From Top Left Clockwise: Loves Me/Loves Me Not, Mini Love Blind, The Girls, Mini Sweetheart Note Set

Varied in style and sentiment, there will be an occasion where one of these is going to work in your favor!

From Top Left Clockwise: Mini Shadows Of Love, Mini Mittens, The Ol’ Ball And Chain, Love Blind Heart

From Top Left Clockwise:  Figures Of Love, BIG Feeling, Mini Heart, Shot Through The Heart

Guess where they’re being sold?  Only in our BRAND SPANKING NEW STORE!  Where you can buy ephemera for all manner of occasions, here look:

Cards, All Sorts

So there it is, check out the store and buy some cards for your loved ones, or not so loved ones.

New York Writes Itself (NYWI) is an amorphous creative production where the inspiration is created not by one person, rather an entire city of potential scribes. Overheard conversations, glimpsed interactions or in-your-face encounters all form the ever growing script. A scribe is described by NYWI as “observational and in touch with the people of New York”, it can be ANYONE in short, and these recorded moments are simply submitted by logging on to the NYWI site and filling out a form.

The show we are in is called New York Types and is a celebration of NYC Letterpress community and the people of NYC. This particular chapter of the NYWI production serves as an ideal description of what NYWI is all about; the spoken word or observed daily life experience of a fellow New Yorker forming the impetus for creativity in whatever form it may take, in this case amazing letterpress posters.

Given the opportunity to be a part of this, we jumped at the chance to give life to the individual voices and views of the city and life in New York. Each Swayspacer created a poster based on selected scripts from NYWI and each designer put his/her own spin on the script creating what is an exciting and colorful addition to the show.

Here’s Willy, crankin’ out some posters:

In addition to the ten editions of posters, we also produced a large scale group poster to which we each contributed drawings.

You can see the full posters at the show, which opens Dec 15 at the Art Director’s Club in New York. More info about the project is here, and you can RSVP for the event here. The pieces are also available for purchase on the NYWI website.

See you there!

But as we all know, camping is not just the fun and games of birch blanket bingo. We need to have some practical knowledge. In our recent partnership with Alite we designed and letterpress printed some beautiful booklets cum posters that are portable enough to go in your pocket and beautiful enough to go on your wall. Our focus for this first pamphlet is knots: sexy and practical. Hopefully this is the first in a series of survival pamphlets for the person who wants to experience nature, but with the elegance and comfort of the city.

We took some of the lessons that we learned printing the Feltron report with its large plates and tried to have a little bit of fun with the poster. Which means we pushed the design to the edge of our printable surfaces and sometimes even over the edge of our bases! We tried to give the booklet a classic feel with the font style and with our color choices of  rusted red and brass.

so if you want to pick up one of these awesome, limited edition posters, come on down to the Alite pop-up store this evening at 6 at Eastern Mountain Sports. I mean you never know when you’ll have to lift a tree with a rope and go to fancy dress dinner in the same night!

This has been a great opportunity for us to peruse our archives for some of our favorite commercial work like the 2009 Feltron Annual Report as well as the kind of interesting printed ephemera that we’re always producing.

The invitation we designed and printed for the opening:

A sneak peak of what we’ll have on display:

Here’s how this came about:

Over the past winter and spring we hosted a group of Parsons fashion design students as part of The Art of Craftsmanship Revisited: New York. Andres, Chi, Payal, Sherman, and Sooji of the team Half-Broken Things spent many hours in the Swayspace printshop absorbing many fine points about letterpress printing. These lessons informed their final project, a dress and short film.

The 2009 Report began about a year and a half ago, when Nicholas asked us to print the business card-like invitations to participate in his annual report. They were printed on duplexed two color paper and individually numbered with a numbering machine.

By the end of January 2010 Nicholas had compiled his data and designed the 2009 Report. We wrote a preview blog post earlier about our initial tests for printing the report, and we were all excited about the results of that initial meeting.

Dan prepared the files for plates and uploaded them to Boxcar Press…

…who sent us 16 plates and proofs.

Then the paper came.

It was a lot of paper.

The report is a 16 page booklet made of four spreads saddle sewn together. Each spread was double sided, and each side has two colors. Over two thousand copies of the book were printed. That means that over 8,000 pieces of paper were run through our Vandercook SP-20 four times each. That’s over 32,000 turns of the Vandercook handle…manually.

We were, however, very game for the challenge and leapt right in, beginning with the grey plates.

Julia completing 1 of 32,000+ handle turns

We printed all eight of the grey plates first.

We then moved on to the yellow plates, starting with the cover.

Printing is fun!

John inking up the rollers.

Each chunk of paper in these stacks is about 200 sheets of paper.

Emma and Ben adding packing under the plates.

Kenzan setting up to print.

Dan checking the color and ink levels as he prints.

Following the yellow, the red plates were printed.

Nick himself stopped by to check out the red and even print a few.

The last color we printed was the blue.

The paper just after it’s come off the plate.

Ready to head to the binder!

This is a shot of all the pages cut and spliced together as they appear in the book.

After shipping the report to NB Bookbinding for sewing and trimming, we proceeded to print the stickers. These were a lot of fun to print since they were done in all the colors used for the report, 100 each. Maybe it’s just that 100 seems like a drop in the ocean compared to 32,000.

The final reports received from the binder!

The finished product.

All in all, it was a great experience, and we’re honored Nick decided to involve us in the project. Everyone learned a lot about handing a project of this magnitude. A special thanks goes to all the printers who took the time to help out and sacrificed weekends and late nights to the cause; we definitely couldn’t have done it without you!

….and now for a nap…

A four-color, sixteen page (four double-sided sheets), 8″x10″ booklet is no small order for letterpress printing. At the beginning of this week, we started running some proofs on the press; we were testing color, pressure, registration and checking for areas we might have some trouble with. Nicholas himself stopped by the studio to see how things were going and to make some decisions about how he wanted it printed. What follows are a few photos of this proofing process. Check back later for our post on the finished product, and don’t forget to pre-order your own copy!

A proof of a page of the report and a very serious meeting in the background

A test plate on the press

Checking out a Mock-up

Sweater Twins and Ben making decisions

Different proofs of the Grey plate

Hoping for this as the end result!

what follows are various shots of the month long process:

these colors are my favorite combination

the full set, fronts and backs, finally realized

]]> http://swayspace.com/blog/2009/11/taking-care-of-business-cards/feed/ 0 http://swayspace.com/blog/2009/06/the-market-at-the-old-american-can-factory/ http://swayspace.com/blog/2009/06/the-market-at-the-old-american-can-factory/#comments Fri, 26 Jun 2009 16:44:14 +0000 Willy http://swayspace.com/blog/?p=248 This Sunday from 11am–6pm Swayspace will be participating in The Market at the Old American Can Factory. We will be selling sets of our antique handset Thank You stationery as well as custom-printing-while-you-wait stationery.

1. Set of 6 folded Thank You notes – $15
2. Set of 20 flat customized notecards – $40
3. Set of 20 folded custom notecards – $45

Here are more details and directions to our building. Come on by and support Brooklyn craft and manufacture!

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(We already mentioned this, but have added a better photo to the portfolio.)

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