PLAZM BLOG

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2010-04-03T11:19:00.001-07:00

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ch-ch-ch-cherry bomb! Monday premier of The Runaways featuring Cherie Currie benefits the Rock 'n' Roll Camp for Girls

2010-04-03T10:57:00.000-07:00

The Runaways Portland Premiere & Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girl’s Benefit featuring Cherie Currie

Monday, April 5^th, 2010, 7:00pm

Hollywood Theatre 4122 NE Sandy Blvd. Portland, OR 97212

Tickets $15 (all sales benefit the RnRC4G)

Limited seating, tickets available at Hollywood Theatre website and box office

Join, The Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls, KGON and Hollywood theatre for a special fundraiser and the Portland Premiere of Hollywood’s hottest Rock Movie – The Runaways!

Get your tickets at www.girlsrockcamp.org

- Q&A with Cherie Currie

- Raffle prizes to include movie swag, autographed items from The Runaway, tickets to Joan Jett’s upcoming concert at Chinook Winds and more.

Following the premiere will be an Over 21 after party at the Ambassador Lounge, 47^th & NE Sandy. Come sing some karaoke --- 10% of sales will benefit The Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls.

A word from RnRC4G

This movie is rated R and contains mature content including violence and drug use. The Rock 'n' Roll Camp for Girls regrets that this prevents many of our Campers from attending the event. This is a story of women who broke barriers and struggled to find their own voice in a male dominated industry - paving the way for future generations of female rockers.

Art Party #3

2010-03-19T15:16:00.001-07:00

This is going to be a good one!
FRIDAY, APRIL 2nd AT BRANX: $5.
Tunnels Listen to Eruption on his myspace page--you will be sold.
Sexual Champions (all female improv brass ensemble.)
Kathleen Keogh of Woolly Mammoth comes to Dinner with White Rainbow
DJs:
Hostile Tapeover
DJ Magic Beans (Maggie Vail, VP of Kill Rock Stars)
PHOTOS BY:
A.M. O'Malley
&
Brook Dillon.
Photo portraits/booth by Lorenzo Triburgo.

Artist Talk Series

2010-03-18T18:57:00.000-07:00


The second Thursday of each month offers the unique opportunity to casually explore pieces in
Portland Art Museum’s permanent collection through the inspired lens of a local artist. Each artist
selects a work from the museum's permanent collection, talks about the piece and leads a discussion.

Free for members or with Museum admission. Reservations are not required, but space is limited to
the first 60 attendees. To ensure attendance, advance tickets are available at the box office.
Talks occur the second Thursday of each month from 6 p.m. - 8 p.m.

On April 8th, James Lavadour will lead a discussion about Max Beckmann's oil painting *The Mill*, 1947.

Past Plazm contributors Storm Tharp, Stephanie Snyder, and Nan Curtis are all scheduled for
upcoming events. Here's a list through September. 

May 13th—Jeff Jahn
June 10th—Storm Tharp
July 8th—Chris Rauschenberg
August 12th—Nan Curtis
September 9th—Stephanie Snyder

Also, a number of prior talks can be found on the museum's web site.

Boul Mich!

2010-03-17T03:28:00.001-07:00

The digital debut of Oz Cooper’s “Moderne” Broadway-esque titling typeface, Boul Mich, available now from MyFonts!

1927 was a discouraging year for Oswald Bruce Cooper, having to devote his time to developing faddish display typefaces based on others' designs in lieu of truly original work.

Though he sidestepped blame in his essay On Cooper Type Faces, Barnhart Bros. & Spindler’s General Manager Richard N. McArthur was the one responsible for assigning Cooper busywork. McArthur put together a sampling of Broadway-esque hand lettering from assorted advertisements, suggesting a very specific incising treatment.

Cooper drew the basic forms of the letters, leaving the bulk of the work to the pattern makers at BB&S, but provided the framework from which the typeface was drawn. The typeface was named Boul Mich, after Michigan
Boulevard, Chicago’s mix of carriage trade shops, elegant residences, artists' studios, and Bohemian side streets. While not a design of Cooper’s choosing, this modern typeface is a paean to the flexibility of Cooper’s skill.

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 by Ian Lynam, published in Japan’s Idea Magazine (http://idea-mag.com/) issue #339. Cooper’s biography is delivered in English and Japanese with numerous full-color illustrations of never-before-published work.

Boul Mich has been lovingly redrawn from Oswald Bruce Cooper’s original drawings and mechanical proofs. It is comprised of a capital letter alphabet, full European character set, figures, and full range of diacritics.

Boul Mich is available now via MyFonts.

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