El Vetica

At last, a t-shirt to celebrate the career of Mexico's only typographer/luchador. Get yours now at The Feed Store.

Photographic High Drama

Paolo Ventura on Winter Stories from Aperture Foundation on Vimeo.

Italian photographer, Paolo Ventura is a virtuoso storyteller. He does it all with the aid of sophisticated small props, dramatic lighting and the meticulous detail of a magician. Using large format Polaroids with a minimal color palette, Ventura constructs dreamy, Fellini-inspired sets to recreate scenes of a war-torn Italy or the saga of an Italian clown's melancholic reverie during his dying days. His narratives are often dark and alluring, yet they invite us inside the frame where we are allowed to explore a time in history found only in black and white movies and photographs. Truly mesmerizing!

Books While You Wait

The Espresso Book Machine - it gives new meaning to tall, short or skinny. Care for a tall tale, short story or a skinny novel? It can print and bind a perfect bound book in a matter of minutes. Look for the Espresso to be installed at nearby Third Place Books in Bothell this coming November. This machine is going to dramatically change the book publishing industry in the coming years. It's your ATM for books!

20 Great Book Cover Designs From AIGA Archives

Blind Text Generator

For when Lorem Ipsum just doesn't get the message across.

Where Old Art Supplies Go

The Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies looks like a glimpse of my art studio if someone turned it upside down and shook it all out. There is stuff in there I haven't used for decades, but I am unable to part with. Two of my favorite old tools happen to be very useful to the Bookbinder for fixing unsightly errors and book blunders. They are the fun little kneaded eraser, which you can disguise as a favorite art animal, and the rubber cement pick-up - yes, commonly used for cleaning those nasty rubber cement messes gumming up your old paste-ups. Time and again I have used each of these tools to clean marks from pages and bindings - often without leaving a trace. These tools are yesterday's version of command z. Some tools never go out of style.

Has anyone seen my old Chartpak Type Burnisher Stylus? I left it somewhere in 1983.

Daily Drop Cap

nitial caps are capital letters at the beginning of a chapter which are set larger than the rest of the text. They can be adjusted to make a raised cap, where they sit on the same baseline as the rest of text, or can be set below as a drop cap where they rest on the lines below. They can be very useful if chapters are not named or numbered and can alert the reader that a new chapter is beginning. As in most things with traditional book design, initial caps work best when there is not a lot of different levels of subheads or other ornamentation on the page. Take a look at some of the beautiful handcrafted initial caps provided by the amazing typographer and illustrator, Jessica Hische in her Daily Drop Caps series which are updated nearly everyday until she completes the alphabet. They are yours for downloading to be used on blogs and websites so long as you kindly provide a credit.