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Building Blocks

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Building Blocks (2013). Artwork by Amy Redmond.

Building Blocks (2013) by Amy E. Redmond. Digital collage of letterpress printed wood type and imagery; photographed type from Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood; digital type. Printed 4-color process on brushed silver Dibond. 4′ x 8′.

DESIGN & TECHNOLOGY, INTERTWINED

I mix design with technology every day — there is no way to separate the two. As an Art Director in the corporate design world, I rely mainly on computer programs to execute my ideas for clients. While they may start out as pencil sketches, the majority (if not all) of their existence is spent in the intangible, digital world.

But as a letterpress artist my ideas are always grounded in the tangible world: I select images and letters from my type cabinets, pull inked proofs of them by hand, use scissors and glue to make a mockup of my design, assemble the final type forms, and then print using ink colors I’ve mixed myself. It is a time-consuming process, one whose physicality I’m highly conscious of and in which I take great delight.

In both cases I am using technology to produce my designs; it’s just that the technology for one is centuries older than the other.

As letterpress printing became an “antiquated” technology, it experienced a shift: first to discarded junk, then to esoteric art form, and later a pop culture fad. It has recently come full circle, returning to its status as a mass-market friendly printing method, but with a new slant: a digital file can now be turned into a photopolymer plate ready to be used on presses that are over 100 years old, bridging the age gap between the two technologies.

LETTERS, WORDS, PHRASES.

The words in Building Blocks are “design truisms” — thoughts collected from leaders in the design and tech communities, exploring how design and technology merge. The discussion began with these four questions:

  1. Design is…?
  2. Technology is…?
  3. What is the relationship between design & technology?
  4. What are the unexpected outcomes of this relationship?

From these conversations I selected words and phrases that resonated with my own thoughts about design’s relationship to technology. The words are not meant to be read in any particular order, but are presented as a form of poetry. The viewer can pick and choose their own path, using the phrases as stepping stones to reach their own conclusions.

MAKING BUILDING BLOCKS

With one foot in the letterpress world and one in the digital, it is easy for me to jump back and forth between the two technologies. But I find that in order for them to coexist in one project I need to work chronologically, starting with letterpress. The brainstorming process becomes quite simple: dig around; collect; pull proofs; don’t discriminate. By choosing an assorted alphabet of wood type, throwing in a few image cuts, and scanning the inked proofs I’ve pulled — including the backsides of some wood type — I was able to build a digital library of hand-made imagery.

(L-R) Wood type; hand-inked proofs, including the backside of a piece of wood type; more hand-inked letterpress proofs. (L-R) Wood type; hand-inked proofs, including the backside of a piece of wood type; more hand-inked letterpress proofs.

I then expanded this library by spending a morning exploring the neighborhood that surrounds the Pine+Minor building, for which Building Blocks was created. Staying within a 3-5 block radius, I snapped photos of found typography with my iPhone. Letters from logos, graffiti, mosaics and signage were captured, adding a very local and visual dialect to my collection.

Close-up of "Building Blocks". The letter "t" is taken from a photograph from the sign for Stumptown, a coffee shop just a few blocks away from Pine+Minor in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood. Close-up of Building Blocks. The letter “t” is taken from a photograph from the sign for Stumptown, a coffee shop just a few blocks away from Pine+Minor in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood.

Happening at the same time, among leaders in the design and technology communities, were conversations about how their two worlds related to one another, and the sometimes unexpected results that occur when they collide. Snippets of these conversations were also collected and added to my growing library.

With all of these elements spread out before me, I sat down to my computer and began sorting through them all, culling the herd and finding a way to pull these once tangible elements together through intangible means. This process is not one to be rushed, best done over a series of days, if not weeks, in order to truly see it with fresh eyes.

My digital file quickly file quickly grew to over 2 gigabytes in size, full of various filters, layers and digital tricks that worked together to bring it to life. At one point I had three different solutions; some time spent away from it helped me narrow it down to one. To help keep the file size somewhat manageable, I had been working in RGB color — but the final file would need to be CMYK, the 4-color printing process that would be used to print the 4×8′ image on brushed silver Dibond.

After a few adjustments, made from referring to color breakdown percentages from a Pantone Color Guide, the file was ready and delivered to the printer vendor from 3000 miles away. By the time I returned home to Seattle the following week, the intangible had once again become tangible: a small proof of the artwork was ready for my approval. A week after that, the full-sized artwork was complete.

Building Blocks (2013) by Amy Redmond.

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Thank you to Ann Hudner, Gerding Edlen Development, and Stella Color for making this large-scale artwork possible. To view the artwork in person, contact the Pine+Minor building manager during regular business hours (1551 Minor Ave, Seattle).


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