VSM in the Newspaper!

I'm so proud of my boss! She was profiled in Monday edition of the San Francisco Gate's Datebook section, as a professional printer and general person of interest. The press in the photo is the one I used to print my business cards and my dad's business cards, my heart pounding anxiously the whole time. I feel so lucky to be working here with such a rich local legacy behind me.


Enjoy!

Friend Valentines

I had forgotten to post these when I made them in February. My favorite letterpress printer, boss, and designer extraordinaire, VSM, gave her interns an alphabet stamp set for Christmas, which I decided to put to use for some one-of-a-kind valentine cards. Since many of my good girl friends - from college and otherwise - are now scattered around the country, I like to send the occasional snail mail to let them know they're still in my heart.

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Getting back to basics with the alphabet stamps

 

 

Balloons for my college roommate

I might make more of these for next year

For that romantic fellow student of literature

Hearts for everyone!

For Purchase: 25 Years, 25 Words

Hey! I had some of these prints left over from my birthday party, so I put them on my Etsy store. Buy one for your favorite linguist/English professor/word nerd.

http://www.etsy.com/listing/70294718/25-untranslatable-words-typography-print

Portrait of an Artist II

John Aczon, Bay Area-based jazz saxophonist, all around funny guy; my uncle. Here he is playing at the Round Up in Lafayette last autumn.

Portrait of an Artist I

Featuring Wayne Wallace, Bay Area-based jazz trombonist and composer, 2010 Grammy nominee, and long time friend to my parents. Here he is... on a napkin, from an evening at Yoshi's, Oakland.

He becomes a professional!

My little brother and I designed a business card for his current postgraduate job search/networking blitz, and it came out so well I decided to post all the photos. This way, maybe some of you who aren't familiar with letterpress can get a sense of the printing process we use in the studio. Although Evan's focus is on sports and (excellent) sports writing, we thought it might be fun to play around with two other elements of his personality: his love of music, and his affectionate nostalgia for the '80s. The result? An electric blue cassette tape with his name on it! 

 

We started with some sketches, and he tried a few different pen widths to get his name just right.

I finalized the design and, with the green light from Evan, emailed digital images to my platemaker to have them made into plates for printing. Then I took a field trip to the platemaker's studio, aaaaaaand ta-da! I actually made the plates myself! Evan's card required four plates, one for each color to be printed on each side: one blue layer, one gray layer (the lines of the drawing), one black layer for the front (his name), and one black layer for the back (his contact info). I shadowed my intrepid letterpress leader, Via, around the platemaking "lab" in Berkeley and helped to turn the negatives of my plates, into plastic polymer plates. It involves a machine the size of a small dishwasher that combines NASA-like good looks with oven-like functions. And it smells like a dark room. You can see one of these plates on the press bed below:

So, the first run was the blue, since it was the lightest color of the cassette image. I printed 130 ridiculous blue blobs...

... then added the linework. Wow. Check out the difference it makes! I started getting really excited...

Lastly, I printed his name on the cassette, which he and I designed to look like he'd written it in Sharpie. What do you think?

He picked a really nice luxe heavy paper from Paper Source, whose tooth you can really see in the close-up below. This thickness and texture is perfect for enhancing letterpress impressions.

 

Now all I have to do is crop these into their final dimensions (3" x 3.5", larger than the standard business card) so he can start handing them out to potential employers. I would definitely hire the kid who handed me this card!

Dang, That's One Big Beer Glass

My best friend has been living in Northampton, Massachusetts, for the last two years, and this week I finally got out there to see her for the first time. Her cute apartment really is located right over a coffee house (jealous!), where all the baristas are cute and blonde and wear high-waisted jeans with leather boots under their black barista aprons. My friend and I enjoyed a few brief days together in various cafes and bookstores, my favorite of which was the Montague Book Mill whose tucked away writing desks actually made me want to exhume my thesis for rewriting.

She got through many a long snowy winter's night at this great bar, The Moan and Dove in Amherst, where you can drink your way into OWNING a hefty beer mug with your named etched into it. When we walked in, she picked her beer, and the bartender (pictured) poured directly into her personalised mug. I drank my stout from a lowly anonymous pint glass. We ate peanuts and chicken wings, which I would usually avoid... but nothing tastes better when you're sharing it with your best friend.

Jason at the Moan & Dove, Amherst, Massachusetts

Making Connections

I met a cool cat named Wallace at my recent birthday shindig, and was pleased to find that he featured me on his sweet blog: http://ideaculture.wordpress.com/ Upon meeting him for the first time I could see he was a good man, from what he said, who he loved, and who he ran through the door when he arrived.
Firstly, he understands and honors the fact that some of this lifetime's most important creative work - and I mean WORK - is done in an armchair with one's eyes to the ceiling, no pad or pencil or computer mouse in hand. This is the real creative process; this is the hard stuff. Thinking is work, too. Secondly, he is madly in love with one of my best and dearest artist friends, and she with him. It's gorgeous, radiant, and contagious. Lastly, when Wallace entered my house, a black and white blur shot past my legs to sniff my dog's butt. Her name is Suzie, and she loves to flop her belly onto freshly dug dirt. He's got big ideas, a sexy clever gal at his side, and the cutest canine sidekick. Nice to meet you, Wallace!