Who Doesn’t Love Letterpress?
Neenah Paper announces the launch of The Beauty of Letterpress, a website that celebrates letterpress printing and its creators with the first virtual, community-based gallery of modern letterpress samples and resources.
The Beauty of Letterpress Gallery presents letterpress work from notable letterpress printers, designers, and artisans from around the country including Rohner Letterpress, Studio on Fire, Two Paperdolls, and Mama’s Sauce. The site features selections from a new curator each month. Letterpress history, context, educational information, community connections and a list of letterpress printers round out the site. (See video here.)
While developing this virtual letterpress home for the 21 st century, the creators could not help but consider the physical move of Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum the landmark institution preserving the rich history and assets of letterpress dating to the birth of letterpress in the 15th century. The Beauty of Letterpress launches with a Neenah Paper, Inc. initiative to help raise $30,000 in funds for the Museum’s move through matching donations and gifts of limited edition prints to designers, letterpress printers and admirers of this craft.
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The Meaning of Obnoxious
Beppe del Greco in Milan is publishing his own magazine titled Obnoxious. The reason for the title is simple: The roots are in latin (nocere, being harmful + ob, a prefix meaning toward, to, on, over, against). Beppe writes:
The meaning sounded perfect to my ears to become the name of this little magazine I was growing in my head, because I wanted it to be set on multiplicity, away from distilled and quintessential minimalisms, loud, noisy, mixed, contradictory and inappropriate, made out of ugly, dusty, unpleasant materials (taken from the intellectual and visual trash bins I could have access to) with scarce or none at all value as I found them (obnoxious, in a word).When the first five issues of Obnoxious are finished, the magazine will be monthly distributed for free in bookshops and elsewhere, also having an on-line window which should have the same contents of the printed matter: I will not sell anything, I’ll just offer it for free and people can pick it up, look at it, think about it, or throw it in the trash.
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A New School
The new Dutch Graphic Design Summer School “Open Set” consists of a two-week series of workshops within a studio environment. The workshops emphasize the interaction between noted Dutch and International graphic designers. This year’s edition takes place in Breda, The Netherlands, from 19th till 31st of August 2013.
The goal of the course is to enhance design’s social value by creating a platform for debates, exchange of knowledge and experience, shaping them into a form of visual communication. In order to reach this goal, tutors with different approaches to the discipline, such as Jonathan Barnbrook, Petr van Blokland, Catalogtree, Jan van Toorn, Willem Velthoven, Martijn Engelbregt, Max Bruinsma (editor in chief at Items magazine) and Geert Lovink (director of the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam) will be on hand.
The event is an independent student initiative, supported by Graphic Design Festival Breda and St.Joost Art Academy. Learn more here.