Friday, October 19, 2012

Book Within a Book: Stick Hamlet Between Your Pages


by Tim Maley, Wired

The Hamlet Bookmark in action.

The Hamlet Bookmark in action. Photo: Amanda Rossi

Isn’t technology wonderful? There was a time when printing text meant painstakingly assembling words letter by letter. Type foundries were so named because they literally forged fonts in steel, and for print shops, offering a new font meant incurring a major capital expense.
Thanks to advances in printing technology, artists and designers have the flexibility to create printed works of exceptional variety and detail, enabling an explosion in craft and quality that opens up new horizons of printed expression. Like making a bookmark that is also a book.
Conceived by cartoonist Zach Weinersmith in collaboration with designer Katie Sekelsky, the Hamlet Bookmark is the physical instantiation of a joke. “We had a shirt/joke that went ‘I’m so bookish, my bookmarks are smaller books,’” says Weinersmith, “These are sort of a realization of that idea.”
In deciding to actually make a bookmark that is also a book, Weinersmith and Sekelsky turned a joke into a design brief. They needed “something that was (a) a classic, (b) short enough to fit on a bookmark, and (c) contained a succinct memorable quote,” says Weinersmith. “Hamlet fit the bill nicely.”
“It came together pretty easily,” says Sekelsky, “It was more just a matter of finding a font that is at least recognizable as text when printed so small.” Sekelsky says the biggest problem was hardware-related. She created the bookmarks on an older computer, with inadequate RAM. “The ‘hardest’ part (i.e., ‘the boring part’) was just waiting for all of the text to re-render every time I made an adjustment to the type.”

I'm so bookish my bookmarks are smaller books.
The shirt design that started it all. Photo: Courtesy of Zach Weinersmith

1 comment:

Mark Hubbard said...

Trouble is technology, in the form of ebooks, has rendered that bookmark obsolete.