Check out this amazing post by Jeroen Beeksman, Why Not Print Buildings?, over at The Pop-up City. It spotlights Italian inventor Enrico Dini and his investigations in large-scale three-dimensional printing. Dini is literally printing whole buildings… “London-based architect Andrea Morgante has joined Dini to produce the first 3D-printed building ever, [...]]]> (via Jaime via Pop-up City)

Check out this amazing post by Jeroen Beeksman, Why Not Print Buildings?, over at The Pop-up City. It spotlights Italian inventor Enrico Dini and his investigations in large-scale three-dimensional printing. Dini is literally printing whole buildings… “London-based architect Andrea Morgante has joined Dini to produce the first 3D-printed building ever, a pavilion to be built in the nearby town of Pontedera.” According to Beeksman’s post, the printed structure is faster, cheaper, and more eco-friendly than traditional construction. Maybe printing isn’t such outdated technology afterall.

The project was featured in Blueprint Magazine’s article The World’s First Printed Building by Tim Abrhams. It’s  definitely worth reading. And below is a video that Beeksman included in his post. I don’t speak Italian and have no explanation for the hostess who introduces the segment on Dini- Lady Gaga meets Mad Max. Maybe one of bilingual readers can shed some light on the subject…

Click here to view the embedded video.

How Master Information Designer Edward Tufte Can Help Obama Govern recaps the Obama administration’s decision to add Edward Tufte to the independent panel that advises the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board. For any unfamiliar with his work, the phrase “Master Information Designer” is [...]]]> Andrew Romero shares some fascinating news over at his Newsweek blog…

How Master Information Designer Edward Tufte Can Help Obama Govern recaps the Obama administration’s decision to add Edward Tufte to the independent panel that advises the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board. For any unfamiliar with his work, the phrase “Master Information Designer” is perhaps an understatement when reflecting on Tufte’s impact on the discipline of information design.

It’s not surprising that a President whose election campaign was in part fueled by the power of graphics would see the potential benefits in going to a professional to help in explaining the recovery plan. Tufte seems like perfect person for the job…

“This is about visual thinking and visual evidence,” Tufte says. “It’s not about commercial art. The last thing in the world that’s needed here is a designer. What’s needed is an analytical, statistical, quantitative approach. Reporting is different from pitching. Artists who design for marketing purposes inherently have problems with credibility. This is something very different in spirit. It’s about accountability and transparency—with heavy, heavy amounts of data.”

Okay, so it’s not as flashy as Fairey’s iconic image but it’s probably a lot more useful… and overall good news for any of us in the business of visual culture.

All you designers-turned-printmakers and printmakers-turned-designers should pay attention to this one. The good people at Rockport Publishers were kind enough send us a review copy of their 2009 release, Dirty Fingernails: A One-of-a-Kind Collection of Graphics Uniquely Designed by Hand by John Foster. As the subtitle suggests, the book is a survey [...]]]>

All you designers-turned-printmakers and printmakers-turned-designers should pay attention to this one. The good people at Rockport Publishers were kind enough send us a review copy of their 2009 release, Dirty Fingernails: A One-of-a-Kind Collection of Graphics Uniquely Designed by Hand by John Foster. As the subtitle suggests, the book is a survey of artist/designers working with “old” media to arrive at interesting (and commercially viable) results. While the book doesn’t focus on printmaking specifically, it is about the current embrace of the human hand in design and by default, plenty of hand-printing is included.

Lots of Printeresting favorites are featured in the book… The Little Friends of Printmaking, The Small Stakes, Ellen Lupton, Tyler Stout, The Decoder Ring Design Concern, and Yokoland to name a handful. Rather than delving deep into the psychology of The Hand-Made with essays, Foster gives us a quick intro about the importance of tactile experience and then let’s the work do the talking. Each piece featured in the book is accompanied by an insightful paragraph or two of exposition explaining the what why, and how.

Can’t go wrong with a Boston by Little Friends.

The book is broken up into five chapters: Typography for the People, These Hands Were Made for Drawing, When Each Piece Needs Your Magic Touch, Puzzle Pieces, and Kicking It Old School and each chapter starts with a brief summary of its guiding principle. Foster makes the case though his editorial choices that while the computer is a valuable tool, in a world full of digital homogeneity one way to stand out is to allow your hand to be part of the conversation. We couldn’t agree more.

Some Decoder Ring and BankerWessel.

This looks familiar.Stefan Sagmeister… designing with bananas.

Choosing work for the book must have been a blast- no doubt with the size constraints a lot of good stuff didn’t make it into the final edit. The book’s subject, analog approaches to design, is incredibly broad. No one volume could cover it in its entirety but Foster does a good job of summarizing the current state of hand-made design from his point of view. This is a decent book on any number of levels: a nice source of inspiration in the studio or classroom but good for a coffee table, too.

Jason Munn of The Small Stakes.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I’m going to go and cut a rubylith stencil.

It’s March in Austin and SXSW excitement is palpable. Some people come for the music, some for the films, some for the interactive media but what I’m most excited about (print nerd that I am) is Flatstock 24. Started by the American Poster Institute, Flatstock is traveling poster show that hits Austin [...]]]> Sean Simmons

It’s March in Austin and SXSW excitement is palpable. Some people come for the music, some for the films, some for the interactive media but what I’m most excited about (print nerd that I am) is Flatstock 24. Started by the American Poster Institute, Flatstock is traveling poster show that hits Austin every year for SXSW. It’s a huge exhibition where everything is for sale. With an average price of $20 for a hand-printed poster, almost everyone leaves with something. Established poster veterans and young upstarts are on the scene showing work and mixing it up with each other and fans alike. All and all a great sense of community permeates the giant, table-filled hall. Here’s a full list of the more than 100 exhibiting artists who’ll be in Austin Thursday through Saturday of next week(3/19-3/20).

The big event at this year’s Flatstock 24 will be the a Smokey Robinson/Shepard Fairey poster signing in conjunction with the release of Fairey’s new Robinson poster.

Also, Serie Project, Inc is teaming up with Andy MacDougall of Squeegeeville to do live screenprinting demos for the public. As I understand it, one of the posters they’ll be printing is Sean Simmons’ winning design from The Great Texas Rock Poster Contest (see the picture above). Sean is a student at the Art Institute of Austin. Nice work, Sean!

A great Flatstock tradition is that many of the artists who show their work make posters to commemorate Flatstock itself. Here are pics pulled straight from the gigposters.com Flatstock 24 forum.

The venerable Jay Ryan’s Flatstock 24 poster.

Charlie Hardwick

Crosshair

Luke Drozd

Landland

John Vogl (the Bungaloo)

Stackmatic

I’ll have pics from Flatstock in a week or so. In the mean time, you can check out my Flatstock post from last year.

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There’s been a lot of talk in the past months about Avatar, the James Cameron CGI blockbuster. Even if you haven’t seen it (which I admit I haven’t), you’d have to be living under a rock to not have heard about the film and its digitally-generated, blue-skinned stars, the Na’vi. The recent announcement of nine [...]]]>

There’s been a lot of talk in the past months about Avatar, the James Cameron CGI blockbuster. Even if you haven’t seen it (which I admit I haven’t), you’d have to be living under a rock to not have heard about the film and its digitally-generated, blue-skinned stars, the Na’vi. The recent announcement of nine Academy Awards nominations including art direction and visual effects (not to mention best picture) has put the film back in the spotlight.

What does any of this have to do with Printeresting? Well, the production company Legacy Effects actually used 3D printing to generate models to test lighting for every scene in the movie. The technology was supplied by Objet Geometries, manufacturer of ultra-thin-layer, high-resolution 3D printing systems for rapid prototyping and rapid manufacturing. Printing technology helping to win Oscars… who knew?

Steve MacDonald (aka Ramblin Worker) is a San Francisco-based artist known for his fiber-based artwork. His work straddles the realms of art, craft, and design. This embroidered Campbell’s soup cans caught my eye and seemed worth a post. Are they printed? No. But are they print-related? I would say yes. In addition to referencing Warhol, [...]]]>

Steve MacDonald (aka Ramblin Worker) is a San Francisco-based artist known for his fiber-based artwork. His work straddles the realms of art, craft, and design. This embroidered Campbell’s soup cans caught my eye and seemed worth a post. Are they printed? No. But are they print-related? I would say yes. In addition to referencing Warhol, these works can be filed under The Cult of CMYK.  Though MacDonald isn’t strictly adhering to the four-color system (note the inclusion of light green), he does appear to be quoting the language of print, at least in part, and filtering it through textiles.

You can see MacDonald’s work in his solo show at Fuse Gallery in NYC from April 24th to May 15th.

A few more pics after the jump…

Michael Loderstedt is a Cleveland-based artist whose print work covers a broad range of subject and process. Schiff Geschicte, a recent sculptural printwork, is a screenprint dealing with the American artist’s ancestral connection to Germany. The form represents the ship that carried Loderstedt’s pregnant mother to the United States. The [...]]]> Schiff Geschicte, Silkscreen, 2010.

Michael Loderstedt is a Cleveland-based artist whose print work covers a broad range of subject and process. Schiff Geschicte, a recent sculptural printwork, is a screenprint dealing with the American artist’s ancestral connection to Germany. The form represents the ship that carried Loderstedt’s pregnant mother to the United States. The piece starts out as a flat, double-sided screenprint that is then cut and assembled to render a three-dimensional finished product. The exterior of the ship is adorned in German national colors overlayed with German text and the interior of the ship is overlayed with English text.

More pictures of the ship as well as Loderstedt’s own words on the piece after the jump.

Inside-out version Schiff Geschicte.

Loderstedt writes…

This project was inspired by a recent story my mother told me, one I had never heard before (I’m now 51, she’s 75). It went like this; we were talking about various neighborhoods in Berlin that I had recently visited and I had known she had lived there in 1957 with my German-born father. He was completing part of an exchange program where he worked in the US for a year (he was at the time a young doctor), followed by year in Germany. My parents had met at Jersey City Hospital, where my mother was an x-ray technician. This much I had known.

She goes on to describe the ship passage back to the states. The seas were unusually rough, and it took longer than expected, about 2 weeks. And that she remembers entering New York harbor on her birthday, August 28th and being quite emotional about being home and steaming past the Statue of Liberty. Then she says, “I was pregnant with you”.

Realizing that I could have been born in Germany, and that early on I’d been rocking around inside her womb over the Atlantic began me to think of a number of different possibilities and actual propensities. I thought encapsulating these potentialities might best take the form of a ship-shaped, sculptural print, with text on the inside and outside of deck, printed both in German and English, and using the colors of the German flag. Some aspects of my life and identity (as much as perhaps interesting, or printeresting perhaps, to others) were addressed in the story provided on the paper ship as follows:

I am an American I suppose by birth, but have a German name. I have only recently learned much about German culture and language (with much more to learn). I know now all this could have easily been quite different.

I am a lifelong sailor and have a deep love for being on water, and have since I’ve been quite young. A prenatally developed instinct or coincidence?

I’ve recently been able to travel through Germany over the past several years. I met many German artists, collaborated with several both there and here in the US. I have hosted many German artists at my home and studio, curated exhibitions of printmaking by German artists, and have exhibited my own work often in Germany. For whatever reasons, these connections have been valuable and engaging for me, and I hope for my fellow Deutchlanders as well. Perhaps this simple paper ship is an homage to my not so distant, but obscured heritage, and my recent activity to recapture some aspects of it.

Feel free to print some out and share with friends.