Category Archives: Imposition and Pagination

Running the Landa Nanopress

Posted on June 5, 2022 by Brian Lawler

Part III [Part II] [Part I] After numerous visits to the printing plant where the Landa Nanopress is running, I have a pretty good idea of how that machine works. I am assisted by a very nice diagram on the … Continue reading →

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Printing on the Landa Nanopress

Posted on June 3, 2022 by Brian Lawler

Part II [Part I] In the fall, my Master’s degree students and I worked on a project to write and publish a book about street art and street artists in Munich. We chose to photograph the work of these artists … Continue reading →

Posted in Adventures, Art, Color Management, Imposition and Pagination, Panoramic Photography, People, Photography, Photoshop techniques, Printing and Printing Processes | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

AppleScript solves my grid mask challenge in Adobe Photoshop

Posted on August 21, 2021 by Brian Lawler

I pride myself on being a competent user of Adobe Photoshop. I know how to make my photos look good by sliding sliders and pushing buttons and applying filters and adding Layer Effects and all sorts of visual things. Occasionally I need … Continue reading →

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Electronic motor control
and my obsession with a 1935 bookbinding machine

Posted on February 25, 2020 by Brian Lawler

This is the second part of my obsession story. To read the first part, please click here. And that’s where my odyssey began. Alternating current induction motors use the frequency of the line power (60 Hz in our case) to … Continue reading →

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Obsessing on a 1935 bookbinding machine

Posted on February 22, 2020 by Brian Lawler

I get obsessed about my projects. My current obsession is the restoration of a 1935 Smyth book sewing machine in the Shakespeare Press Museum at Cal Poly (I was the faculty advisor before I retired). That machine sews the spines … Continue reading →

Posted in Adventures, Bookbinding, Education, History, Imposition and Pagination, New technology, Printing and Printing Processes | Tagged , , , | 9 Comments

An adventure in the Distiller Time Machine

Posted on March 9, 2016 by Brian Lawler

Way back in 2003 I wrote an essay for inclusion in an article in Pre magazine about using Adobe Acrobat Distiller with hot folders to get PDFs with specific settings just by dropping a source file into a watched folder … Continue reading →

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My mission to Mars, continued

Posted on October 17, 2015 by Brian Lawler

In a blog I posted last year, I described how I developed a series of AppleScripts to control Adobe Photoshop to crop, then increase the canvas size, then draw crop marks on a series of image parts to make a … Continue reading →

Posted in Adventures, Art, Color Management, Education, Imposition and Pagination, New technology, Panoramic Photography, Photography, Photoshop techniques, Software | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Rewiring the Linotype machine

Posted on June 14, 2013 by Brian Lawler

I’ve not blogged in quite a while, for which I apologize to my faithful readers. It wasn’t that I didn’t have anything going on. It was that I had writer’s blog. I couldn’t come up with anything to say about … Continue reading →

Posted in History, Imposition and Pagination, Printing and Printing Processes, Typography | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

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 →

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Bookbinding with needle and thread

Posted on October 21, 2012 by Brian Lawler

I am teaching a class in book design and bookbinding this quarter. I have 30 students in the class; they are working on their manuscripts and will soon be working on their book blocks and book cases. This involves printing, … Continue reading →

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