Month: July 2009

The Shape of the Alphabet


The most intriguing piece at the Friends of Calligraphy show I saw recently was this one by Susan Skarsgard — unfortunately my photo didn’t turn out, this is only a partial image and it’s from Cari Ferraro’s blog (thank you very much Cari!). It’s 26 rectangles, arranged in 7 rows, and the signage says this is part of “26 of 26: An Edition of Twenty-six Alphabets.” My interest piqued, I scoured the web and found 2 more images plus an article about an exhibition that included the 26 prints.

Susan Skarsgard alphabetFrom the article by John Carlos Cantu:

In her gallery statement, Skarsgard says that the exhibit “is a kind of meditation on the alphabet as an object, much the same way that a musician/composer might invent a series of compositions based on a theme.”

“The familiar shapes of the alphabet,” she continues, “taken down to their elemental form and stripped of their meaning, have always been intriguing to me. Kind of like arranging the DNA of language and looking at it purely as shape and form.’

Susan Skarsgard alphabet

Ligatures

A Favorite DesignOne of the things I enjoy about teaching beginning letterpress is watching students discover the ligatures in the type case, especially the students with no graphic design background. (A ligature is a character or type combining two or more letters that would look too spaced out if printed separately, such as fl or fi.)
One of the prints I got as part of a printer’s swap earlier this year is A. Favorite’s ode to ligatures, on the left. It’s hard to see all the ligatures she’s blind stamped in the background but she has a card, below, that shows off the blind stamping and highlights those beautiful ligatures.
You can see more about what I like about teaching here.


A Favorite Design

The Making of a Mini Book: Part I

Spread from my ballet bookSeveral weeks ago, my friend Kate suggested that I try making a mini book (a 3.75″ x 2.5″ photo-book) on Lulu, the print on demand self-publishing site. At the time, I did a cursory look & thought the price ($3.99 for a 20 page book) might be cheaper than what I could make such a book for using the equipment in my studio (and probably much less aggravating). Printing photos or even color illustrations is always the biggest issue for me whenever I make a full-color book — the paper choices for my ink jet aren’t very nice (must be coated paper which doesn’t fold very well and the coating makes the paper too white for my taste, so it’s got to be covered completely with ink) and the ink is expensive. While I’ve made an uneasy peace with my ink jet, it can be very ornery — especially the times it sprays bits of black ink over parts of a page, rendering the output useless. So I’m always interested in new ways to print full color pages for my small editions (25-50 books).
Since Kate’s suggestion, I’ve framed a bit of an experiment. One of my first books was a very short story I wrote and illustrated about my first year of ballet class. The original version was 5″x7″ with thick Davey board covers, and a single pamphlet sewn signature. I used Mohawk Superfine Text, a nice cotton paper that isn’t coated but the results from printing my drawings and minimal text with the ink jet are tolerable. Recently someone in my ballet class reminded me of that book and asked to get a copy. I’ve had it on my never-ending to-do list to make a few and decided to use Lulu to print them (reformatted to the smaller 3.75″x2.5″ size). I’ll also make 2 by hand — one using coated paper and the other using Mohawk Superfine Text. I’ll compare the price to make each book as well as their look and feel.
That’s one of the spreads from the reformatted book, at the top of this post. I’ll report back in a few days about using Lulu.