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If the folks promoting Bruno got their use of print in advertising wrong, then designers Tom Wrigglesworth and Matt Robinson got it very right. Tom describes the promo piece on his website in very succinct terms:
HP – invent
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Brief: Present an idea which promotes HP Workstations ability to bring to life anything the creative mind can conceive.Response: Focusing on the synchronisation of a range of HP products, printers become an orchestra in an aesthetic symphony conducted by HP Workstations.
Filmed, directed and edited by Tom Wrigglesworth and Matt Robinson
Music © Round Table Knights
To further market the marketing project they relied the prints made in the project (see below); now that’s recycling. Although it hardly seems to been worth the bother since the video has gone viral.
The individual frames in the animation were reprinted with information directing people to the online video and encouraging them to find their individual frame within the animation. These would then be distributed within creative networks such as design magazine inserts.
What a smart and fun video; it’s enough to make me rethink my brand loyalty to Epson.
Via our friends at notcot.
Plastique* a small jewelry concern with an esty shop has designed some very snappy laser-cut items for the inspired designer.
Thanks to Fubiz for the inspiring find.
On a recent visit to the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, we were lucky enough to be able to attend the thesis exhibition of students concentrating in print. The Central Academy is considered by many to be the top art schools in China and boasts many notable famous alumni though it’s history. Recently relocated to a new campus recently (most likely fueled by the recent market boom in Chinese contemporary art). The school has a beautiful campus composed of somber modern buildings built out of graphite grey brick, and boasts a great new museum designed by Japanese architect Arata Isozaki. The photos in this posting will focus mainly on interesting student from the exhibition.
What would a trip to an art school be without a giant Transformer-style robot sculpture?
The print work was in the basement gallery (some things never change). The gallery itself was huge and broken up into smaller spaces like the one above by divider walls. The exhibition contained the thesis work by dozens of artists. Far too many to display here, the work selected for this posting represent only a handful of work that caught my eye as we cruised through the exciting exhibition.
More specifically, an end to printing the Southern Graphics Council’s near-quarterly newsletter Graphic Impressions. From this point forward Graphic Impressions, now under the able editorship of Erika Adams, will be available only as an electronic document in pdf format.
Does this mean printmakers will have to purchase Kindles to keep up?
In his Letter from the President, Joe Lupo, makes a case for the change from print to virtual.
This newsletter marks another change in the course of the future of the SGC. This year, with the help of our new editor Erika Adams, we will publish our last “real”newsletter. Instead of printing three newsletters on paper a year, we will offer three PDF format newsletters. There are obvious benefits here. First is money, we will be saving a serious amount of money by eliminating postage and printing costs. The second benefit is availability. It is our hope to create an SGC Newsletter Archive attached to the newly designed website coming soon.
He goes on to unveil plans for an annual SGC journal.
The last reason we are making this change is so we can begin the process of editing the first issue of the SGC Journal. It has been a goal of the Executive Board to change the newsletter into a journal for some time. … Our hope is to create an annual journal that would be curated from a variety of papers submitted throughout the year. We want this journal to hold up to academic standards and be a major benefit for SGC Members.
The idea of a new print journal is a compelling one. I vote that this new publication doesn’t merely attempt to be a more print-centric Art Journal, but goes further to consider the ways an annual publication might model interesting print as well as write about it. Publications like Parkett, The Thing Quarterly and Esopus Magazine are good examples of how one doesn’t need to just write about critical theory –they can create it in print. And who better to do that than SGC International?
BTW, the newsletter contains the usual bits, including strong and interesting essays by print world notables David Jones, Phyllis McGibbon and Beauvais Lyons. Anyone interested in submitting articles about “artists, shows, books, blogs, websites and your own ideas relating to print media” to the new digital version of Graphic Impressions are invited to contact Erika Adams via the SGC website.
Having just returned from China, this will be the first of several posts on the some of the printeresting things seen while traveling. I should say that I didn’t attend the Sanbao International Printmaking Symposium and tour in Jingdezhen organized in part by Minna Resnick and Jackson Li, so I won’t be making any reports on the wonders that group may have seen (if anyone on that trip would like to post here please email me).
The observations and photographs in this post are meant to convey a few observations of how printed matter fits into everyday life in China.
Branded fruits! I’m sure this coming to a super market near you soon.
I should add at this point in my education I can only read the most basic Chinese characters and have no idea what’s written on these fruits (any translations from our readers are most welcome).
The media buzz about China often starts with some statement about how the country is building a 21st century infastructure, well you can add their print infastructure to the list of great leaps forward fueled by the ascendent Chinese economy. Walking the streets of Beijing and Shanghai one can’t help but think that there isn’t a problem that can’t be solved with a large vinyl banner, billboard or sticker. Like many technological leap-frogs the local sign industry seems to have moved past screen printing or any US-style nostalgia for hand-painted signs.
“Wake up, Andy Warhol!” was the name of a exhibition of designers riffing on the tropes of … well.. Andy Warhol. The exhibition took place at SSamziegil, a popular bohemian shopping area in Isadong, Seoul, South Korea. The LA-based design collective Poketo! created the bags above as a facsimile of a facsimile work from the exhibit. The bags were made in limited edition and can be found at their site here. As Rueben Miller questions on his art/design blog, “When ‘real’ is mimicked so much that ‘fake’ is as common as ‘real’, then what would you rather have – ‘real’ or ‘fake’? Think about it.” The work certainly does raise some funny questions about authenticity and the multiple. You can see pictures from the exhibition here.
Borja Bonaque is a designer and illustrator living in Valencia, Spain. Amongst the many projects seen on this portfolio site are these skateboards. The designs are compelling and like most of Borja’s work these seem more than a little informed by print language. This touches on a trend I’m seeing all over the place, design work that mimics hand-made printmaking language.
Windell Oskay, Lenore Edman and Chris Brookfield constitute the Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, a collective of .. well, mad scientists who make some very cool stuff. In keeping to their open source code, they make their inventions available to the larger public via their website and flikr slide shows. In 2007 they started working on a DIY 3D printer that used sugar to make some the greatest rock candy the world has ever known.
Candyfab 4000, top of the line 3D sugar printer, circa 2007
It’s always best to test on white bread first.
The updated CandyFab 6000 now in Beta testing.
While it may look like some new superior form of breakfast cereal, the geometry above is made entirely out of sugar. Yummers!
Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories has also cranked some other printeresting project in the past. Here is just a sampling.
DIY stickers for organic farmers.
And the classic “Don’t Fear Art” bumper sticker.
The image above comes to us from The Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum an amazing treasure trove of wooden type and letterpress goodies. If you have any intention of getting work done today – do not go to their site. The actual image is a print they recently pulled.. well, I’ll just let them tell it:
This is the first-ever printing of an 1893 plaque that Hamilton made for the Columbia Exposition in Chicago. It features 48 different wood fonts, measures 51″ x 22″ and boasts the smallest wood type ever made. The plaque is the only known copy that exists and needed to be printed without getting ink on it. After experimenting with various offsetting techniques we settled on shrinkable window film as a barrier and printed through it. It gives a bit of a ghostly effect but the posters are really handsome and we are able to preserve and share this treasure of typography.
Here’s a picture of the plaque on the press bed. It’s a pretty great project. The museum is built in the old Hamilton type factory and is “a fully functional workshop and educational venue. In addition to its massive collection of 19th, 20th and soon-to-be-added 21st Century wood type, the museum also illustrates antique printing technologies including the production of hot metal type, hand operated printing presses, tools of the craft and rare type specimen catalogs”.
The next time I’m in Two Rivers, Wisconsin I know where I’m going for my printing fix.
One can’t look at one online type museum without sizing up the competition, in this case.. the great photo of the wooden type (above) was taken from the spash page of Unicorn Graphics online Wood Type Museum. The site has a great collection of type and a fairly user-friendly interface. And if you get bored you can click on over to their Museum of Creative Calendar Design. With such a love of type and design I may need to keep them in mind for my next odd mass-produced printing project.
I have to thank the modern type foundry Hoefler &Frere-Jones for these great links.
Frédéric Coché is an elusive european artist whose work employs finely drawn etchings that look like they sprung from the mind of James Ensor after a bit too much absynthe. You can see the cover to the book , Hortus Sanitas, above (published by Fremok and available here and here). This format is typical to the 2-3 volumes of Coché’s work that are available; it’s a sequential narrative constructed out of line etchings with a layout like a graphic novel.
The image above is a sample page from Hortus Sanitus. Trying to track down any information on Coché requires some serious internet digging (mostly because one has to slip-out of the english-only inter-web). I did find an interesting write-up on him in Stripburger, “the only Slovene comic magazine covering news in comics, theories on comics and works of Slovene and foreign comic authors (there have been 36 numbers released yet)”:
Frédéric Coché, born in the last century in a small metallurgic village in Lorraine, nearby Jeanne d’Arc’s birth village Donrémy. After that, he studied comix in Brussels, and later got his degree at Nancy’s art school. He’s published several short stories in Frigobox, and Hortus Sanitatis by the same publisher. Some may say that he’s the author of an anonymous pornographical treatise called Ars simia Naturae. For the moment he’s working on an one hundred and fifty pages treatise about life and war wich might be called Vie et Mort du Héros triomphante.
More images and information after the jump.
