Bon à Tirer // Taken from the French, “bon à tirer” is a technical term used by printmakers to indicate the final proof of a print, the standard against which all others in the edition are judged.
We got some shirts printed up by the Hot Snot Print Shop for the AIGA event last week. We’ve also got a bunch left- so we’ll be putting them up on our web-store next week along with the “Birds of Sadness” poster Ben did for the Sweet Hair show a few weeks back. We’ll be sure to let all you fine folks know once they’re ready to be purchased.
The shirt was designed with our good old tabletop manual proofing press, strong wood type and a steady hand.
We just got these suckers back from Ideal Printers over in St. Paul- designed by SOF and offset printed (feasibility and cost issues made it much more reasonable for offset) for The College of Visual Arts- in St. Paul as well.
In order to make the colors on this guy pop as hard as possible we swapped out the standard CMY inks with their florescent equivalent. The actual design process was one of the funnest yet- we took various wood type and ran scrap paper through a little tabletop proofing press and immediately sprayed with our press wash-up solvent and then isopropyl alcohol to make interesting splatters / streaks / clouds / etc. The solvent and the alcohol has the same effect when mixed as gas and water.
Here’s a sweet little run we just finished up for Mauseth Design out of Hoboken, New Jersey. They came up with this set of faux business cards with fake names and numbers for those certain instances where you just- well, where you just could use one of these little guys (e.g. Clubs, Bars, Lounges, Coffee Shops, Class Reunions, Chinese Restaurants and Traffic Stops).
Toot toot! Our Design Camp system for last summer’s event (designed and letterpress printed by SOF) has been making the rounds in the local and national design competition circuit- and lucky for us, doing quite well.
So far we got in at the AIGA MN show, the AIGA National show, and Print’s Regional Annual- and we couldn’t have done it without our copywriter on the project, Riley Kane, illustrator extraordinaire Jenna Brouse, Jeff Baker at Shapco and Dave Lundell at Anchor, Aleks Stancevic and for the Minn. AIGA for givin’ us the darn thing in the first place.
It took about 3 months to design this sucker from the ground up and another month (thereabouts) to mash pretty paper with big greasy machines until this came out:
The Wall. Its up- in all its magical glory. So special, so tasty.
There’s a better half of a thousand cans up there and darn near all are (diligently) cracked open from the bottom, preserving the original seal. Also out of all the cans hanging, there’s only a handful of duplicates. We are quite proud of this assemblage of our cultural history and all of us, at one time or daily, have to be reminded to get the hell back to work and stop staring into abyss of an unfortunately long-gone and better era.
Have a good weekend everyone- and for all those in America, “Don’t blow your hands off.”
Fresh cards sent in from the good dudes at LovelyMPLS (who’ve got a real solid portfolio of design/screenprinted work). Two color print with ultra-bright day-glo pink and metallic silver on the good old 220lb Crane Lettra make for a very impressive and striking card, to say the least.
Check out that fine pattern work on the back- the envelope really got pushed with this one. A bunch of that line work is 1/4 point thick (literally as thick as a hair), tapering down, and on top of that the thing’s are reversed out!
We just printed the latest identity for Space150 (version twenty-two, designed by Dan Jenstad) and after the official launch on Friday, I figured I’d put up a few pictures because its so nicely designed.
