We Made This

Dayfold Print's Little Black Book

Recently in the studio we seem to have had a run of printed projects involving large areas of black. So it was a case of Really Great Timing that Chris Pollard from Dayfold Print dropped by to show us their fantastically useful Little Black Book: A guide to printing the best Rich Blacks.

The guide is a primer on how to create a really solid black: the general wisdom is that you print 100% black (100K) an add 30-40% cyan (or magenta) to create a denser, richer black. That can create a bit of a colour cast though, and this book clearly shows that: each page features a background black printed with an increasing percentage of cyan, magenta and yellow; and has an additional panel showing comparative squares of 100K / 100K + 40C / 100K + 40M / 100K + 40Y. There are also samples of rule and type tolerances (click the shot below to see a larger version).

The book features both coated and uncoated sections, and the folks at Dayfold suggest the following: for uncoated stocks, running C50 M50 Y50 K100; and for coated stocks C60 M60 Y60 K100 (though that depends on exactly what stock you're printing onto).

Lovely stuff. Check the Dayfold blog for more.

We Made This elsewhere

  

We Made This is pretty much an old-school affair, focusing on printed stuff rather than digital stuff. But we dip our toe into the pixelworld now and again; so we figured it might be time to let you know that you can find us on Facebook and Twitter.

The Facebook page slurps up all the content from this blog, so it's really just a different place to keep an eye on what we're doing. But if you'd like to become a fan, we'd be deeply honoured. (There's also a gallery of some of our work on there for your browsing pleasure.)  

 

The Twitter page features Alistair's varied musings (we make no guarantee of their wisdom or even coherence), as well as showing when we've posted new content on here. (We've got a feeling that there's a way of setting it up on some sort of infinite loop, with the blog feeding the twitter feed feeding the blog feed, ad infinitum. So far we've avoided it, but it's only a matter of time.)

Do come and say howdy.

We Made This Facebook page

@alistairhall Twitter page

Design for Music / Music and Design

So this looks rather delicious: the latest conference at the ever brilliant St Bride Library is Design for Music / Music and Design. It features a stellar line-up of speakers including Gerard Saint (Big Active), Karsten Schmidt (aka toxi), Fred Deakin (Airside/Lemon Jelly), Adrian Shaughnessy (Unit Editions, Sampler), Tony Brook (SPIN) and Kate Moross (that's her Midnight Juggernauts design above).

The conference is a day-long affair on Friday 29 January, so you'll need to book super quickly to grab a place - tickets are £75 (£30 for concessions), with a further £15 discount for Friends of St Brides. 

Check out the full programme.

The best vintage store in London

 

We made our way to East Dulwich today to visit one of our favourite shops in London (in fact, it's one of our favourite shops just about anywhere).

North Cross Vintage (on the corner of Fellbrigg Road, just off North Cross Road, London SE22) is one of those perfect treasure troves, stuffed to the rafters with a fantastic collection of books, signs, packaging, tins, woodblock lettering, furniture and other assorted ephemera. 

 

It's run by the lovely John & Belinda, who hand pick all the stuff. The shop was originally tucked away in a basement on the nearby Lordship Lane before they were flooded out - but the enforced move ended up being a good thing, as their new location has far more space.

 

While they replenish their stock after the Christmas rush the shop is only open on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays (from 11 to 6), but from February they'll generally be open Thursday through Monday each week.

There are a few more shots on Alistair's Flickr set. Do pop along if you get the chance - tell them we sent you. 

Ministry of Food Ration Book

Well, crikey, Happy New Year to one and all! Hope you had a glorious festive season.

We had one of those hectic run-ups to Christmas (three parts work, one part social), which is why things have been a bit quiet on here.

But between the turkey and the christmas pudding we did manage to dig through the archives, and tracked down a few fantastic bits of ephemera, including (rather ironically, given all the feasting) this Ration Book from The Ministry of Food, which belonged to Alistair's grandmother.

  

We hadn't realised that rationing went on so long (it finally ended in 1954), and can't help but wonder if a similar system will be necessary again one day; and if it does come back in, what form the rationing 'book' of the future might take.

Check out more scans from this, as well as a few other new bits and bobs, over at Alistair's Ephemera and Second World War ephemera Flickr sets.