Each year in early September, Portland becomes a frenzied city of festivals and events. PICA’s Time Based Arts Festival happens concurrently with MusicFest Northwest, leaving Portlanders culturally stimulated and sleep-deprived. The city comes to life with performances, gallery shows, dance parties and live music.

This year, a celebration of the print that broadcasts these events will be part of the fun.

In conjunction with MusicFest Northwest, the ever-prolific Mike King will present Poster Mart, a rock poster show and sale. Fans and makers of gig posters are surely familiar with Mike King, designer and screen printer, as a pioneer in the world of music poster design.

We interviewed him on Bangback about a year ago, learning about his decades-long creative practice. This time he’s stepping into the role of curator, bringing together the best gig poster designers and printmakers to one place.

The Poster Mart will take place at the Jupiter Hotel in Portland on Saturday, September 10. From noon to 10pm, a spread of talented print people will show and sell their goods. Vendors will include Casey Burns, Guy Burwell, Landland, Keegan Onefoot and Furturtle Show Prints, among others.

Pinball printed up these special-edition posters, featuring metallic silver ink and a bright orange Pantone on French Paper. While Mike King’s experimental illustration style is ordinarily brought to life via screen printing, this artwork translated brilliantly to offset printing.

Get yourself to Poster Mart, Portlanders! The rest of you? Plan for next year, we suspect this might be an annual thing.

A trio of wonderfully Portland things: APAK!, Little Otsu, and Reading Frenzy.

And lucky for all of us (residing here in PDX or passing through), the month of August will combine the three in a triumphant line-up of events.

Tonight, there will be an art show opening at Reading Frenzy featuring APAK and Martine Workman, both long-time collaborators with Little Otsu. And all month long, Reading Frenzy will be hosting a special Pop-Up Shop for Little Otsu. The shop will include all five issues of the ongoing Living Things Series (the fifth, just released, is by Apak!), along with a plethora of wonderful journals, diaries, art prints and cards all published by LO. It will be charming and lovely. You should go.

More about the Living Series after the break!

Item: Saddle Stitched Booklet
Printing: Full Color Covers, Single color Interiors
Printing by: 1984 Printing
Dimensions: 5.875″ x 9″
Paper: 100% Post-consumer recycled paper
Available: $6.95 for one (special deals here for ordering more than one from the series)

Great Gatsby Business Card Print

For Print Only (FPO) is a division of Underconsideration that aims to showcase the most compelling work being designed and produced for print. By doing so, they also celebrate the (not-always-so) simple truth that print is alive and kicking. This year they launched their first ever FPO print awards, and we love the chance to see all the beautiful work being honored in the process.

The grand prize went to the Great Gatsby letterpress poster designed by The Heads of State. Inspired by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s who’s who list of the jazz age, Jason Kernevich and Dustin Summers decided to produce an imagined catalog of all the business and personal cards for the VIPs that attended Gatsby’s parties. The result is a stunning array of forty-eight beautifully designed and printed calling cards. Each one unique, clever, and evocative of the glamourous “roaring twenties” era.

Item: Poster
Printing: 4-color letterpress
Printing by: Studio on Fire
Dimensions: 18″ x 24″
Paper: 20pt. 140 lb French Poptone Sweet Tooth
Available: $60, Hand signed and sealed from The Heads of State

Naturally. A Perfect Fit.

Quality Garments are the specialty of Portland, Oregon based clothing line Bridge & Burn. Founded in 2009, and inspired by its Pacific Northwest environs, their outwear and shirting designs are simply gorgeous. Well-tailored, and functionally stylish, the line offers men’s and women’s options that work well for work, play, and heading out. Pinball had the pleasure to print the hangtags for Bridge & Burn earlier this year, and I for one, love the pairing of chipboard, nicely-set type and this handsome plaid in their product shot. The back of the tag has space for the specifics about the clothing item, and a helpful directive to “Never Look Back.”

Item: Hangtag
Printing: 1-color offset
Printing by: Pinball Publishing
Dimensions: 2″ x 3″
Paper: 20pt. Chipboard
Available: Online & select stores, with the purchase of a shirt or jacket.

Collaborating is a Portland Mantra, and true to its origins, Bridge & Burn has partnered this year with photographer Randall Garcia on his 52 Weeks Project. Each week he uses his grandfather’s camera (a 1962 Mamiya C3) to capture portraits of really lovely-looking people wearing really lovely Bridge & Burn jackets. The rules are one photographer, one designer, one camera, 52 models, and 52 weeks. The results are beautiful.

A beautiful whale print to benefit WNYC's Radiolab, by Always with Honor.

A team of five designers, illustrators and artists have created a set of limited edition artwork to benefit WNYC’s Radiolab. Curated by Jez Burrows, In Radio Lab We Trust is a set of five Gocco printed pieces available in an edition of 100. Seemingly intangible audio content comes alive and becomes physical in these beautiful two-color prints. All proceeds, after production costs, will benefit Radiolab, the radio show that fosters curiosity and operates at the intersection of science, psychology and the human experience.

Participating artists include Always With Honor, Richard Perez, Jim Datz, Lab Partners and Jessica Hische, each of whom created an image inspired by a specific episode of Radiolab. Each print is a B5 print (roughly 7″x10″) and the set of five comes packaged in a special spot-printed packing paper. They’re available online, but hurry! The edition is limited to 100 pieces.

Joel Speasmaker is Forest, a Brooklyn-based studio with a varied portfolio of design work. His series of small books (aptly titled The Small Book series) recently caught my eye.

The set of simple booklets each approaches a different topic with a different visual approach, but remain united through their use of materials and format. Titles include Spirit Figures, On Symbolism, Abstractions, and Collections, each printed on French Poptone paper that evokes archetypal pastel photocopy paper from the cornerstore copy shop.

Sets one and two of the Small Books series is unfortunately sold out, though we can hope a new title is on its way. In the meantime, drool over these out-of-stock titles and peruse Joel’s stellar design portfolio. See below for more images.

Death Magazine #3: The Sex Issue

You might remember Death Magazine from our interview with editor Forrest Martin late last year. The third issue became available last week, and if the idea of a publication about death made you squeamish, get ready for a double dose. Death Magazine #3 is the Sex Issue, which, in Forrest’s words, “means sexy and/or deathy content from a variety of artists, in literal and figurative ways.”

This issue features cover artwork by Creativity Explored artist John Patrick McKenzie, made specially for the issue. Contributors include Slava Mogutin, Joel Gibb (The Hidden Cameras), Anna Huff (Anna Oxygen/Cloud Eye Control), Chris Hornbecker, Sara Marcus (Girls to the Front), David Neevel, and Clark Goolsby.

And as is expected from a contemporary paper publication, Death has a fantastic (albeit kind of eerie) update to their website to accompany the latest issue. Get your copy here, and be sure to poke around the new site.

Death Magazine, Issues #1, #2 and #3

Item: Death Magazine, Issue #3
Editor: Forrest Martin
Printing: Print-on-demand, digital offset
Printer: Magcloud
Page count: 40 pages
Dimensions: 8.25″ x 10.75″
Finishing: Perfect bound
Available: $11, Online (e-version free with purchase of print magazine)

Ink and paper lend themselves to fundraising efforts.

In the week since the devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan, we’ve seen a number of print items pop up across the internet as fundraising tools. Proceeds benefit a variety of humanitarian organizations, and formats range from art prints to oversized posters to pocket notebooks. Print is stepping into a role as a fundraising tool; though not a new role, it is an interesting one to consider.

Help Japan Poster from Weiden+Kennedy Studio, designed by Max Erdenberger

This Help Japan print from Weiden+Kennedy studio embodies the designer’s response to the Japan earthquake and tsunami.”We felt a helplessness that compelled us to do something,” reads the W+K Goodness website, “[and so] we quickly designed this poster.” A week later it has made its way around the internet and is reputed to have raised tens of thousands of dollars for the American Red Cross.

In addition to overwhelming enthusiasm (and subsequent financial support) for the beauty of Japan relief ephemera, we’ve also seen a fair amount of criticism surrounding the role of print in the quest to raise funds for disaster relief.

This poster, designed by Signalnoise, has raised $7250 for the Canadian Red Cross. It is also the subject of a critical blog post about the role of design in the Japan disaster.

John Pavlus for Fast Company questions whether purchasing a poster is really the most appropriate response to international disaster in this blog post. What does one do with their Japan relief poster once it arrives in the mail, he asks, and is commerce-driven support the best we can do?

Does a tangible graphic item increase the amount of donations? Does a beautifully designed piece of print make it more likely that you’ll give your financial support to the relief efforts? We hope so.

Buy a Scout Book three-pack, support Mercy Corps' relief efforts in Japan.

We wanted to help, and so we did what we do best: print. The resulting Japan Relief Scout Book is available for purchase in the Scout Books shop, with 100% of profits benefitting Mercy Corps, a Portland-based humanitarian aid organization.

My stance on this whole debate? The most important thing is that funds and attention are going to relief efforts for people who need it right now. If print can help drive funds to important relief efforts, then print it shall be!

“The people serving you coffee today come from a movement, not a company.”

So reads the first line of the Coffee Common Scout Book, just one branded piece of the Coffee Common movement that debuted yesterday at the 2011 TED conference in Long Beach, California.

All week long, an all-star cast of baristas will be serving up specially curated roasts of coffee from their myriad roasteries to lucky TED attendees. They assemble in Long Beach under the name Coffee Common, the latest incarnation of the newly-launched Common Brand.

Common what? Sure, it can be confusing. Here’s a short primer:

Common was launched on January 31, 2011 in Boulder, Colorado, the collaborative brainchild of Alex Bogusky, Rob Schuham and John Bielenberg. It purports itself to be an instrument of a new capitalism, furthering a shift from competition in business to collaboration; Common is one part community, one part rapid business prototyper, and one part collaborative brand. “We’re confident that benefitting people, communities, society, the environment and future generations is the new advantage in business,” states Common.

Coffee Common is this collaborative ethos in practice: “A diverse group of roasters and baristas…have gathered together as a community to proselytize the simple truths around coffee,” reads the new coffeecommon.com. These coffee experts come from top roasters like Stumptown, Intellegentsia, Ritual and Counter Culture, and together are working to elevate public understanding of their craft.

Enter Scout Books.

These pocket-sized books serve as an introduction to the Coffee Common concept, and do double duty as a communication vessel and an interactive tool for keeping track of favorite coffees. Bold declarations live alongside space for tasting notes and illustrated instructions for home brewing.

Coffee tips round out the book’s 32 interior pages, with short introductions to Coffee Common, the Common brand, and the roasters and baristas participating this week at TED.

We love Coffee Common’s use of the Scout Book as a communication tool. They used the intimate, pocket-sized format to share information with a broad network of consumers, getting their brand into the hands—literally—of interested people.

These books prove that print is still an important part of a brand’s communication tactics. Tangible is powerful.

The Coffee Common brand and collateral was designed by Brian W. Jones, Coffee Common’s excellent graphic designer and editor of Dear Coffee I Love You, a popular blog dedicated to (you guessed it) a love for the intersection of coffee and design.

So, if you’re at the TED conference this week, get yourself to the Coffee Common HQ and indulge in a pour-over cup of Stumptown’s select roast from Loja, Ecuador, or one of the many other curated roasts from Coffee Common’s expert team. Nab yourself a Scout Book to keep track.

If you’re not at TED this week, you can follow along with Common Coffee’s exploits on their Twitter, or at their content-rich blog at coffeecommon.com

Thank you to Brian W. Jones for all of these beautiful images!

Chipboard, spot colors and perfect binding. Yes, please.

RRR.002 is the second edition of a collaborative zine featuring the talents of an international group of makers including Pinball friends and collaborators. This edition is printed in full-color CMYK as well as one spot color, and features a chipboard cover and perfect binding. Made possible by support from Simple Shoes, RRR.002 was printed on recycled paper by Canada’s Westcan Printing Group.

From the RRR website:

We make waste for a living. So now we’re gonna make waste live. With a very short deadline a number of international artists and photographers were asked to act and respond. Look around your environment, see what you can save, pick it up, turn it over, and look at it in a different way.

RRR describes the work in the second edition as being a bit more personal, offering a more intimate view of the artists included. The group of collaborators has grown exponentially. Can’t wait to get our hands on this one!

Title: RRR.002
Artists: Multiple
Dimensions: 6″ x 9″
Printing method: Offset, CMYK and spot
Printer: Westcan Printing Group
Paper: Uncoated, recycled
Finishing: Perfect binding, trimming
Edition: 3000
Available: Online, $10

Spot color printing can have a big, bold impact.

Full color, CMYK, uncoated paper.

Featuring work from the best of the best.