A Pressing Issue

Cleaned and Polished

Slabwood

Finally finished off cleaning, sorting and polishing this font of wooden poster type. Such a delight when weeks of scrubbing off decades worth of ink finally comes out looking as buff as these do. I've got a bit of help now too, which means its not going to take months and months. I'm putting them up on flickr as we speak, so you can sort through them all properly.

Posted on September 24, 2007 in A Pressing Issue | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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Museum of Printing interiors

Inside1

Leading on again from the print museums newspaper article, I thought I'd post a few photo's I've taken there.

Handset

Handset2

Handset3

Leading

Plantin

Linomachine

Matrices

Monotypemats_2

Typeboxes

Wheel

I'd explain all of it, but I really need to put all of this on flickr first.

Posted on September 14, 2007 in A Pressing Issue | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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Museum write up!

Agemuseum

The Melbourne Museum of Printing got a write up in the age today, which was fantastic news. Found out about by coincidence, but I've had plenty of people calling up and telling me about it. Turned on my computer at work, went to the age to bludge abit, and lo and behold, some familiar faces popped up. The guy in the front is Michael, the curator, who has basically devoted his life to this museum, and has been a printing freak since he was nine. The bloke in the back is Laurie, an old dingo comp who knows more about typesetting than anyone. I'm abit pissy that I wasn't at the museum when the journo came, but such is life (thats what I get for taking a few weeks break from the museum).

I did conribute to the piece in a minor way though. I found and sorted the type that he's holding up. Its a beautiful font, but it has no indication of the name. I asked around on Typophile, and someone told me it was called Juniper, but I've had no other leads. Here's a printout for any typographic sleuths out there.

Postertype

Due to the article we had a grand total of ten visitors today, which is the busiest I've ever seen it, and while it could have been better, at least its a start. Heres the link to the article, and its in pdf for posterity's sake at the bottom of the post. Meanwhile, heres some of the type I was polishing all day. After spending two weeks with one brush and some turps, I found a new brush which brings them up to this most beautiful sheen. My wrist is killing me, but it was worth it.

1309type

1309brush

Download letter_for_letter.pdf

Edit: After sneakily finding Tobias Frere-Jones through the Design Observer group on Facebook (Which is just strange unto itself – the beauty of social networking is having conversational access to gods you just wouldn't – and shouldn't – be able to come across) and bugging him to identify the face for me, he kindly did so. He visited the museum once, alas before I was there; which is good considering I probably would have turned into a complete blathering mess at the sight of him. Anyway, it goes under the princely name of Modified Gothic. There's also a condensed version, which seems to be more prevalent than it's regular weighted cousin (brother? sibling?). Nick Sherman also pointed it out to me as well recently. He also pointed me the way to a sale of it on eBay, but not having a few hundred dollars, I couldn't get it. Which is a crying shame: it came with a lowercase!


Posted on September 14, 2007 in A Pressing Issue | | Comments (0)

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    Elsewhere

    • Twenty years fore and aft
      Twenty years from now is 2031. That year is not Utopia or Oblivion, it’s not made of sci-fi hologrammed tinsel; it’s just another year among many, and most of its working parts are already scattered around. Like any other year, it offers novelties, but also huge absences. 1991 had many thriving elements denied to 2031. Film cameras. Newspapers. Bookshops. Print magazines that were simply, entirely and utterly print. National analogue broadcast television networks. Young people.
    • The movie set that ate itself
      One of the twins admiringly touches my head. Before coming to wardrobe, I’d stopped in hair and makeup. My nape and temples are now shaved clean in an approximation of an old hairstyle called a half-box. All to help me blend in on the set. Only, from here on, I can no longer call it that. According to a glossary of forbidden terms posted right in front of me on the wall, the set is to be referred to as the Institute. Likewise, inside the Institute, there are no scenes, just experiments. No shooting, only documentation. And there is certainly no director. Instead, Ilya Khrzhanovsky, the man responsible for this madness, is to be referred to as the Head of the Institute or simply the Boss.
    • A critique on the critical
      Critical design cannot predict the future. Our ideas of the future are often less radical than the reality. Design however, can invent worlds giving us freedoms to explore various branches of reality. Speculative design is a dreamlike exercise – manufacturing alternate worlds, ones which feel every bit as real as the “real world” we inhabit day-to-day (whatever that is!). It cannot predict the future, but it can shape the present.
    • How algorithms shape our world
      And that’s the thing, is that we’re writing things, we’re writing these things that we can no longer read. And we’ve rendered something illegible. And we’ve lost the sense of what’s actually happening in this world that we’ve made. And we’re starting to make our way. There’s a company in Boston called Nanex, and they use math and magic and I don’t know what, and they reach in to all the market data and they find, actually sometimes, some of these algorithms. And when they find them they pull them out and they pin them to the wall like butterflies. And they do what we’ve always done when confronted with huge amounts of data that we don’t understand -- which is that they give them a name and a story. So this is one that they found, they called the Knife, the Carnival, the Boston Shuffler, Twilight.
    • Inside the mind of an octopus
      Another measure of intelligence: you can count neurons. The common octopus has about 130 million of them in its brain. A human has 100 billion. But this is where things get weird. Three-fifths of an octopus’s neurons are not in the brain; they’re in its arms. But new evidence suggests a breathtaking possibility. Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory and University of Washington researchers found that the skin of the cuttlefish Sepia officinalis, a color-changing cousin of octopuses, contains gene sequences usually expressed only in the light-sensing retina of the eye. In other words, cephalopods—octopuses, cuttlefish, and squid—may be able to see with their skin.
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      SF has changed over the span of time I am talking about — from the 1950s (the era of the development of nuclear power, jet airplanes, the space race, and the computer) to now. Speaking broadly, the techno-optimism of the Golden Age of SF has given way to fiction written in a generally darker, more skeptical and ambiguous tone. I myself have tended to write a lot about hackers — trickster archetypes who exploit the arcane capabilities of complex systems devised by faceless others. Believing we have all the technology we’ll ever need, we seek to draw attention to its destructive side effects. This seems foolish now that we find ourselves saddled with technologies like Japan’s ramshackle 1960s-vintage reactors at Fukushima when we have the possibility of clean nuclear fusion on the horizon. The imperative to develop new technologies and implement them on a heroic scale no longer seems like the childish preoccupation of a few nerds with slide rules. It’s the only way for the human race to escape from its current predicaments. Too bad we’ve forgotten how to do it.
    • The Elusive Big Idea
      And that’s just the point. In the past, we collected information not simply to know things. That was only the beginning. We also collected information to convert it into something larger than facts and ultimately more useful — into ideas that made sense of the information. We sought not just to apprehend the world but to truly comprehend it, which is the primary function of ideas. Great ideas explain the world and one another to us.
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    • Is 2011 a year that will change the world?
      For Mason, all this is also pretty clearly manifested in this year’s most iconic archetype: the tent community which springs up in the midst of the city, usually home to the flickering blue light of laptops and the incessant hubbub of intense conversation. “One thing that there has been in common between the Arab spring and the European and American events is this drive – which is almost pathological – to secure space, and live in it,” he says. “In one sense, it’s a meme … and I think it does satisfy a desire. Once you’ve lived and experienced this sort of spontaneous, communal, utopian sort of existence online, which is what you do if you’re a net-savvy young kid … well, put it this way: if you were to ask yourself, what is the real-world equivalent of being in a 200-strong World Of Warcraft horde? It’s probably sitting in a square, in a tent.” John Harris

    The Gentleman's Library

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