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Tag: craft

Centuries of Paper

Great Big Story visits the Richard de Bas paper mill, one of the few places in France where paper is still made by hand.

(via Kottke)

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The Last Punchcutter

last punchcutter

One for the letterpress obsessives and tool aficionados, The Last Punchcutter is a beautiful, wordless film capturing Giuseppe Brachino — who was the head of the engraving department of the Nebiolo Company from Turin — hand-cut a punch for metal type:

(via Coudal)

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Church of Type

church-of-type
Church of Type is the new letterpress studio in Santa Monica, California, of veteran designer and printmaker Kevin Bradley. In this lovely short film, Bradley talks about relocating to Los Angeles, typography, the printing press, and making things by hand:

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Mike Langley, Sign Painter

A rather lovely short film on sign painter Mike Langley by Dress Code:

(via I Love Typography)

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Flying Eye Books

The folks behind the amazing  Nobrow Press have just launched a childrens imprint called Flying Eye Books. Their first book is Welcome To Your Awesome Robot by Viviane Schwarz.

This short film created for the launch of the imprint was storyboarded and animated by Jambonbon (James D Wilson), using the original illustrations of Ben Newman. The music was composed by Lloyd Evans.

 

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Jamie Hewlett

A beautifully shot interview with British illustrator Jamie Hewlett:

It would be lovely to see Hewlett — co-creator of Tank Girl and Gorillaz (if you must) — draw some new full-length comics again.

(via Coudal)

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Something for the Weekend

Letter Cult’s epic selection of the best custom lettering of 2011 (don’t click on the link if you have things to do today — and this is only part one!). Pictured above ‘Drink Me Now, Forget Me Later…’ by Michael Spitz.

Rank Amateurs — Design critic Justin McGuirk reviews Home-Made Europe: Contemporary Folk Artifacts for The Guardian:

The makers’ motives are not always need or thrift; sometimes it’s pleasure or obstinacy, or serendipity – a road sign that happens to make a perfect tabletop. This kind of uncelebrated creativity brings to mind artist Jeremy Deller’s Folk Archive, which catalogues everything from protest banners to pizza kiosks. Deller has written a short foreword here, in which he makes a distinction between these objects and DIY, “a hobby that seems so pleased with itself”. The difference is that the DIYer seeks to emulate the professional, whereas these objects all share the nonchalance of the amateur.

Also in The Guardian, Anthony Quinn on cricket and the novel:

Sport in novels is seldom just sport. It’s a way of talking about something else – fellowship, ambition, jealousy, honour. With cricket it’s clearly a way of writing about failure. Lately we’ve been hearing a lot about players who, at the end of their careers, succumb to insecurity and depression; some cannot handle the post-career blues and choose to end it all. As David Frith’s excellent book Silence of the Heart (2001) made clear, cricket has the highest proportion of suicides in any sport. Why? It might be because it is, of all sports, the loneliest.

Repressed Energy — An interview with Daniel Clowes about The Art of Daniel Clowes: Modern Cartoonist at the A.V. Club:

I can look at my early work and see what a pained struggle it was to draw what I was drawing. I was trying so hard to get this specific look that was in my head, and always falling short. I could see the frustration in the lines, and I remember my hand being tensed and redrawing things a thousand times until I finally inked it, and just having this general tense anxiety about every drawing. I think that comes through in the artwork, and gives it this certain kind of manic energy, this kind of repressed energy, so you feel like it’s sort of bursting at the seams or something.

And finally…

Sara Goldsmith on the history of the paper clip at Slate magazine:

The paper clip we think of most readily is an elegant loop within a loop of springy steel wire. In 1899, a patent was issued to William Middlebrook for the design, not of the clip, but of the machinery that made it. He sold the patent to the American office-supply manufacturer Cushman & Denison, who trademarked it as the Gem clip, in 1904. Middlebrook’s rather beautiful patent drawing shows the clip not as an invention but as the outcome of an invention: the best solution to an old problem, using a new material and new manufacturing processes. Coiled in this form, the steel wire was pliant enough to open, allowing papers to nestle between its loops, but springy enough to press those papers back together. When the loops part too far from each other and the steel reaches its elastic limit, the clip breaks.

 

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Etsy Art & Craft | Off Book

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post about paper-cut artist Rob Ryan, here’s a short film about Etsy itself from PBS Arts Off Book:

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Rob Ryan: Beauty in the Everyday

London-based paper-cut artist Rob Ryan talks about his work and his recently released book A Sky Full of Kindness in this short film for to Etsy:

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Making Faces: Metal Type in the 21st Century

On the New York Times website Steven Heller reviews Making Faces: Metal Type in the 21st Century, a documentary film by Richard Kegler, founder of the P22 Foundry. The film features the work of the late Jim Rimmer, a prolific Canadian typeface designer, who died last year:

Rimmer had a fruitful career, producing a huge number of fonts, but for Kegler, the most exciting part of making this film was discovering Rimmer’s “unabashed joy in doing what he was meant to do,” he says. “He was multitalented, and he was able to do what he loved most in ‘retirement,’ which may have been the most prolific period of his life. He was generous with his time in way that I could never be.”

Rimmer was made a fellow of the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada in 2007.

 

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The Bookbinder | Made in Toronto

A lovely short film about bookbinder Don Taylor made by Tate Young and Ian Daffern for the new online daily Toronto Standard:

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Penguin Threads Deluxe Classics | Jillian Tamaki

Award-winning Canadian illustrator and cartoonist Jillian Tamaki (Gilded Lilies, Skim and Indoor Voice*) has embroidered (embroidered!) three beautiful cover designs for a new classics series Penguin Threads to be released this Fall. They are all breathtaking.

There are more details and images of the designs on Jillian’s blog.

*Disclosure: Indoor Voice is published by Drawn & Quarterly and distributed by my employer Raincoast Books.

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