This is going to be a good one!
FRIDAY, APRIL 2nd AT BRANX: $5.
Tunnels Listen to Eruption on his myspace page–you will be sold.
Sexual Champions (all female improv brass ensemble.)
Kathleen Keogh of Woolly Mammoth comes to Dinner with White Rainbow
DJs:
Hostile Tapeover
DJ Magic Beans (Maggie Vail, VP of Kill Rock Stars)
PHOTOS BY:
A.M. O’Malley
&
Brook Dillon.
Photo portraits/booth by Lorenzo Triburgo.

The second Thursday of each month offers the unique opportunity to casually explore pieces in
Portland Art Museum’s permanent collection through the inspired lens of a local artist. Each artist
selects a work from the museum's permanent collection, talks about the piece and leads a discussion.

Free for members or with Museum admission. Reservations are not required, but space is limited to
the first 60 attendees. To ensure attendance, advance tickets are available at the box office.
Talks occur the second Thursday of each month from 6 p.m. - 8 p.m.

On April 8th, James Lavadour will lead a discussion about Max Beckmann's oil painting *The Mill*, 1947.

Past Plazm contributors Storm Tharp, Stephanie Snyder, and Nan Curtis are all scheduled for
upcoming events. Here's a list through September. 

May 13th—Jeff Jahn
June 10th—Storm Tharp
July 8th—Chris Rauschenberg
August 12th—Nan Curtis
September 9th—Stephanie Snyder

Also, a number of prior talks can be found on the museum's web site.

His caption to the flowchart here reads “FORMLESS CONTENT: Retaining meaning in any container.” The medium is the message, dude! Meaning always shifts with form.

Second printing of Liminal, a zine I wrote about Tokyo graffiti is now available. Screenprinted covers and inserts, one-color interior. Available for a cool $8 postpaid (shipping included) via Paypal to ian (at) ianlynam.com.

Includes photos of work by QP, Ekys, Secto, Want, and SF writers Adek and Twist.

New typeface set out now via MyFonts: Cooper Text.

Cooper Text is a comprised of two fonts- Cooper OldStyle and Cooper Initials. Cooper OldStyle is a round-serifed text typeface, while Cooper Initials are ornamental capitals designed for use as complementary drop caps.

Cooper OldStyle has been lovingly redrawn from Oswald Bruce Cooper’s original drawings and mechanical proofs while Cooper Initials have been drawn from a sample in the seminal monograph of Cooper’s work, The Book of Oz.
Cooper OldStyle was originally released as a non-kerning typeface, which offered limited use for text setting. Oz Cooper was never quite happy with the copious amount of “air” around the typeface’s characters, so this definitive version has been painstakingly spaced and kerned for even text-setting.

Cooper Initials is a set of three typefaces:
– Cooper Initials, the base form derived from Cooper’s original design
– Cooper Ground, blocks of solid color that match the proportions of the Initials and which can be used to add a background color to the typefaces through layering
– Cooper Capitals, the lone letterforms within the initials, which can be layered to add highlight color to the letterform component of the set

These typefaces can be paired with Cooper Italic Complete for setting long lengths of text.

The history of these typefaces:

Cooper OldStyle is the result of Barnhart Brothers & Spindler type foundry representatives Richard N. McArthur and Charles R. Murray having met with Oswald Cooper and his business partner Fred Bertsch in 1917. Due to other commercial design firms adopting Cooper’s style of lettering throughout the Midwest, both companies came to an agreement to create a family of types based on Cooper’s advertising lettering. McArthur and Murray saw the biggest potential in the super-bold advertising lettering that would become Cooper Black, but agreed that a roman weight old style should be executed first, the logical progenitor to a family or related types.

The foundry requested that the roman have rounded serifs so as to more specifically correlate to the planned bold. This was the first of many tactical strategies in type design between type designer and foundry, most specifically McArthur and Cooper, whose back-and-forth relationship in designing, critiquing, and modifying letterforms was integral in shaping the oeuvre of type designs credited to Cooper. While it was Cooper’s sheer talent in shaping appealing and useful alphabets that made his work so popular, McArthur’s role as critic and editor has gone largely un-noted in the slim amount of writing of length about Cooper’s work.

Cooper and McArthur went back and forth over the design of the roman face for nearly two years with Cooper, constantly redrawing and revising the typeface to get it to a castable state. The capitals were successively redrawn by Cooper, with particular care paid to the “B” and “R” to make them relate formally. The lowercase was redrawn numerous times, as were experiments in shaping the punctuation. McArthur requested a pair of dingbats to accompany the typeface, along with a decorative four leaf clover ornament “for luck”.

Cooper included a slightly iconoclastic, cartoonish paragraph mark, as well as decorative end elements, a centered period, and brackets with a hand-drawn feel.

The final typeface is a lively, bouncy conglomeration whose rounded forms dazzle and move the eye. Originally called merely “Cooper” in early showings, the name was later revised to “Cooper Oldstyle”. The typeface met with a warm reception upon release in 1919, the public favoring its advertising-friendly, tightly-spaced appearance. Sales were moderate, and the face was considered a success.

Cooper originally drew the figures the same width as the “M” of the font, but revised them to the width of the “N” at the request of McArthur. Early versions of drawings of the slimmer figures are noted as “cruel stuff” in accompanying notes by Cooper, though they were versioned out into far more elegant numerals than the earlier stout figures. Both versions of the numerals are included in the digital release, as are the ornamental elements.

In 1925, McArthur and Murray requested a set of ornamental initials. Cooper designed the initials open-faced on a square ground surrounded by organic ornament. The initials were “intended to be nearly even in ‘color value’ with that of normal text type”. The letterforms themselves are a medium-bold variation on the Cooper OldStyle theme, lacking the balance of Cooper’s text faces, but charming nonetheless.

Cooper Initials are offered in their original capital alphabet form in this digital version, with no supplementary characters.

The release of these two typefaces coincides with the publication of the definitive Oswald Bruce Cooper biography, published in Japan’s Idea Magazine issue #339. Cooper’s biography is delivered in English and Japanese with numerous full-color illustrations of never-before-published work.

Available now via MyFonts.

Throughout the city of Portland, billboards designed by teenagers will be replacing advertisements with messages of tolerance. This project is titled “Create, Don’t Hate!” and gives students the opportunity to work with design professionals to create meaningful communication in their neighborhoods.

Create! Don’t Hate. is a Design Ignites Change Youth Mentoring Initiative built around the theme of tolerance. designigniteschange.org

Design Ignites Change partnered with Michael Etter of re:active to bring together mentors and students from across the Portland area.

Project partners include re:active, AIGA Portland, Caldera Arts, p:ear, and Open Meadow as well as local design groups: The Cary Design Group, Makelike, Nike, Plazm, Pop Art & Obsessive Consumption.

This show is a benefit for re:active magazine. www.reactivemagazine.com

Show opens with artists’ reception, March 5, 2010 from 6-9pm.
Show closes March 26, 2010 free admission

Pushdot Studio
1021 SE Caruthers
Portland OR 97214
503-224-5925

Please come out and support the youth programs if you are in Portland. It will be a good event. If you know someone who might enjoy the work we do, or just an evening with some great people please forward this on.