In 2004 my teaching colleague, Hendrik-Jan Francke, brought designer Stefan Sagmeister in for a workshop. Stephan mentioned that every Monday morning from 9 to noon he produced a layout for a CD cover just to give him the chance to play and experiment. And Stefan does great CD covers.

That reminds me of a mantra  Jill and I read in the U.S. Olympic Skiing team book—Smooth. Natural. Fast.

This is a quote from Stephan. “I’m not interested in surface or in styling. That is something that comes long after the concept, at the very end of each project—often at the last minute. Then you push it to look as good as possible. What I’m interested in—it all sounds so simple-minded—is strong imagery, design that actually works.” - Stefan Sagmeister / Print

. . .

Facebook notifies me of friends who have changed their profile images. I’ve decided to try Stephan’s project every week (or at least every other week depending on if friends actually change their profile images) to produce a dozen notecards for the friend based on one of their images, which I’ll use as a point-of-departure. I’ll try something—hopefully new, hopefully experimental, hopefully typographic. But then we’ll have to see how it turns out.

Here is winner #1 which we refer as the “O” card.

Details about the letterpress part.

Paper: American Masters Black

Size: A2 (5.5″ x 4.125″)

Runs: two press runs + handrolling

Edition: 24 (12 for Kristen supplied with envelopes, 1 for Stephan, 2 for the archives, 9 to promote)

Production notes: 1) The Os are wood type blind impressed into the paper. 2) Then, I carefully registered the h! to align with the bottom of the left O (no small task with deckle-edged paper). 3) using our Vandercook Universal III (which was still inked with white from the h!), I would reink a 2″ hand roller, which could be done very smoothly by pressing the hand roller against the press rollers. This helped keep the inking very even across the two dozen cards. Then the roller was lightly rolled across the paper so as to not ink the edges from the wood type. Then the accents (the V shape in this instance) were added by using the edge of the hand roller.

Lead Graffiti congratulations go out to Kristen and the cake that followed her.

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