Rise Industries » design

Postcards from Portland

Jeremy — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 14:51:52 +0000

I made some postcards from a couple of photos I took while in Portland a week or so ago. These were shot on my trusty Yashica medium format camera in the Portland Japanese Garden.

To all the Ferns out there

Jeremy — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 06:28:31 +0000

A little light reading

Jeremy — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 06:44:59 +0000

People at work kept asking me how many pages I read in a day, since I often spend my lunchtime reading a hefty novel. So I put this handy info-graphic together.

A little tree graph

Jeremy — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 02:14:35 +0000

A little something I learned today on a hike up to Sturtevant Falls.

DIY Backpack

Mike — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 21:56:09 +0000

I am constructing my own lightweight backcountry backpack…

I was inspired by Ray Jardine’s book “Trail Life” to do it. Ray sells inexpensive “Ray-Way” kits on his website with which you can make all your own camping gear from scratch.

30 or 40 hours in, I’m about 2/3 completed now, with only a large purple extension collar to add to the top, a waist strap, and perhaps also a Rise Industries patch? When completed it will only weigh about 10oz, which is far lighter than any factory-made pack of similar capacity.

Doing this is making me wish that my music projects also came with step-by-step instruction guides!

Prints Available

Jeremy — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 19:24:47 +0000

Oh, by the way, my recent letterpress prints are now available on Etsy. So if you are dying to get your hands on some 100% cotton paper that has been cranked through a really old, bad-ass machine, leaving ink impressed into it in the form of lines and letters, well then that is what it is.

JeremyJQuinn Design Esty shop here.

Printing Guilloché

Jeremy — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 23:49:21 +0000

For my second print in the letterpress class I have been taking over at Otis, I wanted to work with Guilloché patterns – those complex geometric patterns used on currency and other documents for increased security against forgery. I looked into some different software for creating these mathematically based patterns, but then decided to just see what I could create using Illustrator’s “transform each” tool. I started with a square, rotated that 45 degrees, and then drew some flat, elliptical loops off the end of each point – so now I had a shape that looked like a continuous looping line with a geometrical basis. I simply took that, grouped it, and had “transform each” rotate it a degree or two and move it two points on each step. I repeated that until it ran all the way across the page. This gave me a very satisfactory pattern. I then copied that, flipped it, and nested it under the first line to fill in any white space between them. For the last step, I mirrored this whole thing down, and pushed them together again so there was no empty space between them.
I made sure my lines were all set at a hairline (.25 pt), and stared to work on the text.
For the text, I laid out my quote in a separate file, added some boxes around, then merged all the outlines. I copied out only the white spaces, and dropped those on top of the Guilloché pattern to re-create the text with the linework.

I was pretty happy with that, so I sent it out to get a film made. Gerald from Bieler Press had told me he can do a plate with hairlines no problem, so I had set up the linework with that in mind. I figured this would test my ability to print fine linework pretty well. I picked up the place from Bieler, and it looked perfect. Now all I had to do was print the damn thing.

I got into Lab Press at 2pm. Needed to get the typan changed, and Leslie was kind enough to do that for me. So I started in on cleaning and set-up around 2:30. Got it all together, made myself some ink, and ran my first proof. It actually looked pretty good. Very light, way off center, but the lines were coming in clear!

Now I had to locate the print in the right place on the page, get the impression right, get the ink right, and fix any other problems that came up. Seems like every possible problem came up. For some reason, I had a hell of a time getting the right location, I think my simple math and spatial skills were completely off that day. The plate got dirty and needed to be cleaned off. Rollers kept being wrong. Needed more and more impression. The ink dried on the rollers while I was messing with everything else and so I had to clean them all off and re-ink them. It was getting there, then things just started looking bad. This was around 7pm. Five hours in. Gerald told me lower the rollers, and switch out all my packing (the layers of precise thickness paper taped on to the typan to achieve the right impression). The packing was going to be an ordeal so I just ran one more first, to see how it came out. And suddenly, it was good. No idea why. Must have been just the rollers, and needing to work some prints through to get the ink coverage right? I don’t know. But it was good, and it kept being good. Needed some ink now and then, and some finesse with how many times I tripped (ran the rollers over the plate to ink) but I managed to keep it up through the rest of my stack of paper.

So now I have a beautiful stack of these 8-1/2 x 11 prints. Karl Marx quote from the Communist Manifesto over currency/banknote inspired Guilloché pattern. More delicious irony suitable framing and hanging either in the boardroom on Wall Street, or at your local Communist Headquarters – your choice! Will post these up for sale soon on the shop portion of Jeremyjquinn.net so check in there in a few days if you want your very own!

Simplicity isn’t simple.

Jeremy — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 20:13:08 +0000

Last night I ran the first prints of my polymer plate design for the letterpress class I am taking. After a very slow start, things seemed to be going quite well – got the plate located properly, paper aligned, impression good, added some more ink and was ready to go for it, when things started to go badly. First got some bad spots from crap in my ink, then after fixing that, parts of the image started not having enough ink coverage, and other parts looked like they were getting hit too hard. Gerald (the teacher) and I messed with until a half hour past the end of class time, but we just couldn’t fix it. Turns out there was some impression left on the tympan (mylar on the cylinder the paper wraps around) from the last person to print on that press. Rrrrrrr. Ah well, got some decent test prints, and will have to set the whole thing up next week to try it again.

The quote is from Leonardo Da Vinci, and is set in Breathe Pro by Maximiliano R. Sproviero. The overall idea is a nod to Miesien purity countered with Philip Johnson’s snarkiness.

(the images below look great, but after these few almost perfect prints things went downhill and we couldn’t get it back)

Busy Lately…

Jeremy — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 17:30:51 +0000

Things have been getting busy round the Rise Industries Studios West. In addition to some interesting freelance projects, and the continued saga of the furniture design venture, I have moved into a new workspace (Studio 1060! More about that later) and I am working on a new letterpress print, which I will be doing the printing for this time! Here is a teaser shot of it:

Also preparing to give a little artist talk and workshop at Otis. Will be showing some of my sound works and talking about my process for creating those, then doing a workshop on making contact mics. Should be a lot of fun. Maybe I will reenact that workshop and talk at the Rise Studios one of these days, if there is interest in that sort of thing.

Metal Type on Paper

Jeremy — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 06:41:20 +0000

I started taking a great letterpress class this month, taught by Gerald Lange, in Otis College of Art and Design’s Continuing Ed. program. So far we have seen some of Gerald’s fantastic work and that of his students, memorized the California Job Case, set up some type, and started printing. With many errors. So – next week its back to setting and trouble shooting the type, then clean press, ink, print, check, clean, fix type, ink, print, clean… you get the picture. Everything looks like it will take forever but I get the impression that we will get faster at it. The machines, the type, the tools, are all just as beautiful and great to work with as I had hoped. mmmm, lead type.