Field Trip! Jim Horton’s Letterpress Studio
Posted by: Christine Golus
This week a few of us had the opportunity to visit Jim Horton’s letterpress studio located just west of Ann Arbor on Waters Road.
Paper Cuts Part 3: Mormons, eskimo, and girlies
Posted by: Rie Yamaoka
I went to the Vintage Paper Show in San Francisco this past weekend. Talk about indexing by hand! There were many booths selling old postcards starting at 25 cents each, and some vendors specialized in certain topics, such as “death related” and “dozens of babies” (only postcards with a bunch of babies on them).
Renegade Craft Fair in San Francisco
Posted by: Rie Yamaoka
Going to the Renegade Craft Fair reminded me that graphic design can be a very hands on activity. There were many booths selling tea towels and stationery made by letterpress and silk screen, each by hand, with an overwhelming percentage of birds, trees, and flower motifs.
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There were also several booths selling silk screened posters, but one booth was a head above the rest and I recognized his work right away: Jason Munn, a graphic designer whose work on album posters like Death Cab for Cutie and Sonic Youth remind me of the work of one of my favorite designers, Saul Bass.
Shopping the good old way
Posted by: Rie Yamaoka
Here at Q, we discussed the concept of Collaborative Consumption, and how consumers are using network technologies to share and exchange goods and services like car sharing (Zipcar) and social lending (Zopa).
Then you have the good old outdoor antiques fair, where wares are not searchable or categorized, just THERE. And you have to spend hours finding the good stuff.
TechnoCRAFT @ YBCA
Posted by: Rie Yamaoka
Are designers control freaks? We want to control the typography as much as IE will allow, and grimace at a single misplaced pixel on our website, because those small things are what make things "work" in our eyes.
But an exhibition at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco called TechnoCRAFT reminded me that we can all throw that notion out the window in the age of DIY and the vast availability of tools out there that sometimes make design an open platform for something that’s anything but nice and pretty.
Top 5 Things I’ve Learned about Being a Designer from Kids
Posted by: Alissa Ampezzan
As most of you know (I think), I spent the last three months working from our partner office in Wiesbaden, Germany, soaking up their atmosphere and traveling as much as possible. But maybe you didn’t know that during that time, I also spent some time in the USA. Well, technically. I was volunteering with the USO at the Army base in Wiesbaden, which is like being on a little American island in the midst of a German city. I ran a weekly arts and crafts group for soldiers’ kids and it was a blast. A huge challenge, but really rewarding.
I don’t have a lot of small children in my life so it was definitely a learning experience, not only in how to handle 15 energy-filled kids, but also I got a close look at their way of making things. I reflected a lot on my own design processes and how I could benefit from a more childlike approach.
The top 5 things I learned from 6-10 year-olds about being a designer after the jump.
Paper Cuts Part 2: “Between the Folds” screening in San Francisco
Posted by: Rie Yamaoka
A couple of weeks ago I went to the San Francisco premiere of "Between the Folds", a documentary about the art and science of origami.
Paper Cuts Part I
Posted by: Rie Yamaoka
As designers, we love paper; we lovingly finger paper swatches to find the right paper for a print project, and when we get the final print piece in our hands, we turn it upside down, inside out, and just touch it. (Of course) we do everything digitally and a lot of our work is web-based, but pen and paper still has its place.
Note-taking requires happy notebooks.
Archive of the precursor to the blog: a notebook diary that was passed on between a friend daily, in elementary school.
We probably had about 24 notebooks for the school year.
Each entry contains urgent thoughts, color-coded exclamations, and a serial manga that left one hanging
until the notebook came back.
