[HN Gopher] Typographic Pictures Composed Entirely of Brass Rule...
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       Typographic Pictures Composed Entirely of Brass Rule (2024)
        
       Author : benbreen
       Score  : 59 points
       Date   : 2025-04-13 05:04 UTC (3 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (blog.glyphdrawing.club)
 (TXT) w3m dump (blog.glyphdrawing.club)
        
       | fankd0g wrote:
       | This is OG ASCII art.
        
         | fitsumbelay wrote:
         | Agreed. A great example of pushing contemporary tech to do new
         | things and unintentionally forecast even newer things and
         | contexts
        
       | jansan wrote:
       | This is awesome. When I was a child I typed ASCII art on my
       | mothers two-color typewriter. Now, if I can retire and have a lot
       | of free time, I may go to the typography museum in Leipzig and
       | spend a few days typesetting an ASCII-fied "Tears in the rain"
       | scene from Bladerunner.
        
       | lmpdev wrote:
       | Looking at type specimens on archive.org this year I was actually
       | getting frustrated with the opaqueness of what a brass rule
       | actually is/was
       | 
       | It makes me wonder how much of our documentation nowadays will be
       | incomprehensible in centuries' time
        
         | thaumasiotes wrote:
         | Brass rule appears to be... exactly what it sounds like, a
         | straight line made notionally of brass. This isn't exactly an
         | unknown term; compare the <hr> tag.
        
         | tikhonj wrote:
         | It's something that makes more sense hands-on. I took a basic
         | letterpress printing workshop[1] at the SF Center for the Book
         | (SFCB[2], a non-profit in SF), so I had an immediate idea of
         | not just what brass rules were and even how they felt in my
         | hands. Making a portrait with them would be a pretty involved,
         | very tactile experience.
         | 
         | There's so much tacit knowledge involved with physical skills
         | and practices that the only way to preserve the knowledge is to
         | keep using and teaching the techniques. For letterpress
         | printing this is going to be the domain of specialized artists
         | and non-profit organizations like SFCB. I really hope that we
         | do manage to keep practices like through the generations;
         | they're unique and beautiful as both a matter of history and a
         | matter of craft.
         | 
         | This is a good reminder to myself that I meant to take the
         | extended "core" letterpress workshop series at the SFCB, but
         | did not have the time or energy for it over the last couple of
         | years. Hopefully I'll do it this fall or something...
         | 
         | [1]: Like this but, IIRC, with a different instructor:
         | https://www.sfcb.org/workshops/calendar/introductiontoletter...
         | 
         | [2]: https://www.sfcb.org/
        
       | fitsumbelay wrote:
       | Saved the best for last: love the heavily "pixelated" birds and
       | branches in the last image.
        
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       (page generated 2025-04-16 17:01 UTC)