PLAZM BLOG

Portland 2010 Opens Tonight

2010-03-13T10:47:00.000-08:00

Portland 2010: a Biennial of Contemporary Art is opening tonight at Disjecta and BoxRocks.
This is the first biennial in the region since the Portland Art Museum decided to move to the Contemporary Northwest Art Award format. Plazm is an event sponsor and designed the logo, posters, ads, etc. Check it out.

There are a bunch of events running for the next eight weeks or so. The show is curated by Cris Moss. He's selected lots of great artists including Holly Andres, Corey Arnold, Pat Boas, John Brodie, Bruce Conkle & Marne Lucas, David Corbett, Ditch Project, David Eckard, Damien Gilley, Sean Healy, Tahni Holt, Jenene Nagy, Oregon Painting Society, Melody Owen, Crystal Schenk, Heidi Schwegler, Stephen Slappe, Kartz Ucci.

Full listing of all events.

Disjecta
8371 N Interstate
Portland
6 - 10 pm

Book Design, the iPad, the Kindle, and "formless content"

2010-03-06T11:29:00.000-08:00

"Books in the Age of the iPad" correctly deduces that "print is dying, digital is surging, everyone is confused." Craig Mod presents a thoughtful argument on the future of print, but a primary basis of his article is deeply flawed: the idea that some content is "formless." My thoughts about this, from the writer/editor's perspective rather than that of the designer's, can be found in the (generally very interesting) comments thread.

His caption to the flowchart here reads "FORMLESS CONTENT: Retaining meaning in any container." The medium is the message, dude! Meaning always shifts with form.

Liminal 2.0

2010-03-05T03:59:00.001-08:00

Second printing of Liminal, a zine I wrote about Tokyo graffiti is now available. Screenprinted covers and inserts, one-color interior. Available for a cool $8 postpaid (shipping included) via Paypal to ian (at) ianlynam.com.

Includes photos of work by QP, Ekys, Secto, Want, and SF writers Adek and Twist.

Cooper Text

2010-03-02T22:10:00.000-08:00

New typeface set out now via MyFonts: Cooper Text.

Cooper Text is a comprised of two fonts- Cooper OldStyle and Cooper Initials. Cooper OldStyle is a round-serifed text typeface, while Cooper Initials are ornamental capitals designed for use as complementary drop caps.

Cooper OldStyle has been lovingly redrawn from Oswald Bruce Cooper’s original drawings and mechanical proofs while Cooper Initials have been drawn from a sample in the seminal monograph of Cooper’s work, The Book of Oz.
Cooper OldStyle was originally released as a non-kerning typeface, which offered limited use for text setting. Oz Cooper was never quite happy with the copious amount of “air” around the typeface’s characters, so this definitive version has been painstakingly spaced and kerned for even text-setting.

Cooper Initials is a set of three typefaces:
- Cooper Initials, the base form derived from Cooper’s original design
- Cooper Ground, blocks of solid color that match the proportions of the Initials and which can be used to add a background color to the typefaces through layering
- Cooper Capitals, the lone letterforms within the initials, which can be layered to add highlight color to the letterform component of the set

These typefaces can be paired with Cooper Italic Complete for setting long lengths of text.

The history of these typefaces:

Cooper OldStyle is the result of Barnhart Brothers & Spindler type foundry representatives Richard N. McArthur and Charles R. Murray having met with Oswald Cooper and his business partner Fred Bertsch in 1917. Due to other commercial design firms adopting Cooper’s style of lettering throughout the Midwest, both companies came to an agreement to create a family of types based on Cooper’s advertising lettering. McArthur and Murray saw the biggest potential in the super-bold advertising lettering that would become Cooper Black, but agreed that a roman weight old style should be executed first, the logical progenitor to a family or related types.

The foundry requested that the roman have rounded serifs so as to more specifically correlate to the planned bold. This was the first of many tactical strategies in type design between type designer and foundry, most specifically McArthur and Cooper, whose back-and-forth relationship in designing, critiquing, and modifying letterforms was integral in shaping the oeuvre of type designs credited to Cooper. While it was Cooper’s sheer talent in shaping appealing and useful alphabets that made his work so popular, McArthur’s role as critic and editor has gone largely un-noted in the slim amount of writing of length about Cooper’s work.

Cooper and McArthur went back and forth over the design of the roman face for nearly two years with Cooper, constantly redrawing and revising the typeface to get it to a castable state. The capitals were successively redrawn by Cooper, with particular care paid to the “B” and “R” to make them relate formally. The lowercase was redrawn numerous times, as were experiments in shaping the punctuation. McArthur requested a pair of dingbats to accompany the typeface, along with a decorative four leaf clover ornament “for luck”.

Cooper included a slightly iconoclastic, cartoonish paragraph mark, as well as decorative end elements, a centered period, and brackets with a hand-drawn feel.

The final typeface is a lively, bouncy conglomeration whose rounded forms dazzle and move the eye. Originally called merely “Cooper” in early showings, the name was later revised to “Cooper Oldstyle”. The typeface met with a warm reception upon release in 1919, the public favoring its advertising-friendly, tightly-spaced appearance. Sales were moderate, and the face was considered a success.

Cooper originally drew the figures the same width as the “M” of the font, but revised them to the width of the “N” at the request of McArthur. Early versions of drawings of the slimmer figures are noted as “cruel stuff” in accompanying notes by Cooper, though they were versioned out into far more elegant numerals than the earlier stout figures. Both versions of the numerals are included in the digital release, as are the ornamental elements.

In 1925, McArthur and Murray requested a set of ornamental initials. Cooper designed the initials open-faced on a square ground surrounded by organic ornament. The initials were “intended to be nearly even in ‘color value’ with that of normal text type”. The letterforms themselves are a medium-bold variation on the Cooper OldStyle theme, lacking the balance of Cooper’s text faces, but charming nonetheless.

Cooper Initials are offered in their original capital alphabet form in this digital version, with no supplementary characters.

The release of these two typefaces coincides with the publication of the definitive Oswald Bruce Cooper biography, published in Japan’s Idea Magazine issue #339. Cooper’s biography is delivered in English and Japanese with numerous full-color illustrations of never-before-published work.

Available now via MyFonts.

and speaking of Dylan portraits…

2010-03-02T15:09:00.000-08:00

Congratulations to Milton Glaser (who designed the cover of #28), he was one of 12 artists to receive the 2009 Medal of Arts from President Barrack Obama, and the first graphic designer ever to do so.

Portraits of Bob Dylan by Todd Haynes

2010-02-27T15:37:00.001-08:00

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.

Create Don't Hate

2010-02-25T23:44:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-25T09:15:00.000-08:00

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!

MARCH ART PARTY

2010-02-23T22:25:00.000-08:00

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

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

2010-02-20T12:21:00.000-08:00

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!

2010-02-20T00:16:00.001-08:00

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

More info here.

Straight Gold

2010-02-18T04:41:00.001-08:00

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!

Cooper Hilite Complete!

2010-02-16T01:36:00.000-08:00

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.

YACHT + Apple

2010-02-14T23:35:00.001-08:00

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

2010-02-14T16:47:00.000-08:00

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.

The Life and Times of Oz Cooper

2010-02-10T01:48:00.000-08:00

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.

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.

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.

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.

Blunt Mechanic illustrations exhibit

2010-02-08T05:48:00.000-08:00

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.

Anyone Can Color

2010-02-07T19:45:00.000-08:00

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

"Staying Put"

2010-02-05T19:18:00.000-08:00

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

ART PARTY at Branx this Friday

2010-02-04T12:20:00.000-08:00

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

GOD HATES FLAGS.

2010-02-02T16:19:00.000-08:00

Protesting the protesters.

Clobber Grotesk Bold

2010-01-26T07:23:00.000-08:00

Clobber Grotesk Bold is a new typeface just released via MyFonts. It was one of a two-part family originally designed for a metal-cutting business, as they were seeking bold letterforms for their custom aluminum furniture that would be readable at very small sizes.

Clobber is a fairly traditional grotesk, designed in the same vein as Akzidenz Grotesk and a number of anonymous grotesks, though with the addition of slightly flared terminals.

The Wife, the Mistress, and the Prostitute

2010-01-23T22:07:00.001-08:00

Plazm at the Backroom, January 11, 2008.

Curator Stephanie Snyder in conversation with Plazm editors Joshua Berger, Jon Raymond, and Tiffany Lee Brown on the occasion of the Plazm Backroom event. We recently posted the essays from Jon, Josh, and Tiffany plus a complete podcast of the hour+ discussion on our website. Photo above from the event is of Tara Jane O'Neil with Fred Nemo dancing.

Enjoy here

The Rise of American Poster Art

2010-01-21T23:42:00.000-08:00

"American Artifact: The Rise of American Rock Poster Art", is a documentary about the history and subculture of rock poster art in America, will be released on DVD on March 27th, 2010. The film has been touring around the country in the meantime and was recently added to the permanent collection at the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame.

It is playing tomorrow night at the Clinton Street Theater in Portland.
2522 SE Clinton St.
Portland, OR 97202

The DVD release party will be at the Wherehouse in Newburgh, NY. Director Merle Becker will be in attendance. Admission is free and seating is limited. (First come, first serve).

Details for the DVD release party are:
Saturday, March 27th 7:30p
The Wherehouse
119 Liberty Street
Newburgh, NY 12550
845.561.7240

More details, trailers and such on the American Artifact web site.

New typeface: Cooper Fullface Italic

2010-01-21T02:59:00.000-08:00

Just released via MyFonts, my latest typeface release is the definitive version of Oswald Bruce Cooper's great lost typeface Cooper Fullface Italic.

At the end of 1927, Oswald Bruce Cooper yearned to create a heavy "modern" face- akin to Broadway and other display types in height and proportion, but more nuanced while being a dense, black type. The Barnhart Brothers & Spindler foundry, for whom Cooper had designed a number of typefaces, saw the potential of the typeface as a big seller. Richard McArther, General Manager of the foundry, referred to it as "the hotsy stuff", though he was highly critical of a number of characters in the original design. He requested a successive number of modifications, including the addition of Dwiggins-inspired serifs to the face to make it stand apart from similarly-weighted typefaces then on the market. He wanted to imbue the face with a considerable amount of "old-timey" flavor in order to impart a sense of originality to the face and have it sell across both Modern and Bodoni/Didot market segments.

The resulting typeface was called Cooper Fullface, a jaunty and swollen caricature of a Didone with great potential for display advertising work. The final form of the face was a regulated and consistent balance of cartoonishness and earnest visual braggadocio, the bouncy, circus fairway-like swing of the original drawings of the letters taken down considerably and figures redrawn and redrawn for maximum readability.

A specimen sheet was mailed out in 1929, and generated moderate sales, but too late- Barnhart Brothers & Spindler closed its foundry division shortly thereafter as part of ATF's corporate roll-up of manufacturing. The American Type Founders continued to produce the face and sell it at a decent pace, renaming it Cooper Modern.

Cooper designed a matching italic for Cooper Fullface, but it was never released. The BB&S foundry closure resulted in the foundry equipment being shipped to New Jersey a few weeks shy of the typeface's completion. It is unfortunate, as the accompanying italic is perhaps Cooper's masterpiece, a lively Bodoni-esque italic with more than a bit of influence from 19th Century display types, particularly in the treatment of the ball serifs on the uppercase "A", "J", "M", and "N". Cooper Fullface Italic stands as the until-now missing bookend to Cooper's career as a type designer.

This digital release is the revival of that lost Cooper typeface, Cooper Fullface Italic. Within are two typefaces- Cooper Fullface Italic and Cooper Fullface Italic Fancy. The two faces span the range of Cooper's original drawings- the Fancy typeface utilizing a number of alternate characters.

These two typefaces are the result of researching Cooper's original drawings and series of engraved proofs for both typefaces. The typefaces include the original ligatures, original Oz Cooper ornaments, fancy swash characters, and a range of punctuation and diacritics, et al, that fill out a full character set. The typefaces have been lovingly kerned for the smoothest result in text setting.

Available via MyFonts.