PLAZM BLOG: 02/10

Saturday, February 27, 2010

Portraits of Bob Dylan by Todd Haynes

We just posted this featured article from Plazm #29 print edition to our online magazine. View here.

Todd Haynes is not just a writer and director, but a painter as well. In these handmade images of Bob Dylan—the subject of Haynes’s film, I’m Not There—one multifaceted artist finds inspiration in another.

Labels: bob dylan, Plazm #29, todd haynes

Thursday, February 25, 2010

Create Don't Hate

Throughout the city of Portland, billboards designed by teenagers will be replacing advertisements with messages of tolerance. This project is titled “Create, Don’t Hate!” and gives students the opportunity to work with design professionals to create meaningful communication in their neighborhoods.

Create! Don’t Hate. is a Design Ignites Change Youth Mentoring Initiative built around the theme of tolerance. designigniteschange.org

Design Ignites Change partnered with Michael Etter of re:active to bring together mentors and students from across the Portland area.

Project partners include re:active, AIGA Portland, Caldera Arts, p:ear, and Open Meadow as well as local design groups: The Cary Design Group, Makelike, Nike, Plazm, Pop Art & Obsessive Consumption.

This show is a benefit for re:active magazine. www.reactivemagazine.com

Show opens with artists’ reception, March 5, 2010 from 6-9pm.
Show closes March 26, 2010 free admission

Pushdot Studio
1021 SE Caruthers
Portland OR 97214
503-224-5925

Please come out and support the youth programs if you are in Portland. It will be a good event. If you know someone who might enjoy the work we do, or just an evening with some great people please forward this on.

Fight the Power

For skateboarders in New York City, the Brooklyn Banks beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, has been the marquee boarding spot since the 70s. The city recently announced plans to paint the underside of the Brooklyn Bridge and wants to take over this communal skate area for equipment storage until at least 2014. We all know how that could end…but YOU can help!

Skate legend Steve Rodriguez (getting sick, above), of 5Boro Skateboards is fighting City Hall to preserve part of the park. To help keep the Brooklyn Banks, please spread the word, and send an email to brooklynbridgeoutreach@gmail.com.

And if anyone has creative ideas on other ways to spread the word, please let me know, and I will forward them to Steve. Thanks everyone!

Labels: 5boro, brooklyn banks, steve rodriguez

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

MARCH ART PARTY

Just around the corner, this is going to be so good! Each and every first Friday.

Saturday, February 20, 2010

Eat, Talk, & Art: Performance Works NW Artist Dinner Series

Linda Austin and Tahni Holt curate art discussions and feed us dinner.

Why: Our love for communal eating, a desire for more discourse that touches upon performance as an art among other arts, and a curiosity about other people's processes: what & how & why they make what they make and do what they do

Who: Dinner Series schedule

Feb 27             Angelle Hebert (tEEth)+ Angela Fair---see below for bios
March 20         Linda Austin+ Kristan Kennedy
April 24           Cydney Wilkes + Lisa Radon
May 22            Tahni Holt+ Ethan Rose
June 26            David Eckard + Linda K. Johnson
July 24            Tiffany Lee Brown (New Oregon) + Joshua Berger (Plazm)

Each dinner has room for 20 guests. Every dinner is at a different, secret, location that will be given upon reservations. Email hello@tahniholt.com for reservations. $30-$100 (sliding scale) for one dinner / $100-$200 for four dinners.

PKN Global for Haiti!

The GLOBAL Pecha Kucha Night, traveling the world benefiting Haiti just kicked off. Watch it on UStream!

More info here.

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Straight Gold

Asics Olympics Ian Lynam

Stage two of the collaborative website I've designed with AQ for the Asics Olympic team now online. It includes new animated content, as well as many other goodies!

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Cooper Hilite Complete!

Brand new Cooper revival out as of 5 minutes ago!

http://new.myfonts.com/fonts/wordshape/cooper-highlight/

Cooper Hilite Complete is a complementary set of two fonts- Cooper Black and Cooper Hilite. Either typeface can be used alone, or as a stackable, multi-colored set.

The history of these typefaces:

Cooper Black, the most famous and successful of Oswald Cooper’s type designs was released in 1920, following a year of development fleshing out the weight of the typeface and filling out the full character set. Cooper redrew the lowercase characters multiple times, toying with the rounded forms of the “m” and “n” and engaged in a lively debate with McArthur over the final form as McArthur requested that the typeface be drawn bolder and bolder. Cooper famously said the face was "for far-sighted printers with near-sighted customers", and the public agreed. Sales of Cooper Black were voluminous, and Barnhart Brothers and Spindler had a difficult time keeping up with the demand for the typeface. Conservative typographers were critical of Cooper Black, though it was overwhelmingly popular, helping to shape the American advertising landscape through the 1920s and 1930s.

1925 saw the release of Cooper Hilite, the highlighted companion to Cooper Black. The design was executed by merely painting white incised negative spaces on a proof of Cooper Black.

These two typefaces are the result of researching Cooper’s original drawings and series of engraved proofs for both typefaces. The typefaces include the full range of punctuation and diacritics that fill out a full character set. The typefaces have been lovingly kerned for the smoothest result in text setting.

Available now via MyFonts.

Sunday, February 14, 2010

YACHT + Apple

Jonathan Ive, Apple's senior designer (iPod, iPad, iTouch, et al) likes the YACHT logo so much that he and the Apple design team dropped some free custom laser-engraved iPods on the YACHT team last week.

New Oregon Interview Series on Portland's Built Environment

Host Nora Robertson sits down with Mayor Sam Adams, Randy Gragg and Brad Cloepfil

The New Oregon Interview Series brings Mayor Sam Adams, Portland Monthly editor Randy Gragg and prominent architect Brad Cloepfil together to discuss their work in shaping urban space and how our built environment is evolving.

Monday, Feb. 22nd, 7-8:30 PM, Urban Grind East, 2214 NE Oregon, $5.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

The Life and Times of Oz Cooper

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I wrote a 10,000 word essay called "Heft, Gravy, and Swing: The Life and Times of Oswald Cooper" for the latest issue of Idea. The essay serves as the definitive biography of the Chicago type and lettering designer, famed for his Cooper Black typeface.

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The essay is the result of a long-dreamed of trip to Chicago to sift through Cooper's original drawings, scarce writings, and working papers. Copiously illustrated with proofs of Cooper's work, unpublished typefaces, and photographs of rare design work, his legacy is brought into contemporary focus. New biographical information about Cooper, his work, and his associates is discussed within.

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An excerpt:

Bertsch & Cooper was a visionary commercial art service. They were one of the first shops in Chicago that offered to create layouts, compose artwork, and typeset text all under one roof. They continually added staff, resulting in a scattershot assortment of illustrators, draftsmen, and compositors peppered throughout the same building in a variety of rooms. At their first location, Bertsch was famous for his "inter-office communication system" which consisted of yelling upstairs and down from the inner balcony of the building to professional associates. Cooper was ensconced in the "bull pen"- a room with a half dozen or so other commercial artists scratching away at the jobs of the day. Cooper was renowned for his "filing system"- a towering, dusty, haphazardly curved pile of layouts, proofs, notes, and other assorted papers that loomed over his desk, each day's ephemera separated by a newspaper from that date.

This pile grew in relation with Bertsch & Cooper's increasing roster of clients, which included a number of local Chicago businesses including doctors' offices, legal firms, coffee shops, and banks, New York's Marchbanks Press, the department store Marshall Fields, Strathmore Papers, Red Book Magazine, American Printer Magazine, and the American Institute of Graphic Arts. Cooper's distinctive lettering can be found on a series of public service announcements for the United States government's Food Administration, exhorting the public to eat less and conserve rations during World War One.

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The article was jointly designed by myself and the Shirai Design Office, the esteemed designers of Idea. It contains the first public showing of Cooper Italic Complete.

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Monday, February 8, 2010

Blunt Mechanic illustrations exhibit

I'll be exhibiting a number of illustrations drawn for the recent Blunt Mechanic CD on Barsuk Records on February 13th at the Sakura Gallery in Nakameguro.

The exhibition is an all-day art party and exhibition, running from noon until 10pm.

Sakura Gallery
Meguro-ku
Nakameguro 2-5-28 1F
Tel. 03-6277-2100

Supported by Niigata Beer, Chazymo, Aroma Tea Ale, and Mooring Deck.
map here.

Sunday, February 7, 2010

Anyone Can Color

Back in 1997 Plazm curated a 32-page coloring book featuring a great range of artists from Raymond Pettibon to Kay Slusarenko. A full list of contributors is below. The coloring book was originally inserted into each issue of Plazm 16, we had a release party with giant blowups of each of the pages in the coloring book, and lots of crayons. Now, anyone can color some more since you can download a free version of the full coloring book here.

Cover: Anton Kimball
2. Storm Tharp
3. Carla Mayela Figueroa
4. Kay Slusarenko
5. Raymond Pettibon & Monica Moran
6. Heather Hadlock
7. Ed Fella
8. Efrat Rafaeli
9. Bob Waldman
10. Chloe Eudaly
11. Isabel Samaras
12. Marcellus Hall
13. Designers Republic
14. Fred Bower
15. Patrick Long
16. Marcus Burlile
17. Carolyn Cooley
18. Zoey Kroll with text by Margaret Tedesco
19. Denise Gonzales Crisp
20. Rick Pinchera
21. Jeff Kling
22. Peace McCracken
23. Linda Reynen
24. Frank Kozik
25. Sean Tejaratchi
26. Bwana Spoons
27. Sam Coomes
28. Patrick Moore
29. Patricking@Thirst

Friday, February 5, 2010

"Staying Put"

lynam_poster

My latest print project, a double poster set called "Poster Initiative 004A" will debut at Grasshut in Portland, Oregon in the show "Staying Put". The show opens tomorrow, February 6.

The show is a collection of prints from folks such as Yellena James, Tim Biskup, Scrappers, Chris Johanson, APAK, Mauro Gatti, Shawn Wolfe, The Little Friends of Printmaking, Studio Folk, and others.

Work from the show is available online here.

Location:
Grasshut
811 East Burnside
Portland, OR 97214
503.445.9924

Thursday, February 4, 2010

ART PARTY at Branx this Friday

ART PARTY AT BRANX
FEB 5th, 9-2, $5, 320 SE 2nd Avenue Portland

Live music: Tara Jane O'Neill and Marisa Anderson
DJs: Yeti (Mike McGonigal), Permanent Wave, and Gottesfinger (Sarah Gottesdiener)

Visuals/installation: Melanie Valera a.k.a. Tender Forever
Dance/performance: Get Me Bodied

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

GOD HATES FLAGS.

Protesting the protesters.