paper Archives - VsQ - The Visual Squirrels

Bookbinding IV: outside

benteh — Sun, 05 May 2019 18:55:50 +0000

Judge it by the cover. Of course you will. Covers are some kind of board or another. Typically chip board: gray dense cardboard. I am using MDF and plywood, and will try plexiglass, mirror, wood, veneer and whatever comes my way. Typically, boards are covered with cloth, leather, or some cloth-plastic-y combo. The entire thing […]

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Bookbinding III: inside

benteh — Sat, 04 May 2019 19:31:18 +0000

The inside of a book is called a book block or register. Register makes only sense if the content must be in a certain order, such as in text, images, or any content. Blank pages are… blank. Bookbinders love book designers who include a tiny square on the spine of each signature, that will form […]

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Bookbinding II: materials

benteh — Thu, 02 May 2019 21:03:40 +0000

Paper Paper is what it is all about. Almost. Industrial, hand made, rag paper, pulp. Printed, patterned. One thing about paper: there is a direction of fiber, and this should always go along the spine. If it doesn’t, things will crack. I promise. Do you have any fancy coffee table books, that creaks; where the […]

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Bookbinding I: tools

benteh — Wed, 01 May 2019 20:45:39 +0000

I have an apprenticeship in bookbinding. That means I dedicated three years of work and school to it, and I got a scroll-y, hopelessly large and pompous diploma, proving it. I have not worked as a bookbinder for over 20 years. For some reason, now is the time to start again. But to find the […]

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Theodor Kittelsen – a Norwegian bestiary

benteh — Thu, 15 Dec 2016 20:56:36 +0000

Theodor Kittelsen was a Norwegian painter and book illustrator (1857-1914). He illustrated the Scandinavian bestiary of legend and fairy tales, and his work has scared countless children (myself included). He drew and painted trolls, the black death, sea monsters, nøkken (“water spirit”), and anthropomorphised natural phenomena such as the echo. His work can be rather […]

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Saul Bass: Designer of the Seventh Art

yisela — Fri, 11 Mar 2016 20:29:45 +0000

Saul Bass is the genius behind movie legends such as The Shining, The Man with the Golden Arm, Vertigo and Anatomy of a Murder. During his 40-year career Bass worked for some of Hollywood’s most prominent filmmakers, including Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese. It was his work for The Man with the Golden Arm that made […]

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Kjell Aukrust: rural Norway in a nutshell

benteh — Thu, 10 Mar 2016 19:46:08 +0000

Kjell Aukrust was a legendary artist, humourist and illustrator. He is most famous for his wacky stories from a particular part of rural Norway, full of bizarre and hilarious people, inventions and creatures. They make little sense to people from other countries, the Danes certainly do not get it at all. I grew up with […]

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Abstracting the map

benteh — Tue, 08 Mar 2016 15:06:04 +0000

Tung studio in Toronto decided to reinvent the map. The results are beautiful abstract-ish quilts, showing neighbourhoods as ideas. you could not navigate by these obviously, but they are beautiful, understandably map-ish. My thought is that we do not need paper maps anymore, so we are free to reinvent them as ideas and abstract representation of […]

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Biomimicry: generative art of @inconvergent

benteh — Wed, 02 Mar 2016 11:08:59 +0000

@inconvergent is a guy who makes magical, beautiful art with algorithms, heavily influenced by nature. In my endless ignorance, I did not think those two things could combine quite like that. I have of course seen wonderful things that nature do, like the amazing life of slime moulds, the murmuration of sterlings, the underground filaments […]

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14 Meters of Aztec Codice

yisela — Wed, 24 Feb 2016 13:30:10 +0000

The Codex Borbonicus (or Codex Cihuacoatl) is a divinatory almanac inscribed in a single 14.2m long sheet of bark paper. A masterpiece of Aztec style, the codice is believed to have been made after the arrival of the Spanish. Its first section is an intricate divinatory calendar, one of the few surviving. Each page represents one of the 20 trecena or 13-day periods, […]

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