Hasta La Ideas

Après la vidéo et les images dévoilant l’idée du projet « 3D Printed Room », le studio Digital Grotesque nous propose de découvrir la construction et la mise en place d’une pièce magnifique entièrement imprimée en 3D. Un rendu époustouflant à découvrir en vidéo dans la suite de l’article.

Grace à la plateforme de crowdfunding Kickstarter, la société Wobble Works va nous permettre d’obtenir le premier 3D Printing Pen, afin de dessiner des objets en 3 dimensions. Le produit appelé 3Doodler devrait être commercialisé en novembre 2013 au prix de 60$ avant de sortir une véritable imprimante 3D.

Fifties-era Case Study Homes and the SoCal spirit inform Airi Isoda’s latest collection

Continuing to mine the world of architecture for inspiration, Wrk-shp designer Airi Isoda reveals a Spring/Summer 2013 apparel collection based on the Case Study homes built in Southern California in the 1950s. With the fourth collection, crisp lines and structured silhouettes begin to establish a distinct vibe for the…

Continue Reading…

Alternative approaches to the letterpress arts

Based out Detroit’s “Ponyride” studios, Brian Christopher Baker and his company, Stukenborg Press, are at the forefront of the ongoing letterpress resurgence. His prints embrace non-traditional materials—specifically, geometrical arrangements of dice that he uses to create intricate patterns. As a contract for The New York Times Magazine, Baker blanketed the publication’s iconic gothic “T” with a layer of red 5s and 2s. We recently toured Baker’s studio courtesy of the Re:View Gallery and Buick to learn about Stukenborg and the world of letterpress design.

Baker’s penchant for unexpected type materials doesn’t stop at dice. He admits that students of his “Alternatives to Type” class have pressed everything from bunion cushions to foodstuffs. “If you can get it stuck down and type high, you can make a small edition of anything,” explains Baker. This open-ended approach gives his creations new level of complexity that goes beyond typical letterpress prints.

The result of years collecting type from various resources, the designer’s collection of type wraps around his studio in trays upon trays of metal and woodblock sets. His main machine was salvaged from the basement of Manhattan’s National Academy of Art. “The janitor said it had been down there for 25 years,” explains Baker. “It’s a champ machine. It took me about three months to get it up and running because it was caked with all kinds of weird stuff.”

For unavailable materials, Baker also sources type from a nearby foundry, and he admits that CNC machining and laser etching have created entirely new opportunities for letterpress designers. The fusion of materials and know-how becomes apparent when Baker pulls a print—the thunderous roll and cracking of colliding pieces demonstrating the nostalgic appeal of the letterpress process.

Contemplating on the state of contemporary letterpress, Baker says, “It’s definitely a defunct form of production, but there are a lot of folks doing it—although it’s small enough that everyone knows each other.” While most letterpress production in recent years has stuck to simple stationery, Baker’s multi-layered poster prints show the true potential of the genre.

Prints by Stukenborg Press can be found at their Etsy shop. See more images of the studio in our slideshow
.

Images by James Thorne

Mike Abelson sets up a unique print shop at NYC’s Creatures of Comfort

Designers are typically inspired people, and those who have a natural talent can often spot a creative use for even the most familiar object—like the wheel, for example. Such is the case for Postalco‘s imaginative co-founder Mike Abelson, who became obsessed with wheels after seeing the mark that one left on a piece of paper trapped in the sliding glass door of his Tokyo home. This fascination with an object’s unintended purpose led Abelson to create a wheel printer that could add a distinct set of stripes to his finely crafted Postalco notebooks. “If you really step back and think about what printing is, and think about it as mark-making, then in a way this is printing too,” he explained to us at NYC boutique Creatures of Comfort, where he has set up the printer for a one-week residency.

Made entirely from scratch out of household products, the Postalco Wheel Printer is a bit of a Rube Goldberg machine, but Abelson delights in its ability to produce rough, imperfect stripes—an aesthetic that the Japanese have a difficult time allowing. A trained product designer (he helped launch Jack Spade), Abelson spent six months building the printer, experimenting with different wheels and methods.

With Postalco products safely in the hands of quality craftsman, for Abelson the printer is a way to get in on the production side of things, as well as to add to the notebooks’ notoriously handsome but monotone colorways. “Our products are really plain and simple, and are really just sort of geometric. I thought it would be interesting to have something that took place on the surfaces,” he says.

With tiny soy sauce bottles holding the ink, the Postalco Printer operates off of a wooden wheel that Abelson cranks on the side as a notebook passes through, and the carefully placed wheels leave their distinct marks. Those in NYC can pick up one of the one-off notebooks at Creatures of Comfort, which feature special blue and yellow colorways.

The Postalco Wheel Printer will be on display at Creatures of Comfort starting today through 10 July 2012, alongside a new film by Koki Tanaka, which shows the mixed-media artist using various Postalco products in humorous, unconventional scenarios.

See more images of the Wheel Printer in the slideshow below.