Saturday, April 23, 2016

5/7/16 Monogram Class

Students hand drawing monograms with pencils on tracing paper.

Saturday, May 7 at Gallier Historic house in New Orleans French Quarter, experience how monograms are hand drawn then walk away with your very own pencil sketch of it (that you yourself have drawn!)

In this hands-on class examples of vintage monograms, lettering styles and engraving will be on display–students will learn to make new symbols, traditional monograms, and letterforms using these historic pieces as inspiration. By tracing, combining then retracing existing forms, new, totally original designs, monograms and letterforms will be created.
For anyone tech-curious or savvy: The class will discuss bringing sketches into digital format, vector (Adobe Illustrator) versus Photoshop (raster) will be compared. Additionally…the super secret special “Ah Ha!” moment Illustrator trick will be revealed whereby an actual monogram can be digitally rendered in 10-15 minutes (no kidding!).

This class focuses on drawing with pencil on paper. Additionally, no contemporary class would be complete without touching on digital applications, but the majority of our time will be hand drawing. A direct link to register can be found here.

Members of this class will not only take home their very own, custom, monogram sketch,  they will learn where to get 2 FREE digital fonts created from old engraver’s lettering styles created by Monotype (the largest, oldest font development company in the world) that were.
Bring your laptop! Or come without one, either way it will be engaging, educational, and fun.

Saturday, April 16, 2016

Color Matching Systems II: Color, color matching systems, and best practices.

(Above is the author’s late model color viewing system.)

Color management, how do we do this? PRINT magazine uncovers best practices for printing color in a series of articles by stationer extraordinaire, Nancy Sharon Collins. Check out articles #1. and #2 .
Article #1 covered basic color management history. In the second article, Collins discusses best practices in printing color, how stationers (and printers) deal with color management, including expectations and challenges...on both the client and designer side. Article #2 offers best practices for  matching and talks primarily about this in for non-4-color, RGB, or CMYK applications.