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WHEN I WAS TEACHING CREATIVE THINKING and trying to give my students some incentive, I would often raise the question “What would a good student do? Right here. Right now.” to try to multiply a simple opportunity into a small miracle.
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LEAD GRAFFITI HAS CONDUCTED a number of workshops with the Delaware College of Art & Design, most often working with professor John Breakey, whose design class has recently taken our H.N. Werkman Creative Letterpress workshop.
A good friend, Casey Smith, was invited to deliver his ideas to the 2018 edition of RipperCon, a biennial conference of all things Jack the Ripper, held in Baltimore, April 7 - 8 and wanted a keepsake to accompany his talk.
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Ralph Begleiter was the director of a University of Delaware speaker series entitled "Global Agenda" that invited speakers to talk about a political theme. In 2005 it was called "Rx for the President." The final speaker that year was John Bolton. We don't remember the reason, but Bolton canceled. We suspect the controversy around his hiring was probably an element.
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We hated working for a client who came armed with a logo and an accompanying design manual dictating specific color options for both the logo and the corresponding background, how close images could occur to the logo, etc.
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How Ink Writes Poetry. Click the image to get the whole story first and then come back to this blog entry.
Ray has long been mesmerized by the idea of there being a Stephen Hawking, much less that there was a real Stephen Hawking. Many other things that just wander out of the darkness of his shelves of experiences and Stephen Hawking is one of them.
Read MoreJill and I joined in the Women's Marchwith several hundred thousand marchers in 2017 in Washington, DC. This year we joined with Indivisible local members in the protests in Philadelphia.
Read MoreMaybe we can't get Stephen Hawking, but we should be able to get someone who at least has won the Nobel Prize.
Read MoreOur good friend, Christine, came to the studio to do her holiday card. We loved it so much we asked if we could use it as the basis for our Lead Graffiti card.
Read MoreIt is always interesting to see what someone does when they come in without any notion of what it is that they want. Typically, we will decide among the participants as to colors. For this workshop, the colors were silver and teal.
Read MoreI stumble across printed samples and photos of some work that was part of my life back in my Visual Communications days. One of the perks that came from being a designer working for clients and doing a lot of printing work (and I tended to work with only 1 or 2 printers) was that I could leverage those printers into printing VC stuff for free.
If there was a creative moment that I personally started to think that the design program could have national recognition it was with this piece. It was the copy more than the design of the piece. The text which I wrote on the bus coming back from a New York field trip. This is where the idea of the review process to get into the program originated. The text reads...
In the beginning there are 60 sophomores.
They come as designers, illustrators
typographers and design consultants.
It was more difficult than they imagined.
These sophomores are still with us.
The 60 become 30.
Those that leave, leave for a number
of reasons: the work, the field,
the pressure, just to do something else.
Those that stay, stay for the same reasons.
These juniors are still with us.
The 30 become 15.
The reasons are still the same
but the reward becomes greater.
The excitement of the field becomes
a part of their work.
Finally they become the designers, illustrators,
typographers and design consultants they
thought they started as.
These are the seniors that have stayed.
Several people have complained about the calendars not being useful and that they should be more gridlike. I suspect they were talking about some of my more experimental months over the past several years.
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One of the participants did a "Fiddler on the Roof" typographic treatment in one of our H.N. Werkman Creative Letterpress workshops. Seemed like a strange theme at the time.
Read MoreJill and Deborah Arnold are working on a collaborative artists book about the Chesapeake Bay. In the photo above you can see them locking up the wood type that will overprint a 16" x 24" map of the Chesapeake which will form the base image of the text block.
Read MoreWe were commissioned by a group of students to create an edition of 6 clamshells for the Printmaking Club at the Anne Arundel Community College, just south of Baltimore.
Read MoreOver the past several years we’ve produced a number of clamshells for botanical artist MF Cardamone. Cardamone collects plant specimens and combines them with images and words that result in complex visual narratives that reveal the science, history, and beauty of her subjects.
Read MoreOne of the things we always say to say to students is that if they are interested in letterpress (or honestly just interested in design), they need to find real projects they can do for real people. This was one of those we could have just as easily not done.
Read MoreIt was the 1st of 2 Visual Communications fall semester field trips we took to New York City back in October of 1995. Saul Bass, a designer in the Art Directors Club of New York’s Hall of Fame, was the subject of a “Masters of Design” exhibition, part of a regular series SVA sponsored and on itinerary.
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The recent death of Nobel Prize winner, John Nash, reminded me of one of my favorite design projects and a beautiful evening. Bob Gill, one of my design heroes, said a good idea should be “Surprising. Original. Inevitable.” I think this idea for a poster promoting the event fits that rule quite nicely.
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We did an interesting coaster this past month to celebrate the American Revolution and the July 4th holiday that resulted from it. I had wondered how you might register a round coaster on the press.
Instead, I decided I would design one that didn’t need to be registered.
We had a photopolymer plate made of the word “revolution”, centered it in the coaster and printed it using only two registration pins. The idea was that I would never care how it was positioned. We did this for the July APA bundle. Fun and they make nice gifts today. We will use them at lunch at the Glass Kitchen today while working on our Tour de Lead Graffiti project.