Hasta La Ideas

A new comic, a handy guide for print designers, a book documenting paper making, and a new zine… Yup, it’s time to share some of the smaller, independently printed publications to land on my desk recently. First up is the latest in Nobrow‘s 17×23 series of narrative illustration books, The New Ghost, by Robert Hunter, a kind of first-day-in-the-new-office story of a ghost, new to the world of ghostly duties…

The New Ghost (£6.50) is available from nobrow.net

Art Workers: The Making of New Munken Design Range is a promotional book from Arctic Paper showing how its Munken range is created. There’s been a bit of a trend of this kind of book from manufacturers of late which reveal photographs of factories and manufacturing environments alongside portraits of the people that work there and explanations of how they all conspire, usually with industrial machinery, to create the product in question. Regular readers may recall we blogged about a similar project by UK clothes brand Albam back in November last year (read that post here). While not as ultimately collectible as Album’s clothbound, hardback book, this oversize A4 book is full of great photography of the countryside around the Munken paper mill in Sweden, along with portraits of some of the key folk who work there and, yes, some of the machinery they use in the creation of the product.

Art Workers is, unsurprisingly, printed on various Munken stock to show off the product, which is ultimately its purpose. Design: Grow in Stockholm. Photography: Daniel Blom at b-martin.se

Sporting screenprinted and hand-finished covers, A Year In The Droposphere is a new zine from French-born street artist and illustrator Florence Blanchard, aka Ema. The 48 page A5 zine, printed in an edition of 100, contains a colleciton of photos of Ema’s mostly moustachioed droplet-shaped pieces (she calls them Dropmen) which she’s installed on the streets of Paris, London, Miami and Sheffield in the form of drawings, paintings and wheatpastes during the course of the last year.

A Year In The Droposphere (€10) is available from Ema’s Big Cartel site here.

UK design agency, The Media Collective, sent in this handy little 16 page tome (approx 12 x 17.5 cm), designed as a handy reference tool for print designers. It contains examples of overprinting, explains the golden ratio, has a list of standard paper sizes detailed in millimetres, inches and picas, shows examples of how colours sit on coated and uncoated stock, shows a range of blacks created in various ways, shows various types of paper folds, and a wealth of other basic info all designers about to do a print job should know about. One thing I can’t find though is info about types of binding. Nevertheless, it’s a pretty handy booklet to have around.

It’s available for purchase for £4 from printhandbook.com