Have you ever wondered how you might survive in the wild? Well, we at Swayspace certainly have: where the closest thing to the natural world are the mosquitoes that divebomb from the Gowanus in the summer. What could we urban soldiers and keyboard jockeys do if we had to camp out in Central Park if not the Adirondacks? Well Alite has us in mind with its new line of gear. They have soft dog collars with room for storage to tents inspired by RV’s, and of course their Sexy Hotness sleeping bag that blurs the line between full length jacket, purple pajamas, and a limitlessly extendable bed for romping.
We are excited to announce Swayspace’s participation in a show highlighting the work of master craftsmen and artisans working in New York City. The show is part of the LVMH-sponsored project The Art of Craftsmanship Revisited: New York and opens this Wednesday 26 May. The show will be open to the public June 5 – June 27, 11 AM – 5 PM at Nolan Park on Governors Island, which is a great place to visit in the summer in New York, so we hope you can make it out to see and celebrate the hard work of these craftsmen and students.
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.
In a recent prototype for a web application we are working on, we needed to use a select menu to display the appropriate result after a user makes a selection. We couldn’t find any jQuery examples online that did just what we wanted, so hopefully the following will help someone facing the same problem.
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:
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>
After about two months, the Feltron 2009 Annual Report is officially completely printed! I don’t think anyone quite understood the magnitude of the job until it was well underway. It’s the biggest job Swayspace has printed, and in the end it was definitely worth the massive effort by everyone involved. You may have viewed the annual report online, or received your copy in the mail recently. What follows in this post is a look at the process of printing the report; a look beyond the finished product at what it took to get there.
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.
Most projects that come to Swayspace by way of letterpress are either wedding invitations or business cards, but every once in a while something different gets thrown into the mix. We were incredibly excited when friend of Swayspace, Nicholas Felton, decided to have us letterpress print his Feltron 2009 Annual Report. The report is sixteen pages of lovely information design comprised of Nicholas’s personal data collected throughout 2009.
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
Happy Holidays from Swayspace! In preparation/celebration/anticipation of the holiday season, we’ve been printing some holiday themed stationery to be sold at the Makers Market here at the OAC Factory on Sundays.
Having been the ironic printers without business cards for some time, it’s incredibly exciting to finally have fresh sets in our hands. It was a long process of Patrick doing several designs and everyone voting on their favorites. We finally settled on a design and what followed was another long process of printing. We really went to town doing them in 4 colors. We did 3 main color changes, along with some miscellaneous trials to essentially print over a dozen colors.
what follows are various shots of the month long process:
Patrick has been designing business cards for kids so parents can set up play-dates. It’s part of a new business card system we’re starting with pre-made designs and colors (shoot us and email: studio@swayspace.com if you’re interested). Of course, for kid-business cards, you gotta break out the rainbow roll:
