Letterpress Printing - an intro

Letterpress from Naomie Ross on Vimeo.

This nicely made video provides a great overview of letterpress printing in less than two minutes.

If anachronistic and custom small press printing designs appeal to you, check out this site for inspiration and free downloads.

Chalk Lettering to Keep

With chalk in hand, Dana Tanamachi creates elegant and refined custom lettering. I recently found her work and have been absolutely mesmerized by the beauty and lightness of her artistry. As faithful 973 readers know, I am always interested in typography and lettering, but finding a simple medium as chalk on a chalkboard made exceptionally stunning is truly brilliant. I hope you'll enjoy it, too.

Here's a time lapse video of Dana creating one of her pieces.

For more examples of her work see www.danatanamachi.com/chalk/

Easter Greetings from 973

Vintage card images above and more may be found here.

Vintage Valentines

Happy Valentine's Day with Love from 973 Third

Vintage card images courtesy of Susan Breslow Sardone

The Smallest Calendar

Start your new year with a paper gadget - high style, low tech and very small. This diminutive treat offers the entire year in less than 2 1/2 inches by 3 1/4 inches. Click here for the free download from an Italian graphic designer at Grafish Design.

Packaging - Best in Show

Fall allergy and flu season sent me running out last month to stock up on tissues. I was looking for something a little more attractive than the shoe box size container covered in sad looking floral or wave motifs. A few new designs and graphics stood out on the shelves, including the surprisingly attractive and fresh triangular prism shapes in fruits and cheery colors. I was impressed.

Apparently, judges in the world of packaging design were too. I was tickled to see the slice of summer tissue boxes from Kimberly-Clark, won Best in the Show for this year's international packaging design contest from Pentawards. Click here to see all the winners, including the cool Coke cans of summer featured here.

Italic Handwriting

The back to school season is as good a time of the year as any to re-evaluate your handwriting. A recent op-ed in the New York Times challenged writers to stop mumbling on the page and drop the loopy cursive letters of the Palmer method or Zaner-Bloser style we were taught at small school desks with chunky pencils.

The new preferred style is Italic, in which letters do not always have to be joined. It's a matter of comfort and personal choice. The success of handwriting is its legibility. Oh, and closing the gaps on the tops of your letters, that's the part we read.

Click here for the NYT piece and a chance to try Italic.

For extra credit, take a free Italic handwriting lesson online here from studioarts.net.

Very Old Packaging

Revisiting: Old containers featuring beautiful and noteworthy designs

The effective branding of these early 20th century household products is evident in the unique logos, graphics and information on their packaging. How fortunate they've been saved and preserved, some with evidence of their original products, others as re-purposed.

Faultless Starch was a breakthrough product from its introduction in the 1890s for its simplicity of use and no need for lengthy boiling. It claimed to give a finished look to embroidery and lace, and was commonly used as baby and bath powder. Between 1895 and the 1920s the Kansas City company produced 36 illustrated booklets and attached them to the boxes. They included familiar stories for children with the added twist of always mentioning the product. In Little Red Riding Hood, for example, grandmother's starched apron is so pretty to the wolf that he stays for tea. The books also included riddles, games, helpful hints and useful facts.

Kingsford Silver Gloss Starch was started in 1848 in Oswego by Thomas Kingsford, a chemist. He developed it from corn and later improved and marketed it for culinary use as well. A tiny cookbook distributed by the company in 1876 boasted, “The experiment which first gave to the world this Laundry Starch made from Indian Corn, and the skill which perfected it, have been productive of still more notable success in furnishing this new article of food, which is adapted alike to the taste of the epicure and the wants of the invalid."

Not much to share on the Louse Killer to keep your poultry safe from lice. But it's a great looking design.

Symbols of Summer from Coke

The Coca-Cola Company is releasing five new limited edition designs on Coke cans this summer. The minimalist graphics feature a striped beach ball, aviator sunglasses, surf boards, a charcoal grill and stars and stripes. Coming soon!

Easter Greetings from 973

More vintage holiday cards may be found at http://vintageholidaycrafts.com

Universal Messaging

International images we recognize have moved far beyond the well known signs for the ladies' or men's room. But still there is something charming in the simple design prototype of the single color graphic in a square with rounded corners. No matter how many languages you speak, or can read, these wordless signs are fun. Maybe they are visual puns or just clues, but they entertain us and convey a message for our benefit.


I recently found several sheets of sticky labels leftover from a Moleskine planner journal. The graphic images are so delightful for their unique representations of everyday life. They reminded me of the old familiar signs, but were deservedly more universal in their message. Maybe the world is getting smaller after all.

Keep Calm & Carry On

Keep calm and carry on is a great message and a very timely one for us at this exact point in history. It's also a great poster design. The baronial graphic of the crown and the clear Gill font in caps further expresses the simple focus of the message. Well, sure, we can be optimistic with such a thoughtful and charming mantra and a pleasing graphic design to view. I'm feeling better about the world already.

The timelessness of the message and the beautiful simplicity of the graphic elements do not reveal the artist who designed the poster. Now available throughout Great Britain on t-shirts, tote bags, tea towels and door mats, to name just a few, what little is known about it is that it was created as part of a British Ministry of Information propaganda campaign in August of 1939 to alleviate fear of a possible German invasion.

A series of three posters were created under the crown of King George VI, yet only the first two were widely released, appearing on billboards, train stations and shops throughout England. The third design, Keep Calm, was held in reserve, and, thankfully, never needed for its intended use.

Somehow, somewhere, a copy of the unused poster was saved for about 60 years. It resurfaced in a box of old books purchased at auction in 2000 by booksellers Stuart and Mary Manley of Barter Books in Northumberland. They hung the poster in their shop and started to research its origins. Frequent requests to purchase it led them to reproduce the poster and offer it for sale. Some 40,000 copies have been sold through them.

In spite of its wartime origins, the message of resilience is welcome. The archives of British history and design gained a document almost unknown and the rest of us gain the benefits.

Special thanks to Jon Henley for his article Keep Calm and Carry On in the Guardian on March 18, 2009 and Mary Manley's blog entry on March 4, 2009.

Illuminated Letters

Lettering by hand with serifs and flourishes embellishes your message with beauty, creativity, and thoughtfulness. But you do not have to be an accomplished calligrapher to put together a monogram or a mini missive in a quilled alphabet as illustrated above and below.

The art of quilling or paper filigree is versatile and forgiving for the beginner. For starters, quilling is easy to learn and doesn't require a large investment in tools. Click here for more details on basic quilling instructions.

Shaping letters works best if you curl your paper strips first to condition them. Enlarge your alphabet pattern to the desired size and cut your strips to the approximate length needed for each part of the letter. Shape your strips over the pattern to match the curves of the letters. Glue together the strips as needed to form a single letter. When dry, glue the edges onto your card stock to finish.

For many more great ideas on this paper craft I recommend checking out The New Paper Quilling by Molly Smith Christensen.

Images courtesy of Molly Smith Christensen and Lark Books

When Art Sparkles & Spins

Unquestionably, Paul Rand (1914-1996) was one of the most influential graphic designers of the 20th century. Among his most famous works are the corporate identities he created for ABC, IBM, UPS and Westinghouse.

But I am also fond of some of his lesser known design projects. Rand worked his graphic magic for young audiences on four children's books elegantly written by his wife, Ann Rand, an architect, and published between 1956 and 1970.

In Sparkle and Spin, his cut-and-paste style art leads the readers around a newspaper trifold hat, up a perch of letters to a bird spouting punctuation, across a chalkboard, past a strip of candy dots and a lollipop man eating a lollipop, under a mound of sand, near an elevated train, behind a chair, through a sampler of borders and fonts, across a breakfast table and onto the dial of a phone (circa 1957). Sparkle and Spin and Little 1 have been republished by Chronicle Books.

The Design Matters

Clean, clear designs are appealing whether they were made in the early part of the century or just last year. We are drawn to a brand new retro looking design as if it were an old book unearthed in a antiquarian bookshop. The graphics, lettering and design affect our emotions before we may even have time to read the title and digest the subject. Our highly developed sense of aesthetics guide us to pick up that book with the beautiful cover or that product with the striking label. Great design makes the identity of a product enticing.

The work of Louise Fili, whose cover art appears above, takes her viewers into a world of exquisite design with references to typography and layout evoking a different place and time while creating a strikingly clean, clear and modern identity. She makes her products so appealing, it's hard to imagine living without them.

Here are a few inspiring examples from her recent work.









Images courtesy of Louise Fili Ltd.