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Typography Deconstructed Poster

28 Feb

Ready to pump up your type vocab and sound smart next time you bump into Matthew Carter? Well then, this beauty of a poster designed by Drew Binkley at 38pages is just for you. They have a nifty site called typographydeconstructed.com with great typographic anatomy content. This poster is for sale there too – ready to release the inner type freak in all of us.  Get yours with promo code SOFMARCH2011 for good for $10 off all of March.

We letterpress printed this poster on our Heidelberg 21 x 28 cylinder. You can see in the photo details, the polymer plate is positioned in the press on a custom made full size 21 x 28 inch Boxcar Base. The poster is printed with extra tight register (no trapping) on 100% cotton Crane Lettra Fluorescent White 110lbC and trimmed to a final size of 16 x 24 inches.

_0000_Typography_poster_letterpress_drew_binkley _0001_Typography_poster_letterpress_title_detail _0002_Typography_poster_letterpress_comprehensive_guide _0003_Typography_poster_letterpress_anatomy_of_type _0004_Typography_poster_letterpress_detail4 _0005_Typography_poster_letterpress_detail3 _0006_Typography_poster_letterpress_detail2 _0007_Typography_poster_letterpress_detail1 _0008_Typography_poster_letterpress_credits _0009_Typography_poster_letterpress_boxcar_base_21x28 _0010_Typography_poster_letterpress_heidelberg_feed_pile _0011_Typography_poster_letterpress_heidelberg_delivery

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Nicholas Di Genova

06 Dec

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all drawings © NICHOLAS DI GENOVA

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NICHOLAS DI GENOVA is an artist that I spotted in June during Scope Basel. Few months later, it’s definitively time to feature his incredible drawings on WFW.

NICHOLAS DI GENOVA is a Canadian artist who works mainly with ink and animation paints to create a vast and intense encyclopedic range of constructed interconnected species, families and rival clans that find themselves projecting their habits, relations and environments to their viewers.

“When I was a kid growing up I was obsessed with animals and monsters… I’d draw them everyday, and when I grew up I either wanted to be a zoologist or a monster hunter… When I got a bit older I realized that being a zoologist was less exciting than I had imagined, and that ‘monster hunter’ isn’t even a real job, so I just kept drawing. I pretty much do the exact same thing at 29 years old that I did when I was 9 years old.”

This is Art, with a capital “A”: very good, important and innovative!

 
 

book art

21 Jul

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it’s all so pretty… I’m kind of obsessed with book art. I dabble a little here and there with folding book but nothing like what’s really possible. Book art in general is fascinating to see the things people come up with. The other day Ellie of Mint (love her blog) tweeted about her latest post featuring artist Jonathan Callan. I made a note to look it up when I had time. Today I searched google images for “book art”.  It blew my mind. I’m highlighting three artists I really enjoyed (there were many) The above image is Cara Barer and below are Jonathan Callan, Georgia Russell.

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Cara Barer

Houston based artist, all started with a yellow pages she found on the street. Since then she has been manipulating or finding manipulated books and photographing them. Beautiful.

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Jonathan Callan

Love the mass of his pieces. They are huge. Very cool.

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Georgia Russell

Okay, here’s where I just decided I absolutely had to post about this… it’s unbelievable. Truly gorgeous work and under glass domes??? Oy!

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Beating the Recession with Websites

01 Oct

With the Dow Jones experiencing its biggest drop in history, and the stock market losing over 1 trillion dollars, people are looking for other places to invest their money. I recently took the money I had invested in the stock market and put it into websites. When the stock market crashed, my funds were completely unaffected. Recession or not I still consider websites to be the better investment. Historically, if you invest in the stock market for the long run, you can expect about a 10% return a year. If you invest in bonds, you can expect an even lower return.

Now let’s take a look at these returns compared to investing in a website. The first website I ever purchased was gamedip.com. The site cost me $3,000. Now, if you invested that money in the stock market you could expect a 10% return after 1 year. But let’s assume that you are an experienced trader and you crush the market with a 20% return. So after one year your $3,000 becomes $3,600. Not bad, especially considering the fact that if you left it in a savings account you would end up with $3030 (1% return).

Now let’s compare this with my first novice investment in a website. When I bought my first site, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I came across the listing for Gamedip and the description intrigued me. First of all, the sites content is 100% user generated; the sites users are the ones that create new games. I realized that if I bought the site all of the work was done for me. Secondly, the traffic was 100% organic (it was not paid for) so my only expense would be hosting. As far as revenue, the description said the site made about $150 a month from Google ads and affiliate links. Anyway, I bought the site, and in two months it made $280 in revenue. After two months of owning Gamedip I was contacted by someone who had wanted to purchase Gamedip at the same time I did but missed the opportunity. I told him about how great the site was (content user generated, organic traffic etc.) which made him regret that he didn’t purchase it even more. I told him I would sell him the site for $4,000. We eventually agreed at a price of $3,600. He sent me the money through PayPal (which took $100 in fees) and I ended up with a $500 dollar profit from selling the site plus $280 from Adsense revenue (minus $40 for hosting) for a total of $740 profit. $740/$3000 = a 24.6% return in only 2 months. Although this is only one example, the fact remains that this comparison takes the results of an expert stock trader against the results of a novice web site investor with the site investor racking in a larger return in 1/6 the time.

Now let’s look at the risks. With websites you have to worry about a few things. First of all there is the problem of sending a stranger thousands of dollars over the internet. Although this can be nerve racking, if you complete the transaction through an escrow service, it that ensures you will not get cheated. Basically you give the money to escrow, the buyer transfers the site to you and you have a grace period to determine if the seller gave you accurate information about the site. If you proceed through an escrow service, the possibility of someone stealing your money and giving you nothing in return is essentially eliminated. The major risk of investing in a site is that the sites revenue will be significantly less than expected. However, even if this does happen, with enough work you can increase traffic and create new revenue streams. With the stock market you have to worry about corporate scandals, market drops, and market manipulation. Both investments are relatively risky (when compared to bonds etc.) so even though in my opinion websites are the safer investment, for the purpose of this article we will assume that the risk is approximately the same.

Since investing in a website is no riskier than investing in the stock market, the better investment is clearly the one that offers the best return. Here is another personal example that will show the potential returns of a site. My second website I bought for $7,500. The site is called freebiesociety.com. The site is actually a little bit of a disappointment, bringing in only $300 a month under my management. Despite the fact that I am disappointed by the income the site still creates a 4% return a month. That translates into a 48% return in a year– 38% higher than the average yearly return of the stock market.

With such a high risk to reward ratio, websites are clearly the superior investment. The fact that not many people have realized this makes it all the better. But people are starting to catch on http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/29/technology/29flip.html. So if you are going to get started, you better hurry up before everyone else rushes in!

 
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