by Tim Maley, Wired
Isn’t technology wonderful? There was a time when printing text
meant painstakingly assembling words letter by letter. Type foundries were so
named because they literally forged fonts in steel, and for print shops,
offering a new font meant incurring a major capital expense.
Thanks to advances in printing technology, artists and
designers have the flexibility to create printed works of exceptional variety
and detail, enabling an explosion in craft and quality that opens up new
horizons of printed expression. Like making a bookmark that is also a book.
Conceived by
cartoonist Zach
Weinersmith in collaboration with designer Katie Sekelsky, the Hamlet Bookmark is the
physical instantiation of a joke. “We had a shirt/joke that went ‘I’m so
bookish, my bookmarks are smaller books,’” says Weinersmith, “These are sort of
a realization of that idea.”
In deciding to actually make a bookmark that is also a book,
Weinersmith and Sekelsky turned a joke into a design brief. They needed
“something that was (a) a classic, (b) short enough to fit on a bookmark, and
(c) contained a succinct memorable quote,” says Weinersmith. “Hamlet fit the
bill nicely.”
“It came together pretty easily,” says Sekelsky, “It was more
just a matter of finding a font that is at least recognizable as text when
printed so small.” Sekelsky says the biggest problem was hardware-related. She
created the bookmarks on an older computer, with inadequate RAM. “The ‘hardest’
part (i.e., ‘the boring part’) was just waiting for all of the text to re-render
every time I made an adjustment to the type.”
1 comment:
Trouble is technology, in the form of ebooks, has rendered that bookmark obsolete.
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