Author Archives: Brian Lawler

About Brian Lawler

Brian Lawler is an Emeritus Professor of Graphic Communication at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo and was a Guest Professor at Hochschule München from September, 2021 to September, 2022. He writes about graphic arts processes and technologies for various industry publications, and on his blog, The Blognosticator.

French TAGA chapter captures the Kipphan Trophy

Posted on February 6, 2013 by Brian Lawler

This year’s TAGA Conference featured something completely new: the French student chapter from Grenoble won first prize in the TAGA scientific journal competition. This is the first time a student chapter outside North America has captured the prize. The students … Continue reading →

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Linotype: The Film

Posted on January 25, 2013 by Brian Lawler

We showed the film: Linotype: The Movie last week at Cal Poly. The movie was great! We had about 100 people in attendance, including John Werner, who was once the director of typography for the New York Times. He made … Continue reading →

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11.73 Terabytes of storage at my fingertips

Posted on January 20, 2013 by Brian Lawler

I want to be able to store my entire archive on one hard drive so that I can have instantaneous access to all of my files. As I mentioned in my last blog, I decided to build my own NAS … Continue reading →

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Optical discs fail, forcing me to move back to hard drives

Posted on January 19, 2013 by Brian Lawler

For years I have been making writable DVDs as archives for my files. I compile a selection of about 4GB of material in a folder, and when it’s reached that size, I write a DVD. Then I catalog that DVD … Continue reading →

Posted in New technology, Software | Leave a comment

Really Right solutions to my tripod problem

Posted on January 5, 2013 by Brian Lawler

I have written about my mountain-top GigaPan photos in recent months. The results have been spectacular, and I am very pleased with the photos. Carrying the equipment to the mountain tops has been my problem. The tripod I have been … Continue reading →

Posted in New technology, Panoramic Photography, Photography | Leave a comment

Fonts were not always universal

Posted on January 1, 2013 by Brian Lawler

We are now into the second generation of young people who have no memory of a time before PostScript and PDF, people who were not adults when we had competing font formats. I put this era into the bigger era … Continue reading →

Posted in Printing and Printing Processes, Typography | 1 Comment

Bad typography is not easy

Posted on December 20, 2012 by Brian Lawler

My friend Jim is a car aficionado, mechanic, driver, restorer and collector. His favorite cars are Fords from 1933, and he has one that is very special, a custom built street rod with some 1933 Ford parts. It is a … Continue reading →

Posted in Art, Printing and Printing Processes, Typography | Leave a comment

Can’t we just have it the way we used to have it?

Posted on December 15, 2012 by Brian Lawler

Sometimes I wish that software developers could just leave things alone. I paid hundreds of dollars earlier this year to buy the Creative Suite upgrade. Mostly what I got was the new (and very exciting) black interface. Which is really … Continue reading →

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A not very brave new world of storage

Posted on December 15, 2012 by Brian Lawler

I just bought a pair of 4TB drives. I installed them in a LaCie RAID drive enclosure to make a single 8TB drive that will become my Time Machine back-up drive. Until I run out of space again. I know … Continue reading →

Posted in Business, Digital video, New technology, Software | Leave a comment

My bookbinding class ends with literal works of art

Posted on December 13, 2012 by Brian Lawler

  Where have I been? I’ve been here, binding books. For the past ten weeks I have been teaching a course called Book Design Technology. It’s a senior-level course for students of Graphic Communication in our Design Reproduction Technology concentration, … Continue reading →

Posted in Art, Bookbinding, Imposition and Pagination, Software, Typography | 1 Comment