Obsessions

Gallerist Jen Bekman's affordable art site, 20x200, offers a selection of smart, well-curated photographs and prints, as evidenced by these Steve Lambert pieces. There are a variety of love-themed options (as well as a slew of other subjects), should you be on the Valentine's Day gift hunt or just because.   Resources Recommended by Imprint [...]

Read the full article →

Soon after we started our White Plains, New York animation/design studio in 1990, a neighborhood church opened a special volunteer bookstore three doors down the block on Main Street.  People would donate books to the store’s inventory and the church would accept financial donations in exchange for whatever volumes you wished to leave with – [...]

Read the full article →

I've been slightly obsessed with portable roadside signage since I first encountered a stretch of white boxes with flashing red arrows along Route 28 in upstate New York. I'd certainly seen that form of advertising before, but didn't realize how ubiquitous it was throughout rural America (or admittedly, what little I know of rural America). [...]

Read the full article →

(This piece is a much expanded version of an article co-written with photographer/writer John Gruber for Print Magazine and the British trade mag Ads International in 1998.) The thought of Chicago in the 1920’s usually conjures up images of gangsters, Prohibition, and other Roaring 20’s clichés, but there was another movement in the Chicago area [...]

Read the full article →

It is way too easy to spend money at Greenwich Letterpress. Without fail, I manage to leave with some extremely necessary item each time I visit the sunny West Village shop — a journal, some letterpress greeting cards, or maybe a book plate — you know, life’s staples. I am a girl on a tight [...]

Read the full article →

When it comes to using a telephone these days, most people spend more time on a cellular phone than a hardwired device. Even the phonesets we use that are tethered to an outlet tend to be wireless. Folks are cancelling their traditional telephone service in exchange for their cellphone plans. And you can forget payphones [...]

Read the full article →

Hi, designers. As some of you may know, today's my last day with Print Magazine as a regular contributor. It would appear I’ve been writing Obsessions since the Chicago HOW Design Conference. Not last year’s HOW Conference, the one in 2005. At that point, Obsessions was a sort of catchall column, dedicated to curiosities of [...]

Read the full article →

If your Halloween hair is not close enough to the Lord, may I suggest buying a custom confection from Fifi Mahony's in New Orleans? They outfit many a professional drag queen, burlesque dancer, and stripper, so you know that your hair will amaze and last. They constantly post new work to Facebook, so like 'em. [...]

Read the full article →

Here’s a fascinating article from Discover Magazine circa 1987 which essentially posits that the idea of human progress due to civilization is nonsense. That’s shocking enough in and of itself, but current world events support some of what he’s saying. The author cites several facts based around agriculture showing that from the pre-agricultural period to [...]

Read the full article →

Based upon what we know about Opera’s new paged media and Adobe’s earlier CSS regions specifications, the future looks pretty bright for publishing to move into an HTML5 standard. Amazon’s pushing things one step further with its recent unveiling of their Silk browser and an announcement that they’re supporting HTML5 as the underlying technology for [...]

Read the full article →