Knot Practical
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.
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!
We’re in an Art Show
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.
Select Menus and Conditional Logic with jQuery
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:
<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">This is the first paragraph. <a class="remove" href="#">Remove</a></p>
<p id="second">This is the second paragraph. <a class="remove" href="#">Remove</a></p>
<p id="third">This is the third paragraph. <a class="remove" href="#">Remove</a></p>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.js"></script>
<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>
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:
<code markup="none">
<!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">This is the first paragraph. <a class="remove" href="#">Remove</a></p>
<p id="second">This is the second paragraph. <a class="remove" href="#">Remove</a></p>
<p id="third">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 Feltron 2009 Annual Report : Behind the Scenes
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.
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...
Preview : 2009 Feltron Annual Report
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
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!