SILVER & LIGHT from Ian Ruhter on Vimeo.

This is a beautiful project, with beautiful people, beautiful craft, and pure Friday awesomeness. Going back to the roots without leaving society. You know what I’m going to say: RAD!

Glen Milner is a London based filmmaker who created a short vignette of a book being created using traditional printing methods.

I’ve been swimming in coffee and tea packaging inspiration, so I thought I’d share my world with you today. HAM is about to launch into a very exciting rebrand for a local bev maker here in NH. We’re very excited. Not to mention totally jacked up on the high quality coffee our client keeps generously sending us away with after meetings. Life is good.

Oh, and we here at Okay Great have a very exciting giveaway coming up (that’s related to this post, actually!) so keep reading and be on the lookout for that soon!

More bev porn after the jump!

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I honestly think that great literature (and David Simon’s The Wire) can save the world. But, ours is currently a world of blogs, tweets, instagram, status updates and cat videos. There is a sort of loss that we are suffering, not to mention a lapse in Monday afternoon productivity due to…well, in my case, it is probably cats. I’m not sure we’ve seen the dividends of this suffering just yet, but I can imagine there will be less and less books like Lolita being published in the future. Unless someone turns Lolita into a fucking zombie OH GOD IN HEAVEN PLEASE DON’T DO THAT.

Lately, I’m longing for something very far away from a computer screen. I’m looking for evidence of a human hand connected to a human brain and heart. The best proof is often found in the scribbles and scratches in the margins. Just look at Nabokov’s butterflies above. He had an obsession that wouldn’t quit, even here when he was working on a translation of the Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. It’s like seeing Picasso’s brushstrokes in a museum. It’s thrilling to be that close to his moving hand. Most of the time, we can’t get that close to a writer’s hand. Unless, you look in the margins of their working manuscripts.

The above, is a page from T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. I love knowing what he wanted to rework, how he crossed out sections, how some words had to be cobbled out.

And this scene from The Godfather – Coppola uses TWO colored pens here! And all those arrows, all that movement while there is eating and shooting! I love it.

Maybe this is the same reason why some ladies throw their panties on stage at a Poison concert (and yes, some ladies are still doing it). Maybe we all just want to get a piece of us a little closer to the things we love. For me, it’s my eyes on beautiful words and ideas.

Though, back in the day, if Faulkner was playing the Arena, I may have thrown a pair his way.

P.S. of course, there is a Tumblr for this and that. That’s our world of today in a nut-shell, baby.

¡Oh! ¡Un zig-zag! is a new little book by Spanish designer and illustrator Antonio Ladrillo. Twelve double page illustrations talking about the color and the shape. Basic color and simple geometrical shapes turned into characters that reflect through a simple text about their condition. ‘We are lines!’, ‘We are curves!’

You can pick up a copy for cheap @ Antonio’s shop!

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Yes. That’s correct. We’ve started a new business. A year after we opened Haigh & Martino in our bedroom and a few years after we became internet friends with Brainstorm (remember the rad giveaway we did with them!!??) we combined forces and have opened Industry Standard, a screen printing shop with the greatest intentions. We’ll be working with talented artists whether they’re a big name already or waiting to be discovered by readers or kids with crisp bills at craft shows.

Things have been moving fast, to say the least. The pic above is from a recent open house for important people at 3S Artspace, where our studio (both HAM, Brainstorm and IN/ST combined workspace) is located. We’ve been lucky to become friends with the founder of 3S, all around amazing dude, Chris Greiner (he sings and surfs!!) and we’re ecstatic to be housed in the next hub of all things creative in Portsmouth, NH. 3S will be turning into a music venue, an art gallery and a farm to table restaurant. Not a bad place for us to be. I can just imagine working all day in the studio and walking downstairs to check out the band and grab a beer at the bar. WHAAAT?!!? Dreams, people. Dreams. They sometimes surprise you and come true.

3S was kind enough to offer us a ginormous (albeit real raw) space and with a little elbow grease, some pallets and a lot of love for what we do, we’ve got it into working condition with enough room for every-thang. And then some.

The greatest thing about Industry Standard so far? If it’s not the lunchtime frisbee/skateboarding breaks, the bobby bottleservice jokes, serious shop talk about paper stock or the sheer thrill of walking into a space that looks and feels like who we all are and want to be – then it’s definitely being in business with great people who love to work hard and play even harder.

If you’re an artists who needs screen printing, give us a holler.

If you’re a bright young thing looking to make your life truly yours, I hope this post inspires you to jump into it. Fully. We have and it’s the best thing we’ve ever done. So far.

Sometimes, I feel pretty stupid being online all day long. And it’s at those times that I am thankful for having stacks of Cabinet magazine (issues 13-43!) piled up in the living room. Intent on encouraging “a new culture of curiosity, one that forms the basis both for an ethical engagement with the world as it is and for imagining how it might be otherwise”, Cabinet makes you more eager to check your mailbox than your inbox. So put down that silly iPad or whatever gadget you pretend replaces printed magazines these days, and dive in.

I really love the breadth of style from Atelier Olschinski, a duo out of Austria. Just compare these two pieces above and below. Metropolis vs Space Odyssey.

They have such a great eye that extends not only to graphic design, but to photography, editorial art direction and plain old high-end concepts. I like. A lot.

I really like this event invitation done by German design firm LSDK. Their whole portfolio is great, which is extra impressive considering they were just founded in 2009. You can check out more on their website.

Jessica Hische may not have coined the term, but she defines procrastiworking.  In addition to being a prolific letterer, typographer, and designer, she also the proprietor of approx 1/7 of the internet (up to about 1/4 when you eliminate all serious sites).  One of her new endeavors is something a bit more useful – Inker Linker.  It’s a simple site where you can find printers based on the type of printing they do, your priorities for the job, and (soon) their location.  I think this will be a really useful resource for us freelancers who need to find an offset printer or a letterpressman for a print job.  Also, if you’re a printer, and you’re reading this, head over and post your info on the site so you can be listed.

I love the touches on the site too – like the crosshair for the cursor, and heavy use of CMYK.  Cooper Black also never looked so perfect.