Well, gosh, it’s been a while. Before I step things up to what I hope is a more suitable level of attention to a site intended to help put bread on my table, allow me to re-introduce myself.
Back soon. Promise.
I’ve been lusting (that’s right, lusting) for a badge press for years. In fact, this is one of the few things my sensible side has consistently managed to veto. So I was boyishly excited when I unwrapped my Christmas presents and found that my sister had bought one for me.
Here’s how I squander my time putting it to use.
This is where I get to unleash my inner child. I try to come up with at least an A3 sheet full of ideas for every batch of badges I make. I try to stay away from text, because I’m the kind of person who’ll try to cram an essay in there if given half a chance.
I lay out all my badge ideas in Illustrator, with a combination of infinite patience, attention to tiny details, and Bushmills. Designing for a 38mm circle sure puts all that moaning about accommodating 800×600 screen resolution into perspective.
I normally print 12 badges in a single batch. When they’re printed (assuming I’ve not forgotten to turn off the design guides), I get to play with my circle cutter. When I first got this, I didn’t notice the cutting mat, and now have to hide some nice round marks on my floor from my landlady.
This is what it’s all about. I load up the press with the badge back, front, design and cover, and get to feel all mechanic-like while I pull levers and spin doohickies. I learned the hard way to make sure things are positioned just so before pressing - no-one wants an un-pinnable badge.
Book making is one of the beautifully redundant things I do to recharge my batteries and fire up some creative spirit. It’s one of the only things I can think of where I get complete creative control of the final product, from the shape of the book, to the materials it’s made of, to the design of the page; it’s all me, baby.
For now, I’ll talk through the process I went through to make a book to celebrate my Mum’s 21st (ahem) birthday.
I don’t really enjoy making blank books, so I normally start with some ideas for content. As with all things, I’ll scribble away on an A3 pad until the ideas seem right, and then get to work on the mac.
At this stage, I like to think about the form of the book. I’m into fiddly things, so I usually turn to the excellent Keith Smith for inspiration, an end up picking a binding style that’s miles beyond me.
For some reason, signatures break my head. I normally have to print a stupid number of versions of a book before I get it right - in the photo above, I’m trying to fit 16 pages into an 8-page signature. In case you’ve never made a book before, this is a silly thing to do.
Binding the signatures together is great fun. If you like stabbing yourself with a needle. I ended up stabbing myself in the leg doing this one.
This is the messiest part. You take your carefully-cut cover board and your carefully-cut cover cloth and introduce them to huge amounts of glue. If you’re lucky (or not me), the glue stays where you put it. If not, you get to scrub your book covers for hours to get rid of the errant glue.
In the photo above, I’ve gone for some fancy binder-style covers that will be held together with cloth on the spines.
Getting the book block to stick to the covers requires the use of fly-leaves. The fly-leaves are the heavier, prettier sheets that are glued to the inner covers and attached to the first and last signatures. Shopping for fly-leaf paper is a fantastically masculine pastime that I encourage you to try.
The finished book, ready for emotionally exploiting my mother. She cried on just about every page.
For more photos, visit my Flickr set.
I’ve found myself on the wrong end of some meaty tube delays over the past few days. So much so that I signed myself up for TFL’s free tube updates, which proceeded to get themselves eaten by my spam barrier at random, arrive when I was already on my way home, and would only tell me about some very specific routes if they did arrive in time to be of any use.
And so, with the fiery passion of a man who’s wasted too much life on crowded tube platforms, I took matters into my own hands and created THE TUBINATOR!. Every 15 minutes, old tubey updates twitter with any tube lines that aren’t quite up to scratch at the time. It doesn’t do planned outages, which I’m assuming people have already noticed, but it does cover the DLR. Us South-East Londoners are people too, dammit.
Go ahead and say ‘Hi’ to THE TUBINATOR!.
It’s taken a while, but I’ve finally convinced myself that I don’t need to hand-carve my own CMS in order to build a site. Gone are the days of learning new programming languages! Gone are the days of custom-coding AJAX stuff that only I will ever see! I don’t think I’m overstating things when I say that this is the beginning of a new age.
It’s taken me about 8 hours, I can finally take down the ‘coming soon’ page, and I have the final episode of series 4 of The Wire warmed up and ready to go.
To a new age, friends. A new age.
