What Have We Been Doing?

As subscribers may have noticed, blogging has been light of late.

It will continue to be light for a while, but please know things are active here at the studio / shop / insert preferred workspace term.

I have been enjoying working on a range of projects the last few months, from hand-printed broadsides, business cards, full color announcements, and letterpress bookplates to trade edition books, menus, ad designs, and more. I recently completed designing and typesetting the newest Eno Publishers title, 27 Views of Chapel Hill, and they are starting to make progress on the upcoming Asheville edition. Durham can’t be far behind. Today I just checked the proofs for the new Watts Grocery menus and the fall menu there will roll out after Labor Day.

But, I haven’t been happy with the quality of the photographs I’ve taken of my more letterpress oriented work, and this has been the main reason I’ve not been updating the blog and website with more recent projects. I also bought a new computer, upgraded the software, and bought a new wide gamut monitor and getting everything to play well together has taken some serious time. Things are up and running and I have a vastly improved monitor and color managment workflow setup, including using Lightroom as an intermediary step so thatI will be able to exert exacting control over color reproductions. This work and improved image reproduction will be evident in the Maji Moto book I’m currently working on, as well as projects like the Full Frame film catalogue and exhibit catalogues for gallery and museums. Previously I had let the offset shops pre-press departments handle optimizing photographs, but in our accelerated we needed it yesterday economy, this step often seems to slip through the cracks, or not be performed up to snuff, so I’ll be attending to these image reproduction issues myself more in the future.

Improved photo shoots should happen in the near future with some assistance from professional photographers nd what not. But, whether this happens two months from now or two years from now will be hard to tell as our first work priority continues to be working on projects for clients and meeting deadlines and creating good work. That takes time. And did I mention I’m a one person shop. No intern. The dog doesn’t help out much, sorry Bella, you are a helluva greeter though, no doubt about that.

Oh yeah, and the wife is due with our first child in a couple weeks. A boy. We are very excited. I figure in about six years this means I’ll have some IT support in-house.

Please know the best way to see what H&B is working on is to stop in at one of our open houses on the Third Friday of the month. I continue to curate the foyer gallery, rotating exhibits by guest artists, using the H&B workspace to display recent and in-progress works. Plus, you never know who is going to stop by on the sidewalk.

It is usually a low-key fun time and besides seeing work a way to meet some other folks and check out galleries and what not in the downtown Durham area.

Thanks for checking in and please be assured at “some” point I’ll have better reproductions of recent work within the portfolio section on the website, and I’ll return to posting on the blog and providing more glimpses at current projects.

Below are just a few examples of recent projects which I’m posting even though the photoshoot results were a lil disappointing. Okay back to tasks at hand.