Roberto Bolado sent me this great video about a let­ter­press printshop in his coun­try.

Dito­ria from typometro on Vimeo.

This is the sec­ond part of the inter­view with Adrian Shaugh­nessy. The first part was here.

What sort of designer had you become at this point?
Well, I’m not a very good designer; I’m an OK designer. I’m OK when it comes to com­plex things like grids. I like maths. I like geom­e­try. I like mul­ti­ples. How things are arranged on the page. I like that because it’s all about dis­ci­pline. I learnt about type through doing hot-metal type­set­ting. So I know that what is between the black marks is as impor­tant as the black marks them­selves. With metal type­set­ting you have to touch it, it’s not just the return key. So that’s my dis­ci­pline. I’m an art his­to­rian by trade; I’m slightly intel­lec­tual, maybe too intel­lec­tual. When it comes to visu­al­iz­ing things I’m too intel­lec­tual, it becomes too obvi­ous. Neville Brody’s the exact oppo­site of me. We’ve worked together suc­cess­fully. Neville’s a dig­i­tal painter. He just throws it on the page and it looks great, but he can’t repeat it. I’m the other way round. I pro­vide the skele­ton, I make sure things don’t fall down. And he makes it look good, and I’m very happy with that.
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Next week I have to fly to China, and I’m already dread­ing the 12 hours or more on the plane. I can only hope that this man won’t sit next to me. He was pho­tographed by a Stew­ardess aboard a flight in the US. These days, we’re charged for every kilo­gram (or pounds or ounce) of extra lug­gage. Some­times I long for the days at the begin­ning of air-travel when every pas­sen­ger – includ­ing women – would be weighed. The pilot had to know the exact weight of the plane in order to guar­an­tee lift-off. Even with my post-christmassy 164 pounds I would qual­ify for a bonus com­pared to some folks…

Taken from the book — Stu­dio Cul­ture: the Secret Life of the Graphic Design Stu­dio. This is a short­ened ver­sion of an inter­view with Erik Spiek­er­mann. Dur­ing the 1970s Spiek­er­mann worked as a free­lance designer in Lon­don before return­ing to Berlin in 1979 where, with two part­ners, he founded MetaDe­sign. In 2001 he left MetaDe­sign and started UDN (United Design­ers Net­work), with offices in Berlin, Lon­don and San Fran­cisco. Since Jan­u­ary 2009 he has been a direc­tor of Eden­spiek­er­mann, which employs over 100 peo­ple and has offices in Berlin and Amsterdam.

Unusu­ally among con­tem­po­rary design­ers, Spiek­er­mann has a sophis­ti­cated set of the­o­ries relat­ing to the lay­out, struc­ture and man­age­ment of design stu­dios. His the­o­ries have been exten­sively road-tested in the var­i­ous cre­ative enter­prises he has founded and run dur­ing a long career.

The inter­view was con­ducted in the offices of AIG, London.

Adrian Shaugh­nessy: You have a vision of your per­fect stu­dio. You’ve even got a name for it — The ‘Rund­buero’ Stu­dio (see dia­gram). Can you describe it?
Erik Spiek­er­mann: Ide­ally it’s a round space. It’s made up of three or four con­cen­tric cir­cles. At the cen­tre is a recep­tion area. This is where every­body enters. It is linked to the rest of the stu­dio by a cor­ri­dor. In the cen­tral recep­tion area are the peo­ple who answer the tele­phones, do the emails and make the pho­to­copies. It’s where all the machin­ery is — the print­ers, the espresso machine. Every­body has to go in here sev­eral times a day to pick up print­outs, pick up mail, get cof­fee and so on. Now, the fur­ther you go from the cen­tre the qui­eter it gets. Peo­ple in the outer rings have win­dows, oth­ers don’t. The walls are maybe only shoul­der height. If a sec­re­tary wants to see if I’m in the outer ring, she can get up and look across and see if I’m actu­ally there.
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The pre­vi­ous post showed that blog­ging from a phone still leaves a lot to be desired. But I still want to make the point that tech­nol­ogy shapes design. In this case it cre­ated a Claren­don (ca. 15mm tall) that doesn’t exist any­where else. Sim­i­lar effects can be seen with type that was pro­duced for other meth­ods of repro­duc­tion, from trans­fer type à la Letraset to wood type made for small presses that printed labels and signs for shops.

I’ve had a new platen press (the pre­vi­ous one burnt down in 1977) and a Kor­rex proof­ing press for a while now (see Proof­ing press upstairs). There is also quite a bit of type and every­thing else I need to start work; but I still haven’t printed any­thing. Mean­while, as reminder and inspi­ra­tion, here is a lovely video from the US show­ing busi­ness cards being printed on a platen press.

Kee­gan Mee­gan Press & Bindery from :::: MAGNETIC ARCHIVES :::: kiva on Vimeo.

Tilt­Shift pho­tos make every pic­ture look like a scene from a toy train cat­a­logue. As the iPhone will not take really good “real” pho­tographs, I pre­fer to apply effects like Tilt­Shift, even with an app that fakes the effect by apply­ing arti­fi­cial focus to over-saturated images. At least that gen­er­ates cool-looking pic­tures for on-screen use. This one shows the Gare de Lyon in Paris.

Some­body has taken the trou­ble and uploaded some extra mate­r­ial from the Hel­vetica DVD to You Tube:

Novem­ber in Berlin doesn’t look so bad when it’s turned into a toy town, cour­tesy tilt/shift pho­tog­ra­phy.