Just launched today, this gallery “…presents letterpress work from notable letterpress printers, designers, and artisans from around the country including Rohner Letterpress, Studio on Fire, Two Paperdolls, and Mama’s Sauce. The site features selections from a new curator each month. Letterpress history, context, educational information, community connections and a list of letterpress printers round out the site.”

In addition, the site aims to assist The Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum “in their efforts to relocate and effectively salvage a priceless piece of letterpress history.” The marquee video explains the daunting challenge that the museum faces, and the site urges fans of letterpress to donate to the cause.

Visit The Beauty of Letterpress.

This is several years old but new to me: Surfrider Foundation teamed up with advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi LA to produce this environmental awareness campaign. They collected real trash from local beaches, packaged them up and brought them to local farmers’ markets.

Read more in this old blog post at Shape+Color.

Animator Michael Ruocco breaks down seven seconds of the 1977 Disney children’s classic “The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh,” in which animator Milt Kahl brings the character Tigger to exuberant life. This analysis is the very definition of a committed craftsperson: it is a nuanced, careful examination of every piece of the work at hand, filtered through a clear-eyed appreciation for the craftspeople who have come before. For designers, it’s just the umpteenth reminder that even very small details add up. Read the full blog post at Cartoon Brew.

I’ve always had a soft spot for double-exposure photography, and how it crosses over from image capture into a form of graphic design. I’m most impressed when the exposures are all done in the camera (rather than in Photoshop), because to me it seems very close to laying out elements in the real world.

Here is some work from two photographers who have really mastered the form. They both work in very similar styles, and I have no idea if one can claim precedent over the other, so I’ll just list them alphabetically.

First off is Anette Ivanova.

And here’s work from Christoffer Relander.

I’ve put together this Bitly bundle which points to portfolios for each.

Designer and critic Michael Abrahamson’s Fuck Yeah Brutalism tumblelog is a favorite. It provides a steady stream of historical photographs of the brutalist style, a postwar mode of architecture that favored the emphatic use of cast concrete and brick at huge and often inhumane scales. Looking back on what was built in this style, it strikes me that brutalism is the closest that architecture ever came to replicating the horrific beauty of a multi-car pileup.

Now Abrahamson is bringing brutalism to architecture magazine Clog as guest editor for the current issue. The folks at Clog were nice enough to send some sneak peek shots at the interior of the issue.

You can’t look away, but you can order your copy here.

New York designer Mike Joyce has been producing hypothetical gig posters for some of his favorite bands from the punk and post-punk era, designed in the style of Swiss Modernism. Each one is set in lowercase Berthold Akzidenz-Grotesk Medium. There are plenty more of them to see at Swissted.com, and Quirk Books has collected them into a book.

This is horrifying and quite damning of both technology companies and consumers (I’m as guilty as anyone else). The New York Times reports on the glut in recycled displays: Back in 2004 recyclers of old televisions and monitors were selling the glass in these discarded devices for as much as $200 a ton. The recycled materials would go into new cathode ray-based displays.

Because of the nearly total shift in the market towards flat screen displays, today it costs those same companies as much as $200 a ton just to remove the now unwanted devices. Naturally many of them don’t bother, and huge repositories of old televisions and monitors now sit in sometimes illegal quantities in warehouses. Worse, the owners of some of these businesses, cutting their losses, sometimes abandon them entirely, resulting in public health hazards; at one site the lead levels were seventy-five times the federal limit. Read the whole story.

Coming to New York in May, an exhibition on the past, present and future of Monotype, the venerable “global provider of type, technology and expertise.” Tickets are free and can be booked now.

I could tell you to spend all day poring through the seemingly endless list of incredibly witty ideas by designer, illustrator and art director David Schwen, but for the best of his body of incredible work, check out his series Pantone Pairings. Here are just five samples:

There’s more at Schwen’s site.

Great gift idea for the gambling designer in your life: this deck of cards does away with the traditional suits and replaces them with the standard four printers’ inks — cyan, magenta, yellow and black.