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Paul at This is Real Art very kindly sent me this set of postcards he designed for the Type Museum as a thank you for a favour I did. It has to be said, a favour sooooo small it hardly deserved the name. I'm not being ungracious though, these are brilliant and received with great thanks.
They're still available from Paul.
I've been itching to get this posted. The cover and title pages were designed by George Mayhew while everything else was done by John Goodwin. But the cover! A masterful bit of overprinting; the still vivid colours (just good old cyan, magenta and yellow) retain a really physical presence on the paper. Close scrutiny reveals delightful subtleties; like the eighth of an inch (this was pre-decimal of course) of pure magenta down the left-hand edge of the otherwise red colour bar, barely discernible against the yellow overprinted section and that word "Macbeth" just not quite aligned to the dark, purple panel where magenta and cyan coincide.
And inside it's just as good with heavy colour bars working with gaping white spaces. Even the back cover is intriguing with coloured inks overprinting solid black to create subtle changes in darkness.
Very sad to hear (via the CR blog) that Paul Arden died yesterday. Here's some is his wisdom (repeated from last November).
While I was off work last week my parents were over from the mainland so we all went to the Ulster Folk Museum for a day. It's a great place, I've mentioned before, and everyone enjoyed it. Just as we were polishing off our picnic lunch my oldest boy asked if he could go and play in the coal yard. Despite images of a returning blackened child, we let him go.
A few minutes later I thought I'd better check to make sure he hadn't fallen fowl of any of the numerous hazards; I know, I thought, I'll sneak through the coal yard office and scare the b'jesus out of him (as the locals say). But, creeping in, I was greeted by a warming sight: there he was, at the desk, leafing through this lovely vintage atlas. That's me' boy.
Apparently, he was deciding where we were going to go on holiday. Somewhere off the coast of the Antarctic it is then.
(Took the opportunity to extend my UFM Flickr set too.)
I won't lie; just saw this on the We Made This blog and thought it deserved more blog love. A lovely job if you ask me and there's a website packed full of everything you'd ever want to know about the project.
Here's another one from Nick's box.
Map aside, it's interesting (well, for about 2 minutes) that the Caltex brand looked remarkably like another but a little digging reveals that it still does because they're both offspring of the same hermaphrodite parent Chevron. It's all explained here.
Thanks go to the man with the box.
