Install

Site visits working on the 9/11 Museum were always opportunities to gather info about actual install conditions. For graphics visits I needed an escort but once onsite had free access to wherever in the museum we needed to check. Deliveries and workers arrived really early in the morning and the site wound down considerably by three in the afternoon, a perfect time for my project manager at Thinc (the one and only Mr. Bill), or one of the museum team members of Amy, Emily, Alicia and/or Ian to wrangle the time and personnel to work out next steps or adjustments. The exhibit fabrication team at Hadley included Chris, Rob and Kerrie, always willing and able to help get our graphics to their most resolved state.

On this eve of 9/11 I've been running through images and have pulled together a grouping that includes ephemera like packaging and crates and also views of installations in progress, available here.

Cabana

I've long had a theory (more of a notion) that 1958 is the year that design reached its apogee, but setting a date merely begs the question that the date is the culmination of anything. I escaped briefly to the library a while back and took a series of cropped cellphone pics, kept in a folder titled Vassar 1958 Vogue and transferred to the computers and external drives that've passed through in the following 10 years.

Among the notably post-1958 images: a modernist cabana for a sailing club, designed by B. et N. Westwood Piet et Associés Architectes, Club Nautique a Desborough Grande, found in an archive of 1960s French architecture magazines. Assuming the architecture was French since then, with a little research and with the aid of Google Translate, it turns out that it's a British project and that B. and N. are Bryan and Norman (an avid sailor), post-war architects in a practice that apparently included Jan Piet in the sixties. There is an informative brief history by Norman's son here on the last page of the PDF.

The raw translation of the French on the accompanying images is as follows:

1. Overview taking the opposite bank of the Thames on the slight construction that integrated well, for its shape and colors (natural brick, varnished wood, white woodwork), in a green setting.

A. Cut (section)
B. Ground floor plan (reserve and changing rooms)
C. Upstairs plan (club and bar)

Lincoln St.

Lunenberg, Nova Scotia, Canada, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is a small Atlantic port with settlement history dating back to the 1700s. Home to the Bluenose, a Grand Banks fishing schooner designed by Canada's self-taught, renowned naval architect William "Bill" J. Roue, Lunenberg's wharfs, boathouses, and Victorian architecture are a beautifully preserved glimpse into Nova Scotia's maritime history.

Fresh catch still comes into the docks daily, and between the year-round residents and a short tourist season, 'downtown' Lunenberg manages to keep a balance that doesn't overwhelm its scale and resources.

On a recent visit, a couple of new, design-conscious Lincoln Street businesses were kind enough to chat on a drizzly weekday and feed us on our parting night.

Special thanks to Scott and Matthew at the Pentper General Shop, and to the lovely proprietors of Lincoln Street Food, who share a passion for Nova Scotia contemporary architecture as practiced by MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple.

Inspirograph

Running through bookmarks lately, I rediscovered a novel piece of programming by one Nathan Friend, of Des Moines, IA, who is a front end engineer. Finding time to "hack away at side projects" he has created a digital Spirograph, written in TypeScript, that he's dubbed the Inspirograph. Pretty catchy, right?

Try it out here and take some time to view some of the thousands of images people have created and uploaded to the gallery.

My initial attempt, along with vintage Spirograph instructions, is here and I can tell you that I have quite forgotten how I did it, making some of the gallery submissions all the more impressive.

Murray Hill 2 2346

Teaching at FIT, they give adjuncts small shared offices that are great repositories of graphic design clutter from student projects to books - one of which in my office was Photo-lettering Inc's Alphabet Thesaurus Vol.2, published in the mid-60s. With, literally, thousands of typeface examples, it's a coveted resource for type design from an era before digitized anything, when couriers shuttled around bags of typeset photostats to agency art departments around the city. These catalogs were everywhere when I began typesetting and doing paste-ups in the late 80's but were quickly obsolete and largely thrown out when Macs took over. They're expensive to come by nowadays with nice examples in the $300 range. Ed Rondthaler was the director of PLINC and published a type memoir in 1981 that I've just bought an out-of-print edition of with the generous support (Amazon gift card) of a former workmate for helping out with design advice. Thanks Becca!

Spend some time at House Industries' excellent PLINC history.

A few pages of type from Ed Rondthaler's book here.

POTUS & the King

Since the blog has launched this July 4, 2015 Independence Day I'll share an anecdote we ran across fooling around one afternoon in the studio. (Big shout out to my design director at the time, Steve Shaw.) This little slice of American lore centers around Elvis Presley, Richard Nixon and their meeting at the Oval Office in December of 1970. They are such an incongruous pairing and the publicity images are such a hoot that I've used one as my desktop's desktop image for the past couple of years, eliciting chuckles from such a wide range of passersby that I haven't found another image yet to replace it. Only a Frank Sinatra and Michael Jackson portrait (included in the gallery link below) comes close but it's a little too saturated and not neutral enough for a desktop.

The full story is on the Smithsonian site here.

Select images here including Elvis's handwritten letters on airline stationery.

Type-tastic

Doing image research for inspiration one afternoon I came across an excellent archive of antique type catalogs. The nice people at unicorngraphics.com have compiled a web museum "for the purpose of educating the general public, and the next generation, on the beauties of wood types and engraved blocks. Our mission is to gather, save, preserve, and interpret wood types and information about them."

Visit them at www.unicorngraphics.com/wood type museum.asp#

Very Hatch Showprint.

Select images: Hamilton Type