I thought I would try to collect my thoughts about the AIGA / Philadelphia Feedback portfolio review held last night at Moore College of Art. I’ll rewrite this over the next couple of days. I’ll correct the typos and provide more clarity. But I wanted to get it started for anyone that might come to it.

A note to start with. I don’t think students should be worrying about if the intended target consumer will buy into the piece. It is whether a design studio, advertising agency, etc. will buy into it as a piece representing the students potential to contribute. That is what you are selling. Not the product of your piece, but your ability to present that product in a way that sells your design, illustration, writing skills. The rest will follow.

. . .

I talked to 10 or 11 students and the quality of the work covered the full range of possibilities.

I didn’t see a lot of projects where the project itself caught my attention. Movie posters were for the standard movies. Bookcovers were for the standard books. Wine labels. Logos for small startups. Sitting here this morning I can only remember two projects (lyric posters and an exercising app that lifted the energy of the music as you worked out) that the student seemed to invent that was really, really interesting and new, but both of the solutions had uninspired design which was a real shame. I think they both could have been projects where that one project would have made me want to hire you. It is hard to imagine how many of the projects come from teachers that say “Design a wine label.” For the money they get to teach, they can come up with better projects than I saw, but then I only saw a few portfolios. They all seemed strangely normal in a world where change is happening at breakneck speed. For instance, instead of just designing a wine label or a package that makes a crappy bottle of wine cost twice as much, design a bottle that is a matchmaker, the person (thing?) that brings the two people that are sharing it together—the eHarmony of wine labels. Maybe a label that explains all of the subtle tastes that I should be tasting as I drink it, so that after the wine, I’m a better judge of wines. I hope that made sense as I think it is an interesting point.

1. This is a bit self serving, but write and design and mail a THANK YOU through the United States Post Office to everyone who took time away from work or families or TV to spend an evening looking at your student work. I mean DESIGN a thank you. Not an email. Something that took a few minutes out of your life. One of the best instances I spoke of this last night was suggesting that a student take a criticism I made of a piece they thought was helpful and use that as the basis for the design of the thank you. It would take them about 3 minutes to do it. What did I say that was important to you. Include that criticism in some way in the thank you so they will essentially know who it came from. Make the reviewer remember you by your thank you. THEN MAIL IT. DO IT QUICKLY. In my opinion, if you wait two weeks, you might as well not do it. You could do those well and you’d have another page in your portfolio. You should thank everyone (same concrete way and not just an email) that ever gives you any of their time. Everytime. Everytime. Everytime. For the rest of your life. I am amazed at how much effort I can go to. I just did a project for the benefit of 9 graduate students and did not get one hint that anyone cared for the 90 minutes effort it took on my part.

2. I started my interviews last night with “What do you want to be?” I was surprised how many students couldn’t articulate that in one or two sentences. Why are you studying design or illustration or typography? Then to me your portfolio should be a body of work that will jump start you down that path. And that first piece in the portfolio should be the dessert of what should be a good visual meal.

3. Boring design work. One way I tried to makes sense of what unexpired design started with, “If the client was willing to approve this layout, how long do you think it would take me to design the piece.” In most instances, no more than 5 minutes a page to pour in some type, grab an existing image and crop it and position it in a nice way. Done. 5 minutes. You have to do work that will make me, a professional designer, work hard to duplicate or equal your effort.

Add to this any design where you use existing photography in any kind of dominant way without inflecting some of your own effort into it. Taking a photo from some magazine, cropping it into a rectangle, and gluing it down is a crime against design. NEVER USE ANYONE ELSE’S CREATIVE WORK AS YOUR OWN. Crop it in an important way. Intrude into it. Carve it. Something. Same is true for typography.

4. The jugsaw puzzle syndrome. Personally I hate it when the various visual elements (illustration, piece of type, or whatever) has an imaginary fence around it that keeps anything else from intruding into or onto it. Photos on one side of the gutter—typography on the other side of the gutter. Boring. It is like the world is a two-dimensional space and the most anything can do is bump against something else (and even then most of the things have a little white border around them). Why can’t a descender descend more into the next line and then maybe split the word under it like a knife cutting through a block of cheese. One of the great things about computers is that you can layer. Do that. If you don’t there should be a really good reason why you didn’t. Intrude. Interrupt. Crowd. You have a lot of control over what stands out first by what overlaps something else. Overlap provides power and it can even happen to something small.

5. Business cards. Have them and give them out recklessly. I’m a letterpress printer and I HATE 8 POINT TYPE ON A BUSINESS CARD. Honestly, if you want me to write you an email so I can offer you a $40,000 a year job, don’t you think it should be easy for me to read your email address. My favorite business card I’ve ever seen was a guy’s name on the front and his email address on the back. No address. No phone number. He was the president of one the largest advertising agencies in the world. Name and email were the same size. About 18 point. The card was red and if you were in the business you knew exactly what agency (Ogilvy) he worked for. How small can I make the type? BORING. Your business card is a BILLBOARD. Act like it. And it wouldn’t hurt if you acted like you cared that I had to look through the data on it while trying to dial it on a cellphone standing out in bright sunlight.

6. The order of the portfolio is critical. I’m not sure I saw anyone that actually had what I thought was their best work first (of course, maybe I don’t know how to like the right pieces). Who do you want to be and the piece says that the absolute best should be your first piece. Your second best  piece should be the last piece in your portfolio. You want to start on a good note and end on a good note. Third best piece should be the second piece in your portfolio. The ones in between the second and last can likely be in most any order, but I would consider how you sequence the work. How do they tell a narrative story about who you want to be? You don’t have to group all of your editorial work together and then all of your packaging. They can move around. You can bounce back and forth between edgy and subdued work, large scale and small scale.

7. Slim down the portfolio. People, especially with iPads, tended to show too much work. Honestly, 5 killer pieces could be enough. My guess is that most people are hired on only 1 or 2 pieces, so clearly those must be good projects. You have to make sure the others don’t bring down the good ones. Don’t pad your portfolio with projects that don’t matter. Maybe one or two details and move on. May people that wanted to show that an idea had legs just added 4 applications that were then too small to really see. You actually need to show ‘legs’ with a project that shows them well, and not just an idea with alternative applications. Don’t include work just because you have a lot of time invested in it. For the most part I don’t care where you put in your time. If you can do good work quickly, more power to you. Actually, good work should look easy, inevitable, almost as if, “What else could I have done?”

It is worth throwing in here how hard it is to take a piece you’ve spent a month on and then not put it in your portfolio. But if it isn’t helping to tell your story well, you have to be a surgeon and cut it out.

And if you need to photograph the project (i.e. package design) it needs to be a good photograph. Use good lighting. I like them with a bit of a shadow. Look at our books in our portfolio. And think about if you can crop off part of the thing. You don’t necessarily need to show the neck of a wine bottle. You can make it a lot larger to show off your label if you bleed it off the top. And cutting off the top of the bottle shows some design while showing it all likely doesn’t.

8. Overall piece’s concept. What is the piece about? How have you helped me figure it out. There was a lot of visually interesting work, but I just couldn’t quickly figure out how to read it. Keep in mind that if you have large type I’m going to read that first. Then my eye is at the end of those words. How do you get me to look at the next important thing? What elements were important to your story? How do you help me navigate through the piece? This often happened on posters and posters are quick pieces often viewed from some distance. It was like reading a short story where the author took all of the sentences and put them in a different order. Where do I start? Where next? Scale. Color. Position. Juxtaposition. If you want me to see and connect various elements in the piece you are going to have to put up some road signs.

9. Centering or designing a number of different projects with the same layout. There were a bunch of logos with the name of the company centered under it and they were from a lot of different schools. Keep in mind I don’t need you if all I’m going to do is center them one over the other. That will take me 2 seconds. Take me somewhere else. Marry the logo and the company name together. Concern yourself with how they would work separately. Make the pieces fit together in a surprising way. And get up every morning and say to your self, “Don’t center if you can avoid it.”

10. I also didn’t see many (I may not have seen any) complex design problems that seem like the kinds of problems normal businesses have. Little that seemed like it would take more than 2 or 3 weeks of class. I need a logo, then I need that logo applied to some places (personally I would design a logo where you could use variations of it and still identify the company) like the store front, letterhead, 3 kinds of business cards (for business meetings versus those that would sit out for the general public to pick up), and ad, a brochure, a mailing piece, an ipad. Now do all of that, but have a cohesive concept of the company and have every one of those pieces add to that story. “We sell lots of cute things.” The logo should say that. The letterhead should say that. An ad should say (show) that? And I could go on and on about that. Not just the name of the company, but “We sell lots of cute things.”

Some thoughts for AIGA for next year.

Do the breakout sessions in the middle of the semester and try to help people get juiced about doing a killer portfolio before they get to the Feedback. I would have loved to have a chance to talk to several of the students two months ago. Schools might have seniors do a test run at the portfolio and invite five people to review them. Get that information BEFORE you do you portfolio.

How about an early portfolio review where they only show five pieces?

When students sign up they need to also list their schools.

15 minutes is too short.

Why not start the interviews at 5:00. Reviewers can get involved as they get there?

Project: Alphabet poster

Size: 15″ x 22″

Edition: 25 posters

Production notes: Printed from handset wood & metal type on a Vandercook Universal III by Lead Graffiti, May 2012

Paper: Somerset Textured White, 250 gsm

Color runs: three handrolled runs

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A Lead Graffiti Metal Type Composition workshop went sour with two people out of three not showing up. The one person who was there had some letterpress experience, so we decided to change horses.

We had been wanting to try out this 40 line Gothic Condensed so we set out to produce an “alphabet poster” in three runs with all handrolling of the type.

We roughly laid out how we would arrange things, knowing that it would change as we moved on. We wanted a spontaneous feeling versus the normal grid layout most people do when doing one of these kinds of posters.

Brenda Ridley worked on this piece during the afternoon’s diversion.

One of the things we love about letterpress is the variety of collaborations that go on. One we’ve gotten involved with this year for the first time is a small book (5″ x 7″) entitled It’s a Small World. About 60 people got together and each produced a page (front / back). We’ve collected the entire set except for 4 issues. This year was the 58th edition.

We took the opportunity to work with an idea that had been bouncing around in our heads where you can cast multiple lines from the same line of matrices on our Intertype C4. We also like playing with punctuation and challenging the normal rules of readability.

The print was produced in 4 runs of black. It was fun printing multiple runs in the same color because it makes the outcome look much simpler than it was to produce.

The back of the piece was a story about spontaneity and creative thinking we thought the group would enjoy. Also kind of interesting that the only way you can get the book is to be one of the participants.

Craig Cutler pulled out all of the stops on his final week of his year-long series of weekly personal photography projects. Lead Graffiti contributed some heavily debossed work in the form of a flipbook. The sheets were photographed at a very low light angle which really accented the depth. Here are two frames from the film.

Lead Graffiti’s contribution run from 1:34 - 1:46, 2:02 - 2:11, and 2:17 - 2:25 in the 3.48 film. Really nice to see what a conceptual photographer does when you just hand them some typography made via letterpress. Putting it into film ramps even that up another 5 notches. A killer end to what must have been a grueling test of creative endurance.

Tray and Ray got the chance to go up and spend a day at Fast Ashley’s while a number of the studio segments for the final film were shot. When you’ve got New York City firefighters blocking a street and blasting water through the sheet metal you know something’s happening.

This weekend we crossed our 500th Lead Graffiti workshop participant with a ‘creative’ letterpress book project. We went to a bit of extra trouble to preprint the numbers in handrolled color.

We had been thinking about a workshop that used quotes starting with numbers where we would have six participants and everyone would get a spread

One must love a cat on its own terms. ~ Peter Gray

Two people kissing always look like fish. ~ Andy Warhol

Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

“The four major guilt groups—food, love, career, and mothers.” ~ Cathy Guisewite

“If I’m not back in five minutes… just wait longer!” ~ Jim Carrey

Six one way. Half a dozen the other.

There is some nice typographic experimentation going on in there. Just for the record we’ve rotated some of the pages so the bottoms would all be in the same direction. In the printed piece half of them are upside down. Careful folding and tearing of the sheet turns it into an accordion / caterpillar book. We use Lead Graffiti pastepaper and a no glue / no sewing method for making a cover.

The partipants walk out of the workshop with a finished book and enough pieces to make two more that they can give away or trade.

We always give each of our letterpress book workshops to Special Collections at the University of Delaware so they can include a line on their résumé for having a piece in that wonderful collection.

Craig Cutler has finished his year-long series of weekly personal project, two of which connect with Lead Graffiti.

The first was week 49, which included 16 still life photo of various imagery Craig found around our studio. Here are four of them, but you can see them all here.

From top left: portrait of our 1956 Intertype, handcarved wood type from the 1840s, a 96 point uppercase Caslon X, and a galley of large metal type.

I had to put a couple of images from Craig Cutler’s second day of shooting for his CC52 project.

Above is Craig arranging a bunch of woodtype ampersands and Craig, with Jeff assisting, balanced over his 4 x 5.

This was the final shot of Craig (second from left) shooting a killer portrait of our Intertype. The outcome was stunning. Nice that he didn’t ask us to move the 3,400 pound beauty. That’s Tre (pronouced tray) to the right and Tray in the middle. Always nice to have two Tray’s in the studio at the same time.

The Polaroids looked great. We can’t wait to see the finishes of the whole event.

Any VC grads out there that want to get together at the show’s opening in Manhattan in the middle of May? Would be nice to see some old faces.

New York photographer Craig Cutler is nearing the end of CC52, his year-long series of weekly personal projects, and has chosen to shoot #49 at Lead Graffiti in our Newark, Delaware letterpress studio. It is interesting to watch Craig dig through our cabinets and shelves, reminding us of the beauty in our everyday objects and things stuck in corners attracting ever thickening layers of dust and spider webs.

It was satisfying to share our cathedral of wood & metal type with Craig’s reverence for film. Craig is shooting in black / white and color on 4 x 5 and an exhibition celebrating his creative journey is planned for New York in May.

Below is a photo taken by Jeff Cate who was assisting on the project showing Ray and Tray dismantling the day’s first set-up composed from our 96 point Caslon foundry metal type.

We’ll be sure to announce when the images from the Lead Graffiti shoot are online which should be around March 8th.

This is a photograph of Craig working with some found type from our ‘hell box’.

Maybe five years ago we bought our Vandercook SP-15 off eBay. When it got here the one major problem was that the ink drum was quite scratched from the automatic cleaning bar that scraped the ink off it. Lately we’ve been having trouble printing evenly with it and started to deduce that it might be a combination of the colder weather (and colder ink) and the ink drum dropping ink on rather erratically as the press ran.

We’ve wanted to get it remilled for years and finally got around to doing it this week.

I’m not sure what we expected, but we gasped when they brought it out. There is nothing like having the right tool for the right job.

Our studio is a 2,200 square foot space in an industrial park and as it turns out there is a grinding service just down the street called J&A Grinding that we’ve been using to sharpen our cutter blades since we moved in. We asked them if they could mill the surface of our drum smooth and they said, “No problem.”

It cost us $150 as it took at least 7 or 8 passes to get all but one small area that just seemed dangerously deep, but very, very small. I wish I had taken a photo of it before the milling to show you how much damage there was, but above is one of the finished job.

Honestly, we aren’t going to use the auto-cleaning any more. We also might just take all of the other metal rollers and let them take one pass across them all and just have it like new again.

I also think we’ll start adding ink on the rubber rollers instead of hitting the metal ones with an ink knife.

Lead Graffiti is pleased to announce the upcoming publication of The Multifaceted Mr. Morris. This is the catalogue of the William Morris exhibition mounted in the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection at the University of Delaware for the “Useful & Beautiful” conference held in October 2010. More than 30 books, manuscripts, drawings, and other works are described and an introduction tells the story of how the collector came to collect Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites. The author, Jane Trippett, is a PhD student in Art History at the University of Delaware.

The book is printed via letterpress in Caslon type, with eight color plates, 150 copies will be available, 100 in wrappers ($50) and 50 signed hardcover ($125) bound with parchment.

Books will be available through Oak Knoll Books and Lead Graffiti.

As we at Lead Graffiti approach printing via letterpress as designers, we wanted to find an interesting way to incorporate some visual element to the project. Many of the pieces included in the book are fabulous, often either one-of-a-kind or ones with an important provenance.

We took each entry and looked at the piece for some visual element we found interesting. Often it was typographic, in the instance of a photo or a drawing it might just be a small area that attracted us or a word in a letter. We took those elements, photographed them, put them through Livetrace, and designed a space at the top of each page printed via letterpress for them to inhabit. We printed them in a light tone so as to not detract from the main reason this book exists. It will be interesting for someone who visits the MSL Collection to look through some of the pieces and see if they can find the image. Sometimes it will be easy. At other times it will be quite difficult.

Here are a few of the images we used in the book to give you a taste.