveau poster art. But it is also the home of some most unusual posters, stressing novel applications of collage and printing techniques. These arresting, colorful works are the creations of two young artists, David Osborn and Charles Woods. As students of art history at the University of California, they became convinced that there must be more to art than counting halos in medieval religious paintings. So they formed a partnership which has resulted in a number of commercial projects— package and product design, advertising, interior decoration—and a handsome array of graphics, ranging from the striking posters to postcards, bookplates, verse cards, wrapping papers, and greeting cards.

The act of creation, with the excitement and absorption it generates, seems the major cause for much of their output; for they discuss various design projects with real affection and animation. Fortunately, their daring use of color and their instinctive feeling for effective composition have made all their creations eminently salable, with the result that they now have charming and crowded stores in the early California towns of Monterey and Nevada City. And how did they get started on collage posters?

Woods: We had been working on a series of banners for a restaurant. They were cut-out collage in black-and-white. Instead of using them for patterns for a printing process, however, we delivered the black-and-white collages with color notations to a maker. Then they were all made just as flags are.

Osborn: Of course, they were rather expensive. Then we got the idea for a more inexpensive method of reproducing decorative works. Before that, both of us had worked in silk-screen, but with an extremely limited output. Fifteen or twenty-five prints would be all we would make of a subject. But it is absurd to say we are going to make only fifteen, and, therefore, they will be more valuable. There is no reason for that. Five thousand of these can be run, really.

Loney: Yes, but isn’t it the collectors’ idea that the fewer there are, the better investment it is for him?

Osborn: Yes, but that has very little to do with it.

Loney: How do you choose a subject?

Woods: We’re pretty well hung-up on subject matter. We keep flying from it, but we have to come back to it. It is some kind of a compulsion.

Osborn: I think we learned that in religious illustration. That is one of the few fields where there is any symbolism that has meaning to a great many people. Here are two figures standing under a tree in a garden-it means nothing. If you say “Garden of Eden,” there you are! Regardless of belief, everybody knows what the symbol is.

Woods: It is more or less a universal symbol.

Osborn: We had been working in religious symbolism for a long time—it is a vast resource. Then we had this commission to do these banners for the Galleon Restaurant. We discovered that it was difficult to do secular symbolism—so that people would look at these banners and not treat them as abstract things, but would have some idea of what they meant. So we evolved the idea that for Galleon we would do seas and oceans. Our sources had to come from outside religion. Fortunately, we were both in Art History, and we began to look at old art, old sculpture, hoping that we might be able, in some way, to symbolize the Pacific Ocean, perhaps by using a turtle. We tried to symbolize the Atlantic Ocean by using cool colors, a derivation of a galleon banner with a Scythian medallion, with Northern Lights. Our poster series of Seas and Oceans was a derivation of the banners.

Loney: And how did you develop the poster technique?

Woods: We originally worked in collage and silk-screen. Our initial idea. was to use offset lithography as a more artistic medium—something we could control, and something that was more direct. So we evolved a simple silk-screen technique applied to offset lithography. By silk-screen technique, I mean that of stenciling. Now, offset lithography is a commercial printing process. Usually the initial copy is set up in black-and-white, either by typesetting or by drawing—some method that gets a black image on a white sheet. In turn, this is photographed in either line, or halftone, which breaks up the continuous tone into small dots. A negative results, in which all the clear areas in the negative are printable areas; the opaque areas are non-printing areas. These negatives are, in turn, stripped into light-proof paper, or vinyl masks.

Then photo-offset plates are exposed to strong light through this negative. Photo-offset plates are coated with a photochemical compound, so that areas where the light goes through the negative will be unable to pick up ink. The areas that the light does not hit reject ink. The resulting offset plates have a full image in positive, just as it will eventually be printed. There are different offset techniques, but, I think this is the basic one.

The plate is now set up photochemically to reject and to attract ink. Mounted on a roller it first passes over a series of inked rollers. They transfer ink across the whole plate. Then the plate continues in its revolution, and is washed with a solution—sometimes acid, or water, or sometimes a combination. After that, all the areas that are to be reproduced have ink on them. All the areas that are not to be reproduced have been washed clean. The plate is pressed again, against the rubber blanket, as it continues its revolution, so that the rubber blanket has the entire image that is going to be printed from it. It has picked up the actual ink off the plate. Then the paper enters the press. A polished roller presses it against the rubber blanket roller. All of the ink on the rubber blanket is transferred to the paper, and the paper comes out of the press.

Loney: Is this a rotary press, or is it flat?

Woods: This is flat. The actual printing in a rotary press is the same. By rotary, we simply mean the feeding method, which is continual.

Loney: But are these posters done a sheet at a time?

Woods: Yes. In using a commercial printing process, we felt it would definitely be much easier to get works reproduced. By using the silk-screen stencil technique, we can control the reproduction. We can make it less mechanical, by having less precise edges, keeping almost the craft effect of an original poster. I think I should explain our actual method of creating. First, we usually do rough sketches in black-and-white. I learned this technique from Cameron Booth. We used to do oil paintings in black-and-white, and then apply color on a second painting, having chosen a color palette. It is a backwards way of painting. Some people would call it decorative painting, but it is hardly that. I don’t know quite how to explain it. It is an odd way of working. It really is a Germanic approach. I think Booth learned it from Hans Hoffmann.

Osborn: I think the mistake we make is that half the time we should leave things in black-and-white.

Loney: But don’t the colors sometimes fade out some of those values?

Woods: Yes. Then the result is not the same at all.

Loney: My feeling about several of your posters is that some of the chosen colors are too much alike. But, I guess you know what you’re doing.

Woods: Well, I hope we do!

Loney: If there were stronger contrasts of color these posters would be more interesting to me.

Woods: Anyway, the second step is to finalize our rough, black-and-white sketches. We do a full drawing on a light-colored or white paper. In some cases, we go to a third step, which is doing a collage—to get that cut-out feeling that all of our things have. I think it’s a sort of Polish race memory on my part—the Poles are great paper-cutters. We do the collage in black paper, over the sketch, using a light-top table, so we can reproduce, generally, the positioning and character of the sketch. I would say at this point, when we do the black-and-white collage, that the poster begins to form itself—we begin to know what it will really look like, as far as the configuration of shapes and line. While we are doing this, we have to keep in mind that it is eventually going to be in color. It is like three-dimensional chess at this point. When we are done, we should have a rather accurate black-and-white collage. Then we normally choose a color palette—in some cases with only three colors, and, occasionally, five or six colors.

Loney: Doesn’t that make a difference in what it’s going to cost you to print the posters?

Woods: Oh, of course. The more colors, the more cost, and sometimes, we use too many colors—we might do better just using one or two.

Loney: Is there a difference in the price of posters, or do they all sell for about the same‘?

Woods: That is a continual problem; we have to average it out.

Osborn: We prefer never to analyze what the eventual thing will cost!

Woods: Right! After choosing the color palette, we make color notations on the individual areas on our collage. When we begin choosing colors, additional notes are sometimes necessary. For instance, in one of our posters, once the whole collage was done, and we had noted the colors, we thought we would need another color background, or other areas in color. So we made notations on a separate piece of paper that we were going to add additional color that did not show in the collage. We have to visualize how these colors will look. It really is a strange way of working, but I think we are able to get a more controlled color than if we just “messed around.” As for doing actual collages in color in advance, it’s almost impossible, because we’re working in a print medium, using a collage only as a technique to get to the print. I think doing a full-color collage would give us only a full-color collage, which when printed would not look that way.

Loney: Because some colors would be showing through, wouldn’t they?

Woods: Yes, you would have some showing through, because the ink, in some cases, is transparent.
Our fifth step is to lay the lightproof masking sheets, which are used in offset lithography as a medium to hold the negatives. We use them as straight masking sheets. We lay them on top of the collage—again on a light-top table—and we copy or we outline the general areas and outlines of each one of the colors that we intend to use. Each one goes on a separate masking sheet. We keep these in register by using simple pins in the corners, like those lithographers use. We then punch holes with a regular paper-punch, so that we can keep all the colors in relationship to each other. Then we take the masks off. It is an additive process in copying. You can add one sheet on top of the other, until eventually you see the entire poster-—all in outline form—-but with each color separate. You can do this because you can see through these light-proof masks.

Osborn: This is the principal reason for using the light, anyway; it is a convenience.

Woods: Then we cut out the areas we want to print. What we are really doing here is making a stencil. We’re duplicating the role of the photographic negative in the process. Once we have these cut out—this is true of the majority of our posters—we simply give the masks to the photographer for the lithographer, and he uses them as he would a photographic negative, to make one lithographic plate for each color.
While there are multi-color presses now, this sort of thing really has to be done by small printers who want to fuss and who are interested. I don’t know how we really keep printers so long using this process.

Loney: It’s very demanding, isn’t it?

Woods: Yes, it is very demanding. We’re a great bother to have around.

Loney: If the printer is careless and sloppy, the whole thing is ruined?

Woods: Most printing plants are used to turning out commercial printing.

Loney: They like to run through 5000 copies in about ten minutes?

Woods: Well, five thousand an hour, and have it done and over with.

Osborn: It is also not economically possible for them to do otherwise. The only reason that we got started in this, is the fact that we both worked in a lithography printing plant.

Loney: So you know the processes, and what the possibilities are. But that means that you then have to seek out somebody who cares to do something on the side that is a little special.

Woods: Exactly! But this is very pleasant, and a lot of printers do.

Loney: About how long does it take —I mean in minutes—to print a four or five-color poster—with “due care”?

Woods: That all depends.

Osborn: One of the problems is that when we are changing something, or working on our masks and cutting out, we are tying up the press while we are puttering around the light-top table.

Woods: The actual printing part of the process is terribly short. Most presses run 5000 or 6000 impressions per hour.

Loney: Does the press have all the plates on it, or does it only print one color at a time?

Woods: One plate at a time. There is a problem of changing, but that is done very rapidly.

Loney: In other words, in a run of a hundred, you print up one color on a hundred sheets and wait until they are dry? Then you keep doing this for each color?

Woods: And each time the press has to be washed up. It’s great fun. Then you have to change the plate, and “make ready”—which is a dreadful word.

Osborn: You have to run through about a thousand to get a good hundred.

Loney: Why?

Osborn: To get the print adjusted.

Woods: You see, the ink flows across the press, and it is picked up by the rollers, and then transferred to the plate. Some areas take up a lot of ink, and some areas take very little ink. In a small run of a hundred sheets, I would say that you probably have to run two-hundred-fifty sheets to get a hundred good ones.

Loney: And the paper is expensive?

Woods: Not particularly. Paper is cheap. It is the cheapest part of the whole process.

Osborn: Also, when you are setting up your press, you don’t always use the good paper.

Woods: You use the same sheets over and over again, to get the ink adjusted properly, and the water—if water is used. The proofs become very interesting. You can get great color ideas by looking through old press sheets—color relationships and color overlappings that you would otherwise never conceive of. We do the colors one at a time, and either the printer or we mix the color swatches. Sometimes the ink needs slight alteration, but that again is part of the joy of being right with the printer, and being able to change color right on the press.

Loney: Changing color on the press? That means you have to wash all the plates again?

Woods: Sometimes you don’t have to. In lithography, we usually try to run our lightest colors first. They are transparent colors. They vary in transparency, of course. If we put down a really dense color—in lithography, the darker the color the denser it is—the lighter ones wouldn’t appear at all. Part of the color planning and choosing of the color palette step is determining in what sequence the colors are to be laid down. With silk-screen, we discovered, we did exactly the opposite—we laid down the darker colors first, and the lighter colors afterwards.

Woods: Working at the press gives us a real opportunity to alter shapes. As you can see these things laid out on the press one color at a time, quite often you see changes that you really would like to make. So, you can at that point—when one color is done—take the mask of the next color that is going down and put it over the print on the light-top table, to check where the shapes are falling. We can see if there are any alterations that we want to make. Then we make them in the mask. Or, we just rub them out of the plate, which in some cases, is possible. But, it is very difficult to add to a plate. When all the colors are printed, and the poster is nominally done, we sometimes find it necessary to add another color.

Loney: For accent?

Woods: For accent. In lithography, it is called a “correction plate,” but we don’t like to think that we make vast errors. This plate being the last, it can, in some cases, make the whole composition hold together.

Osborn: The picture will reveal itself.

Woods: In our two silk-screen poster series, we added usually one additional color, and, in some places, two colors. So in planning posters, we usually try to use fewer colors than we think we want, knowing that we will probably add more in the end. Using the offset process does enable us to use a photography technique in areas where we feel it is necessary. On some of our posters, we simply cut out printing type as collage. In others, we want the contrast of the more mechanical type against a rough, craft-like outline. In those cases, we simply had the type set, or designed the type in black-and-white. Then it was photographed and stripped in as a negative onto our hand-cut design.

Osborn: A number of our series have really been almost studies in type. That’s how we created the ticket series.

Woods: Yes, they were an exercise in flat color in a ticket format. Flat color was done, as I outlined, with cutout masks, and then the type was added as an exercise in typesetting and type-contrast.

Loney: But you haven’t done anything quite like this since then, have you? Woods: No, we haven’t.

Loney: How long ago was that?

Woods: Oh, several years . . .

Loney: Was that an early thing with you? You gave it up and have gone on to collage posters‘?

Osborn: No, in our commercial work we have used type.

Woods: Yes. In some of our posters there is a lack of tortured type, which is in such vogue at the moment. I think type has such integrity, that I like using it just for itself. I really hate altering it too much, except where the demands of the design require it. I don’t think it should ever really take over the design of the poster.

What else to say? That’s the process. Basically, it is a silk-screen process used for lithography.

Copyright American Artist ® 1969. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. Images used with permission.

Osborn/Woods links:

Osborn/Woods Etsy shop
Osborn/Woods profile at Gravel and Gold

Since May 9 my life has been a nonstop crazy thrillride. That’s the day my son Ethan Louis Mercer was born. His arrival has unearthed my childhood obsession with dinosaurs. I feel like a young nerd again!

To celebrate this splendacious time, I’ve made a set of cut-paper scenes depicting my prehistoric pals. Take a look!

I frakking love dinosaurs. To imagine that those outsized ancestors of birds and lizards once pranced around in my backyard has always fascinated me. My extensive childhood research yielded elaborate drawings, dioramas, and time spent pronouncing hilariously long words. I distinctly remember the joy of correcting my parents on the pronunciation of such names as Diplodocus and Dromiceiomimus. Poor Ethan, his dad is a total nerd.

While reading Michael Kimmelman’s excellent book The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa, I came upon this excerpt from a letter written by vaunted American Conceptual/Minimal artist Sol LeWitt to Eva Hesse:

Learn to say “Fuck You” to the world once in a while. You have every right to. Just stop thinking, worrying, looking over your shoulder wondering, doubting, fearing, hurting, hoping for some easy way out, struggling, grasping, confusing, itching, scratching, mumbling, bumbling, grumbling, humbling, stumbling, numbling, rumbling, gambling, tumbling, scumbling, scrambling, hitching, hatching, bitching, moaning, groaning, honing, boning, horse-shitting, hair-splitting, nit-picking, piss-trickling, nose sticking, ass-gouging, eyeball-poking, finger-pointing, alleyway-sneaking, long waiting, small stepping, evil-eyeing, back-scratching, searching, perching, besmirching, grinding, grinding, grinding away at yourself. Stop it and just DO!

Don’t worry about cool, make your own uncool. Make your own, your own world.

What I love most about this quote is how honest it is. It reads like a fever dream, bulldozing every obstacle that could possibly lie between you and your path to doing something great. In fact, it doesn’t even do that. The quote pushes aside the very notion that one should even worry about making something great. For me, this quote is a personal call-out. A rallying cry. Plainly put, it says Get over yourself. Don’t tell me about your ethos—I don’t care. Don’t give me an excuse—I don’t want to hear it. Don’t waste your time. It is yours, and it is precious. Go. DO.

Early in 2010 I was contacted by Overcoat Management to do some poster work for the Oscar winning, all around superb duo, The Swell Season. I’d been yearning to do a highly ornamental piece for a while, and when I found out that I’d be doing a poster for a show at Radio City Music Hall I had the perfect setting to lay down some extra-purty design work for this excellent band.

Here are some images that I took while I was putting the piece together. I vowed early on to try some new things both technical and aesthetic, and the ridiculous amount of working and re-working of lines, textures and color really paid off.

I did most of the drawing in Illustrator. I don’t typically work in vector from the start, but it allowed me in this case to be very precise while experimenting with the layout. Once I got the layout close to where I wanted, it was just a matter of getting the right texture and feel out of it, which required a lot of work outside of a computer. Using a photocopier, transfers, and overlaying hand drawn elements really loosened the thing up. I was very happy with the results, and the edition of 100 posters sold out before the encore!

First, a video.

How I made it.

F’n skulls man. What is more rockin’ than making a big ass skull for a poster? So it went when I got in touch with Young Widows’ front man Evan Patterson about a September gig in Philly. Much of the band’s artwork is threaded around different skull images, many of which have an experimental, arty vibe while still being pretty bad ass. So I figured I could have a good run at it. I started with a small pencil drawing, just a bunch of lines that I worked and reworked until I had a decent framework to build on. At that point I decided that I wanted to kind of destroy the line drawing, push the image with much more texture and shape. See the initial sketch and the first couple comps below.

I had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to take some liberties with the piece. I have a habit of using 2-3 colors on any given poster, but this one begged to have 5, 6, and finally 7 colors worked into the image. Some tricky effects with transparent inks would make for a challenging technical print, but really I was most excited that I was able to break down the line drawing and add some depth to the image. Here is the final digital image.

Color Layers

Below are the sequential layers of the print. See how the overlays build upon each other, creating a hot mess on paper. This was really fun to print! The final edition includes 60 of the Young Widows poster, and 30 art prints with no text on them. They are both available in the shop.

After making gig posters for so long, I’ve been growing weary of the throw-away aesthetics that are found in large supply in the medium. Typically I will sketch, design, edit, and print a poster in a very short period of time, sometimes in one day. Nuance and intimate detail are often casualties of short deadlines. After all, these are very momentary images, and I’m not a master draftsman. With the pieces for the Scenic Route show, I sought to develop the images slowly over time, pushing, pulling, drawing and re-drawing until hopefully arriving at something more personally gratifying than just a cool band poster.

In the neighborhood

One of the first pieces I worked on was actually a re-work of an art print I’d made months prior, for a spring-themed show at Masthead.

"Neighborhood", art print for Masthead Spring show

I wasn’t very happy with how the original piece came out. The shape-based composition was a step in the right direction, but the whole bottom half felt too flat and unresolved. This was actually the first print that I made in the studio that I built in my basement earlier this year, so it does benefit from some very tight registration. I decided that I wanted to rework this image, particularly the little village with its faceted walls, windows and doorways.

With this as a starting point, I did a tracing of some of the key shapes that I wanted to keep from the print. Then I started building a line drawing out of the tracing, keeping in mind that I would be converting the lines into shapes that would be butted and overlaid upon each other.

Turn your hymnals to early-mid century modernism

As I was working this line drawing (I had five or six others going at the same time), I was checking back on some historical references for inspiration. Two guys spring right to the front if we’re talking about dealing with lines and shapes. First, Paul Klee. I’ve never seen anyone else do lines like this guy. They look like hieroglyphs or x-ray reflections left behind as a kind of delicate stain on paper. Second, Stuart Davis, who broke planes and three-space shapes down into some seriously sublime stuff, so bold and chaotic and that it has an almost contemporary feel. I was trying to figure out how to take these line drawings and convert them into taught, flat shapes that suggest depth but do not reward it. Here are a couple pieces by Klee and Davis:

First state

Below is the pencil sketch for the new piece. The original focal-point building is intact, and around and leading to it a winding path breaks into several planes and views as it hops around the bottom of the drawing. Let’s get it out of the way and call this my house. Welcome to the neighborhood, watch your step!

I  scanned the sketch and brought it into Photoshop. Tweaked the levels, made fills out of the negative spaces, even threw in some textures. None of it seemed to work. So, taking a different approach, I loaded the line drawing in Illustrator and proceeded to redraw the whole thing in vector. That made it much easier to edit and refine the shapes, but I was left with a knife-sharp vector design that still lacked something.

Bringing in the everyday

I’ve been fascinated by this huge sign near my house for years.

It’s on the White Horse Pike, a long stretch of road that runs from the Ben Franklin Bridge all the way to the Atlantic City. I grew up driving up and down this stretch of highway. It’s really nothing special, but this enormous horse sign always caught my eye and I’ve long wanted to make something out of it. So I made a horse drawing and inserted it into the vector drawing. here is what it looks like at this point. Lots of shapes, some possible overlays, and a trapping nightmare.

Moving right along

Apropos to the name of the show I was preparing for, I decided that the only way to soften this design properly was to redraw the whole thing again by hand. I printed it out and went to town on the light table with various pens and ink brushes. Here, Smokey approves of the main elements and curves.

That led to about three hours of piecing the design back together in Photoshop, filling in some blanks, and then hand trapping the whole piece. One of the ways I trap stuff like this by hand is isolate each color on a layer, in print order. Then I select the layer, expand the selection by 6 or 8 pixels, and draw in the traps where the layer above overlaps. It was easy with this one since the shapes were so simple.

Let’s print this damn thing

OK, it’s go time. Here are each of the color layers as they went down, starting with the second color. The first color was key because I added some texture to it. If it printed the way I was hoping, the proceeding overlays would pick up the texture and do some fun things as the colors build up.

and the final (seventh) color:

Note how the orange overlays the green and light tan colors at the bottom of the image.  I wasn’t entirely sure that would translate but it came out even better than I thought it might. This print is one of the finest technical prints that I’ve ever made. The registration is spot on, especially at the bottom of the sharp yellow shape in the middle. The dark gray final color has a bit of gloss in it to make it pop a bit more. The final edition is 38 prints, and they are available now for $40 over in the shop. Thanks for reading!

I spotted this specimen in an old Linotype catalog once used by a midwestern newspaper publisher. The catalog itself is 3 inches thick, has several cigarette burns on the cover, and smells wonderful. As I studied the catalog for its huge volume of detailed specimens and beautiful, usable layouts, I was intrigued by the dummy text that was used throughout. Take a look.

I did a little more research to uncover where this text originated. I could not locate its original place of publication, but I unearthed its author, one William Addison Dwiggins.

To put it straight, Dwiggins was a pivotal figure in American design history. He was a student of Frederic Goudy; He coined the term graphic design; designed over 300 book covers for Knopf, including a stunning illustrated edition of The Time Machine; created beautiful typefaces for Mergenthaler Linotype. He even built his own marionette theatre and puppet group.

I am assuming that this dummy text originated in his 1927 book Layout in Advertising. In the book he says that Gothic faces lacked grace and their lower case characters were useless. With that, typefounders Mergenthaler Linotype challenged him to make a sans face that didn’t suck. Thus began a partnership that yielded Metro, a great first typeface by any measure, as well as a pile of other austere type designs.

Check out:

• A list of Dwiggins’ type designs.
• Flickr photo pool
• Facebook page..?

Below is the full text fragment.

Again, I could not locate the original, if you can confirm it let me know and I’ll send you a poster. I also added some paragraph breaks.

How is one to assess and evaluate a type face in terms of its esthetic design? Why do the pace-makers in the art of printing rave over a specific face of type? What do they see in it? Why is it so superlatively pleasant to their eyes?

Good design is always practical design. And what they see in a good type design is, partly, its excellent practical fitness to perform its work. It has a “heft” and balance in all of its parts just right for its size, as any good tool has. Your good chair has all of its parts made nicely to the right size to do exactly the work that the chair has to do-neither clumsy and thick, nor “skinny” and weak-no waste of material and no lack of strength. And, beyond that, the chair may have been made by a man who worked out in it his sense of fine shapes and curves and proportions-it may be, actually, a work of art.

The same thing holds for shapes of letters. And your chair, or your letter (if a true artist made it) will have, besides its good looks, a suitability to the nth degree to be sat in, or stamped on paper and read. That explains, in a way, why the experts rave over the fine shapes of letters; but it fails to explain wherein the shapes are fine. If you seek to go further with the inquiry, theories will be your only answer.

Here is a theory that the proponent thinks may have sense in it; Fine type letters were, in the first place, copies of fine written letters. Fine written letters were fine because they were produced in the most direct and simple way by a tool in the hands of a person expert in its use-by a person, moreover, who was an artist (i.e., a person equipped to make sound judgments about lines, curves, proportions, etc.). The artist of that moment when printing was invented who furnished the fine written patterns for type was (luckily for printing) working at the top notch of a fine tradition of calligraphy. He was making sound judgments about lines and curves and proportions of letters. He had resurrected an ancient distinguished style of writing and had added to it the quality of his own fine taste. His letters flowed from his pen easily and simply, without any tricks or affectations or extraneous embellishments. He was simple enough and artist enough to let the implement itself (and his facile hand) shape the product.

The fine qualities of this artist’s letter-forms were carried over into the metal types and sealed up there like butterflies in amber. It is argued, however, that the ascription of beauty to type letters by this route (i.e., via the standards of calligraphy) is false logic. If the natural and simple and tastefully controlled use of an implement produces a fine result, why not start with the process of founding type, instead of with the process of writing with a pen? Why not cut punches and strike matrices and cast type metal simply and naturally and tastefully, and make types that reflect a suitable artistic use of the process of typefounding?

I think that the argument is esthetically sound. There is no common opinion about the legibility or grace or vigor of various type faces that can be quoted as authority. One man’s opinion is as good as another’s. Each commentator has his own pet designs and his own reasons for thinking them good. Some kind of comment on the various type faces in general use is desirable in this section merely for the purpose of bringing the argument to a focus on actual examples. The comment that follows has no more weight than this: it is what a given person thinks about the type faces that are at the service of advertisers in this country.

Let us begin by recalling the fact that the specialist is in the habit of dividing type faces into two broad classes-”old style,” and “modern.” The change from old style to modern took place at the beginning of the nineteenth century, so that the modernity of the “modern” faces is not so conspicuous as their name might lead one to think. But a change in fashion really did take place, and there are structural differences that make the classification reasonable. Some acquaintance with these structural differences is desirable if you are to have peace in the type family. For, while members of one group are able to interchange freely and peaceably among themselves, if you try to put them both into the same design a race riot is apt to result.

The characteristic feature of a modern letter is its perpendicularity; the main elements are either perpendicular to the base line or parallel with it. Whereas in an old style type there are slanting features that give it its character. Between these two groups there are many faces that are called transitional; that is to say, their progenitors were old style faces beginning to be modern, or modern faces with some lingering memories of old style. There are, beside, many faces that never had any grandfathers to remember at all—plain mongrel.

Papers and types are tools supplied to the designer of advertising ready made. He picks what he wants from the stock on the retailers’ shelves. But the next pieces of apparatus, drawn lettering and ornaments, are made to his order. How these latter affairs turn out is more or less “up to” the advertising architect; whereas in the case of paper and type he may reasonably claim that his responsibility is less because he is obliged to use what he is…

I recently found a little collection of quotes in an old notebook, along with detailed notes about executing a wall-sized print of all of the words that I know. Man, I need to get out more.

“When the image of an object changes, the observer must know whether the change is due to the object itself or to the context or to both, otherwise he understands neither the object nor its surroundings.”
- Rudolf Arnheim, from Visual Thinking

“to see, to perceive, is more than to recognize. It does not identify something present in terms of a past disconnected with it. The past is carried into the present so as to expand and deepen the content of the latter. Art is thus prefigured into the very processes of living.”
- John Dewey, from Art As Experience

“Words have no value in themselves. That is their value.”
- Daniel Chandler, from Semiotics for Beginners

“The absolute present is unattainable” –Doug Aitken

“How can you say any style is better than another? You ought to be able to be an Abstract Expressionist next week, or a Pop artist, or a realist, without feeling that you have given up something” - Andy Warhol, quoted from “What Is Pop Art? Answers from 8 Painters, Part 1,” Art News 64