Speed Reading

Publisher Quercus Books teamed up with the clever Italian design duo Matteo Civaschi and Gianmarco Milesi of H-57 to publish a book for people with short attention spans. Each true story is told in a series of witty pictograms, providing a snapshot on our world. With more than 200 stories, Life in Five Seconds cuts to the chase in order to keep you informed of world events, cultural icons, and famous people. But wait, there is more! You can download the free Quercus Eye app for Android, iPhone or tablet, and point it at some of the designated pages, and the story will spring to life faster than you can turn the page.


See more extracts from LiFS here.

Presidential Jell-o Shots

What's more American than jell-o except Presidential profiles in red and blue jell-o? Artist Henry Hargreaves recently released this infographic of Presidential portraits with red/blue indicators of their political divide. In addition to the red and blue colors of the Republicans and Democrats, the key also indicates that left-facing presidents served one term only (Obama is right-facing mind you), the smaller silver stars indicate they died in office and the jell-o splatters signal their assassination.
     If you are hosting an election night party, consider preparing one of these sort of presidential strawberry or blueberry gelatinous desserts to your guests. For a real crowd-pleaser, just add a little vodka or tequila to the mix and you've got jell-o shots for the entire crowd.
     Hargreaves may also be familiar to you as the character who created the blackletter Bacon Alphabet, and the amazing toasted icons—white bread portraits of the rich and famous. I smell a food theme here. Hmmm...jell-o shots with toasted blackletter crudites?
     Best way to learn more about Henry Hargreaves is to watch this space. A big hat tip to Cool Hunting for an earlier report on his story. Meanwhile, make your vote count today!   

The Silence Experiment

The difficulty of learning any new language is learning pronunciation. With all of the excessive silent letters, it is no easy task to wrangle words into sentences. In the English language, one can fairly admit there are a surplus of vowels that are wallflowers of a sort. They are present but seldom accounted for unless you are in a spelling bee. 

Well now, someone has visually demonstrated all of the matter that these silent but surplus letters visually make when printed in three different languages. In the project Silenc, developed for a recent Data Visualization course at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, students Manas Karambelkar, Momo Miyazaki and Kenneth A. Robertsen took on this challenge. They present a visual display of an interpretation of silent letters within Danish, English and French, and it is based upon the concept of find-and-replace. A database is constructed from hundreds of rules and exceptions, and an open source processing code then marks up the silent letters.

To visualize the collected data, it is displayed in different methods. In a graphic display, a common text written in 3 languages is created using the same fonts and style. All of the silent letters are then assembled at the bottom of the page as a measure of their enormity. In the book, the silent letters are all in red, and when viewing this with a red-filtered 3D lens, these letters disappear entirely. The results of these demonstrations are compelling. Just think of all the space, paper and ink we would save, by not printing or reading all of these surplus letters. Less is always more. 

Wrestling With Typographic Terms

Armin Vit served up this Nacho Libre type analogy a while back for round number one of Coudal Partner's Layer Tennis blog. Again, I'm late for the game match, but Vit's typographic wrestlers are worthy of a replay. Myself? I would have played the "justified horizontally" wrestler card next. Game over!
::From Layer Tennis via Wrong But Funny. 

A Mash-up of Chromolithography, Meat Extracts and MacArthur Fellows

No. 1: The artist composing the image in his studio.

No. 2: Extracting the limestone.

No. 3: The studio for lithographic reproduction. 

No. 4: Making press proofs.

No. 5: Printing the final large press sheets.

No. 6: The final trimming and collating of the cards.

The highly regarded German chemist, professor, and a founding father of organic chemistry, Justus von Liebig (1803-1873), invented a way to produce beef extract from carcasses (hmmm) as a cheap alternative to real meat. In 1865 he formed the Leibig Extract of Meat Company and like many businesses of the 19th century, he advertised his business with beautiful sets of trade cards. Nearly 2000 Liebig cards have been documented since the Liebig Company began issuing them around 1872. They continued to produce them for over 100 years on everything subject from famous Belgian scientists to masters of illusion, usually in sets made up of 6 cards. The earliest Liebig cards were printed using a method called chromolithography, and are prized among collectors for their fine quality of printing and design. 
       This set of 6 cards displayed above, from User Online, illustrate the actual production of chromolith printing of the day. The process of chromolithography was invented in the late 1790s, 40 years before the invention of photography, and it was an alterative to the woodcut or engraving process where you carve into the surface in order to create a relief image. Chromoliths, (sometimes referred to as chromos), are known as planographic prints, meaning the images and text were drawn on a flat, limestone surface with a greasy crayon and when it chemically treated, the drawn areas would attract ink and the stone would repel it. Each color represented a different stone and press run, so the task of producing this method of lithography was not only extremely labor intensive, but an art that few mastered. The subtle texture of each print comes from the irregular grain of the stone. Some of the finest printers were in Germany and France where much of the best quality limestone was mined.
       The set of 6 cards above illustrate the entire chromolithography printing process in consecutive order. In one corner of each card is a small infographic of ink colors next to a portrait of Mr. Liebig. Each card progressively adds 2 more colors resulting in a combination of 12 ink colors for the final portrait. The background on each has an illustration of the one step of the print process beginning with the first card of your average long-haired, pointey-beard artist at his drawing table. Next, in consecutive order, is the extraction of limestone (a nice word for mining); a factory of artists painting stones; making press proofs; the printing; and then the final trimming, collating and packaging. I regret that I could not find larger versions of this set of Liebig cards, but the Princeton University Library reported on a larger rez which I've included below. It is a German version of the same French card No. 4 you see above. Interestingly, they were probably printed at two different printing houses and you can see some dissimilarities in color and detail. The text at the bottom of the German version is also much nicer, which leads me to think it was likely the original or first edition. Granted these are at 2 different resolutions, but it does appear that German card has more definition and detail overall. 

Another version of card No. 4, but in German this time.
Below is a photo of 2 litho stones which I took this past summer at the wonderful Museum of Printing in N. Andover, MA. The people at the museum actually printed from the stone recently and you can see an example of it next to the original.   

Below you can see a 1907 Liebig card on Venezuela from Four Ages of Sand. A magnified portion of it displays the extraordinary detail and combination of colors in a typical Liebig color chromo. 

If you are interested in learning more about the stone lithography process, you must visit The Museum of Modern Art's site, The Printed Picture, hosted by noted author, former Dean of the Yale School of Art, photographer and MacArthur "genius grant" recipient, Richard Benson. In addition to a video on chromolithography, Benson has a total of 8 hours of videos there discussing every printing process from early Lumière autochromes, Japanese woodblock printing, wood engraving to printing processes such as the old piano roll. It is an incredible archive of material and extremely well-documented. His beautifully designed companion book to the MOMA site and a 2008 exhibit, The Printed Picture is one of the most comprehensive guides on printing processes I have ever seen and an essential resource for printers of all stripes. You can read a great book review of it by Jerry Kelly on AIGAs site.

As a side note, Richard Benson just happens to be the uncle of Newport, RI stonecarver, Nick Benson who is also a recent MacArthur fellow. For those not counting, that is two "Macs" in one family! Nick was honored with a "genius grant" just last Fall for his lettering and stone carving work. I reported on Nick last Winter here on Letterology and for AIGA's Voice series, and I had the wonderful honor of visiting him and his brilliantly talented father John Benson in their RI shop in July. John's father, John Howard Benson began the family stone carving business at The John Stevens Shop in 1927. He was an artist, calligrapher, teacher at the Rhode Island School of Design and author of The Elements of Lettering. At the time of my visit I learned of yet another talented Benson; Nick's brother, Christopher, who lives in New Mexico and is a very fine painter in his own right. He also designs and publishes some very fine-editioned portfolios of artists work at The Fisher Press. I found it hilarious that each one of the Bensons will independently claim the other is more talented than the next. They are a one-family art colony—the art gene runs very deep in that family! 

Origami Parade

These 3 origami balls were a gift from a very sweet Japanese friend named Yayoi Matsuda from Osaka. She made them all from text pages of Parade Magazine as they were the lightest weight paper she had on hand at the time. Each ball contains about 50 different folded pieces of paper. Her father taught her how to make them when she was a young girl. He told her that origami will keep your brain active and sharp and be a prevention against memory loss. Yayoi tried to teach me how to make a ball, but I was not a good student. Which may account for my poor memory. Yayoi has since returned to Japan years ago, but left me with this beautiful 3D step-by-step set of instructions which I treasure as much as the origami balls. 

Typographic Alchemy

It's no surprise that my student Joe of The Viatorium Press, discovered the brilliant work of Kristen Haff. He is a big fan of alchemic texts and typography and does his research. I am grateful for the introduction.

Kristen is a recent design graduate from the San Francisco Academy of Art and acquired her first job as a Junior Designer for Viking and Penguin imprints with the Penguin Group in New York City. Included in her portfolio of work is a series of four typography posters titled The Typographer's Stone which she produced several years ago as a school project. The assignment was to reinterpret the text from Robin Williams book, The Mac is Not a Typewriter and visually translate them into spreads. Kristen imagined Williams' text as a series of golden rules for any designer and was granted special permission to produce them as a set of posters for her assignment. Her teacher then suggested she treat them like sacred texts and to consider using different languages in order to give them a more cryptic feel. This inspired her approach of styling them after old alchemy diagrams which often contained vast amounts of information within elaborate structures. (The printers and designers of these old charts and diagrams were the original visual information designers). It is difficult for me to read and authenticate her presentation of the four different diagrams, however they are very beautiful visual displays of typographic hierarchy nonetheless. This is a very difficult and challenging exercise to distill such a vast topic as rules of typographic ettiquette into categories and hierarchies of information and I think Kristen did an amazing performance with visually displaying it all. If she were to revisit them again someday, she tells me she would like to give them each an aged, worn feel. I do hope she considers publishing them as posters or even a fold-out compendium of some kind as I suspect there would be a great deal of interest among information designers and typographers. Kristen has a very bright future ahead of her now in the publishing world and I look forward to seeing more of her book design work in the future. Below is a glimpse of her portfolio of student work.

Seven Fears of Childhood

What about clowns?
:: Via WackyStuff

A Love Target or Surveyor's Mark?

::Via Mr. Wacky Stuff.

Brit Lit

The New York Times reported in the most recent Sunday travel section on the literary town of Norwich England—a Getaway for Book Lovers. Included was an image and brief mention of the abandoned electrical plant which had been painted with the text of Sir Thomas More's 16th C Utopia. A further search directed me to British artist Rory Macbeth who painted the entire building's facade word for word. These are not short line lengths mind you. Each line of text appears to continually wrap around the entire building so the reader would have to circle round and round just to read it all. I'm sure he wasn't concerned with readability or optimal line lengths, but I have to wonder how many times he had to move his ladder while he painted the dang building. Note to self: visit Norwich someday.

Another interesting work of Macbeth's is his reinterpretation of the Bible. Using proprietary software he rearranges the Bible's text into alphabetical order and then printed it in an edition of 300. According to Michael over at Book Patrol, there are 313 exclamation marks, 56 uses of the word slaughters and 86 instances of the word ass. Who knew? This is also a great piece of data visualization that creates some nice text patterns.














::The above photo of Macbeth painting the building is by Sarah Morley.
::Other photos of Macbeth's Norwich is work from Daniel Weir's photostream.