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.

And though we put out many cool works, we still felt limited by the size. Well, no more! We figured it was time to hit the extremes and get the biggest base our Vandercook could handle and the smallest base we could get for the C & P.

pretty good, for a block of wood

We had already experimented with printing from larger than normal surface areas when we collaborated with Lite-Brite Neon We used a wood base that had the text carved into it. We then knew how big we could get, but we wanted to print big and perfectly. So we saved our nickels and dimes, turned in all our soda cans, and sold lemonade on the street to allow us to purchase a beautiful papa of a magnet, coming in at 18 ¼” x 24”

Practically filling the bed of the Vandercook, we can now put a plate anywhere we want! And more than that, we can finally print the posters and other large forms we’ve been dreaming of in our spare time. We felt that with our involvement with NYWI, now was the perfect time to explore just how far we could go with large form letterpress. Just having a base that size to play with opened up a whole new world of ideas for our designers, and we can’t wait to show you what we’ve come up with in the next few months.

We don’t want to belittle our little base, it is just as fantastic and ferocious despite it’s 2” x 4” stature. We often print envelopes or projects where the paper is cut to size on the C & P, and you can have a devil of a time trying to make sure your pins don’t hit your base. Remember the bunting bases are precise and delicate and can be smashed and mashed much like lead type. But now we’re going to retire our battle scarred base and replace it with our new Tiny Ajax! We’re finally going to have the flexibility to print almost anything we want almost anywhere. And it’s just so cute too.

Don’t think our old bases are going to waste though. We’ve put them on our recently refurbished SP-15  which we can’t wait to try out on some full wedding suites. The dream of having all the machines here running simultaneously is finally upon us. We’ve expanded our shop, we’ve hired more designers, we’ve found some great printers, and now our only limits are the limits of our imagination and the imaginations of our next generation of printers.

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!

The objective of the virtual grocery store is to make productive use of commuters’ waiting time by saving shoppers time spent going to the supermarket and, of course, advertising Tesco’s hypermarket which is currently under construction.

Because I have never lived in South Korea, I am not going to speak to how this product would succeed or fail in the context of South Korea. Because I do live in a city with the busiest metro system in the Western Hemisphere and an ever-growing, overworked labor force I am going to discuss this product in the context of my own home metropolis, New York City.

Like a real grocery store the aisles and shelves look bright, glossy, orderly…appealing. Such a cleanly rendered, realistic depiction of store aisles taken out their context and plunged into a space which is both hopeful (the ride home) and dreadful (the often hot, stinky wait) creates a tension which makes it feel almost like an art installation. And yet, in a space where commuters are preconditioned to be inundated with the ever-cycling advertisements of the day, I can’t help but wonder if  New Yorkers wouldn’t just perceive this as an ad and thus be discouraged from actually interacting with it. Unless of course it was a product and an interface that the consumer was already comfortable using, such as Fresh Direct.

Fresh Direct is an online grocery store serving the New York City metrpolitan area. Shoppers order online and then FD delivers them at the customer’s desired date and time. Here at Swayspace this is the service that we use to order groceries for lunches in the studio each week.  For the first time last week I was in charge of putting in our order. Ordering packaged products like chips and cookies feels normal since these products look and taste the same almost every time I purchase them. Ordering cold cuts, fresh bread and ready-to-eat meals is a different story. A thumbnail image of Fresh Direct’s multigrain pullman loaf doesn’t say much to me when I can’t pick it up to feel it’s weight, density and color. These items arrived like a surprise as though someone else had more control over what arrived in our cardboard boxes than I did. The experience left me a little feeling uneasy. But as with anything, time and repetition would likely breed familiarity and I very well might look forward to tackling my Fresh Direct order while waiting for my ride home.

A few people responded to Tesco’s advertisement by suggesting that we take this model a step further to create whole stores with dynamic aisles of screens. This would allow product placement to be adjusted, sale items highlighted and prices managed from afar while taking up less physical real estate with the lack of aisle space needed for shopping carts and cashiers. Over time and generations could we slowly loose our attachments to the sensory inputs a grocery store: the smell of muffins from the bakery in the morning, the chill in the freezer aisles, the convenient candy bar on your way to checkout. In considering the possibilities of such an interface, the problems of substituting the usual sensory experiences of grocery shopping pose clear hurdles to designers trying to engage their users.

In a city where the urban working dwellers spend long hours in the office and usually can’t wait to get home to their young ones or out to the bar for a cold drink this just might work (that is if you can get used to getting shoved out of the way as you reach to scan the milk). For now,  I’ll continue to cherish it when the butcher hands me a slice of turkey to test it’s thickness and when I press my finger into an avocado and know I’ll be able to eat it the next day.

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.

Here’s an example of what we want to happen. Choosing one of the options in the select menu reveals a particular paragraph. Clicking “Remove” makes that paragraph disappear again. Choosing “Select...” resets everything back to where we started:

Select...

<br />

First

<br />

Second

<br />

Third

<br />

This is the first paragraph. Remove

And here’s how the code works. First include jQuery (duh). Next create a select menu with a value included for each option. (That’s crucial for making the whole thing work.) Following that, we’ve got three hidden paragraphs, each with an id (unique, of course). Then comes the script, which pretty much says “If the user switches the select menu to option 1, 2, or 3, display the corresponding paragraph. If they select the first option, hide any displayed paragraphs. And if they click a link, hide the parent (the paragraph in this case) of that link.” Hope that helps, and happy coding:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>

<head>
  <script type="text/javascript" src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.js"></script>
</head>

<body>
  <select>
    <option value="0">Select...</option>
    <option value="1">First</option>
    <option value="2">Second</option>
    <option value="3">Third</option>
  </select>
  <p id="first" style="display: none">This is the first paragraph. <a class="remove" href="#">Remove</a></p>
  <p id="second" style="display: none">This is the second paragraph. <a class="remove" href="#">Remove</a></p>
  <p id="third" style="display: none">This is the third paragraph. <a class="remove" href="#">Remove</a></p>
  <script>
    $('select').change(function() {
      if ($(this).val() == 1) {
        $('#first').show('fast'); }
      else if ($(this).val() == 2) {
        $('#second').show('fast'); }
      else if ($(this).val() == 3) {
        $('#third').show('fast'); }
      else if ($(this).val() == 0) {
        $('#first, #second, #third').hide('fast'); }
     });

    $('.remove').click(function() {
      $(this).parent().hide('fast');
    });
  </script>
</body>
</html>

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!