Now in its second year, Publication Fair boasts posters printed by OMFGCO and Container Corps.
The 2010 Publication Fair was held this weekend at the Cleaners at the Ace Hotel in Portland. We were on hand to scope it out and to staff the Pinball Publishing /Scout Books table. I scored some amazing printed works and, in the midst of doing so, spoke with the exhibitors about about their work. This three-part video series highlights those conversations.
Watch the first installment below.
Nieves introduces an app for iPhone: device-based reading for independently-produced publications is becoming a reality.
I’m buying zines today in an unlikely place: the bus. I’ve just downloaded the newly released iPhone app from Nieves, an independent publisher in Switzerland, and on the app have been reading zines from their catalog such as Drinking Baileys from a Skull by Jody Barton; Grid Sewing by Lizzie Finn, and Untitled by Tobin Yelland.
As I’ve purchased and downloaded the titles, there are calculations taking place in the value-tradeoffs part of my brain that silently outputs go/no-go purchasing decisions. I’ve had my eye on the print-version these zines for years now, but hadn’t yet pulled the trigger because shipping costs attached to online purchases feel like a tax to me; but now in one bus ride I’ve bought three zines at $0.99 each.
The Nieves app behaves exactly as it should. The reader’s library is displayed as a grid, the zines’ covers facing the viewer. The navigation is intuitive iPhone UI as it should be. For example, when a zine is being read, holding the iPhone upright displays a single page while rotating the phone horizontally changes the display to a two-page spread. Swiping the screen turns the page in the appropriate direction. These behaviors can also be found in other apps such as Zinio and are certainly part of a new set of expected behaviors for screen-reading applications.
Graphic selections from the best of the best.
There’s a book that’s a required addition to our household library each year, it’s The Best American Comics annual which is a part of the Best American series from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. You might think from that description that I’m a comics devotee. I’m not. There’s actually only one kind of comic that I like: the well-vetted. The Best American Comics annual vets better than anyone by bringing in guest editors such as Harvey Pekar, Chris Ware, Lynda Barry, Charles Burns, and this year’s Neil Gaiman to sift through pamphlets, zines, online comics, and publications of all kinds. The Best American Comics 2010 represents a selection of outstanding work published in North America between September 1, 2008 and August 31, 2009. It presents 25 of the very best examples of the year in comics. Read More
Gestalten delivers a short interview with the prolific maker, director, curator.
Gestalten’s most recent podcast video is an interview with artist and curator Aaron Rose. Aaron is most widely known for his co-curation of the groundbreaking Beautiful Losers exhibition. He was the owner of the Alleged Gallery in NYC, is a director at the Director’s Bureau (along with Soffia Coppola, and Mike Mills), and is founder of Wieden+Kennedy’s entertainment arm WKE. In other words, homie’s an O.G.
In this short interview, Aaron shares his perspectives on audiences’ delay in keeping up with makers’ transitions, a fascinatingly correct idea that the 21st century has yet to establish an identity of its own. He posits that we’re still only remixing the 20th century, and innovators eventually becoming the cliché:
All the innovators become the cliché. That’s cultural progress. You can’t stop that from happening that’s just life. And that’s the good thing about life too, the avant garde today is the establishment of tomorrow, there’s no way around it.
So You Need A Typeface is a humorous look at the process of selecting type
Danish graphic design student Julian Hansen created So You Need A Typeface, a tongue-in-cheek flow chart to walk you through the process of type selection. There are nuggets of type-selection truths sprinkled throughout this piece. For example:
• Not afraid to be asked if you live in the nineties?
• What is your opinion of Eric Gill?
(If you’re not familiar with the contentious life of Eric Gill, you should probably read up about him so that your usage of Gill Sans or Perpetua can be in used in full knowledge.)
• (Do you need) A champion in usability?
…this one leads to Caslon as a logical conclusion. I couldn’t agree more!
This one made me LOL…
• Everybody loves Garamond
Although this piece was made with humor in mind, in actuality there are far worse methods of arriving at a decision about type (anything that involves the word ‘funky’ would qualify as worse). In fact, following this chart to the letter wouldn’t be a bad strategy because the outcomes of each scenario end in the age-old well-vetted production typefaces such as Garamond, Futura, Palatino, Didot, and Helvetica and the chart routes you into classic usage of each of them. So, a tip of the hat to Julian for creating a useful resource. And he’s made it available as a poster.
Tae Won Yu's exhibition in on display at Land Gallery in Portland
A retrospective of Tae Won Yu‘s work recently opened at Land Gallery in Portland. The show features album artwork, posters, prints, and photographs from Tae’s years of living in Olympia, Washington and beyond. Also on display are perhaps his most widely recognized works —the Built to Spill album artwork for Perfect From Now On, Keep It Like a Secret, the Live album, and Ancient Melodies of the Future.
Sort, stack.
I was at Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) yesterday and found myself in the recently opened exhibition Sorted Books by Nina Katchadourian.
Sorted Books primarily features photographs of stacks of books, their titles meant to be read sequentially, top to bottom. The results are pithy dadaist poems such as:
Primitive Art /
Just Imagine /
Picasso /
Raised By Wolves
and another:
Relax /
When I Relax I Feel Guilty /
When I Say No, I Feel Guilty /
God Always Says Yes! /
Don’t Say Yes When You Want to Say No
I like the idea of books being corralled into groups for which they were never intended because that’s where they wind up naturally anyway right?, on our bookshelves in random groupings. Now I can’t help but read the titles on my bookshelf sequentially. If I come across any particularly interesting ones I’ll post it in the comments below. What about yours? Any Nina Katchadourianesque sequential titles on your bookshelf?
Moiré Index creates what is perhaps the first visual lexicon of moire patterns.
Carsten Nicolai is a visual and sound artist who’s new book Moiré Index from Die Gestalten creates what is perhaps the first visual lexicon of moire patterns.
A moiré pattern is an interference pattern created when two grids are overlaid at slightly different angles or when they have slightly different mesh sizes. Moiré patterns are often an undesired artifact of images produced by various digital imaging and computer graphics techniques, for example when scanning a halftone picture or ray tracing a checkered plane.
In graphic arts and prepress, the usual technology for printing full-color images involves the superimposition of halftone screens. These are regular rectangular dot patterns—often four of them, printed in cyan, yellow, magenta, and black. Some kind of moiré pattern is inevitable, but in favorable circumstances the pattern is “tight;” that is, the spatial frequency of the moiré is so high that it is not noticeable. In the graphic arts, the term moiré means an excessively visible moiré pattern. Part of the prepress art consists of selecting screen angles and halftone frequencies which minimize moiré. The visibility of moiré is not entirely predictable. The same set of screens may produce good results with some images, but visible moiré with others.
Nicolai’s body of music engages the blips, bleeps, and static of data being visualized, sometimes through automation. He carried this interest into a series of published work categorizing the artifacts of visual data representation. Moiré Index methodically —and obsessively— sorts through the variety of moires patterns to deliver a comprehensive reference point for the patterns.
Collateral Matters opens this week.
Brace yourself for blatant self-promotion:
This week marks the opening of Collateral Matters: Selections form the Museum of Contemporary Craft Archives with Kate Bingaman-Burt and Clifton Burt.
Using printed materials and ephemera from the Museum archive, the exhibition reveals stories about the history of printing and design in Portland, and communicates how such printed materials construct institutional identity.
Focusing primarily on the 1940s through the 1970s, the collateral materials on view provide a simple study of both intentionally and unintentionally designed pieces in the pre-desktop publishing era. The critical role of printshops is revealed through designed print pieces, such as invitations, posters and letterhead, and then contrasted alongside office paperwork – handwritten artist statements, pastel-toned invoices and receipts speckled with red “sale” dots, for example. In an installation designed to show the visual impact of printed materials, the guest curators engage typography from the mundane to the meticulously designed, showing how graphic language functions in a range of types of printed collateral.
Jennifer Daniel's new letterpress-printed business cards.
Troublemaker, rascal*, and art-director / illustrator Jennifer Daniel’s new business cards are hot off the press at Ohio’s Cranky Pressman. You’ve likely encountered her work as a contributing artist at the Morning News, as one of Print Magazine’s 20 under 30 New Visual Artists, or one of her zillions of editorial illustrations in the New York Times. These cards, however, portray her job title as “unicorn groomer.” They feature letterpressed ASCII artwork of stars, a heart, and a unicorn and are printed on two colors of specially bonded paper stock:
Cranky Pressman created a duplexed paper where two different colors of stock are bonded together. Pop-Tone in Sweet Tooth and Razzleberry colors by French Paper Co. was used, each in 100 lb. cover weight bringing the finished weight of the card to a heavy 200 lbs. The card fronts were letterpress printed in 2 colors, Black and Rubine Red with matching Rubine edge tinting.
Pinball Publishing
We're a creative publishing company located in Portland, Oregon. We are fueled by a love for print, collaboration, and the manufacture of meaningful objects.
Phil Elverum: Print Pioneer of the Pacific Northwe...:
Phil Elverum is best known for his work as the bands Mount Eerie and The Microphones, as well as... 
Hatch Show Print:
Hatch Show Print is one of the oldest print shops in America. For a hundred years Hatch was a si... 
Carson Ellis, Illustrator Extraordinaire:
It is important to have heroes. It is also helpful when they are real people. I have my share of... 
Eco-friendly CD Packaging:
Printer: Pinball Publishing
Item: Pinball Pak (CD Packaging)
Paper: 20 pt. Chipboard
Inks: Pa... 
Field Notes and Fifty States:
Item: Field Notes Colors "County Fair" 50 Editions
Paper: 100# linen cover stock (Blue, Red, Ye... 
Coffee Common, Scout Books, TED 2011:
"The people serving you coffee today come from a movement, not a company."
So reads the first... Pinball Publishing is a creative publishing company located in Portland, Oregon. We are fueled by a love for print, collaboration, and the manufacture of meaningful things. Pinball powers a growing web of interconnected projects, including Scout Books, Bangback, and Print Pinball.
Bangback is a place for print. Here we share our own print projects as well as expanded coverage of print culture at large.
Print is dead. Long live print!
