27 Jul 2010, Written by Paul M Davis in design,literary

Printers’ Ball and Chicago Design League

Since 2005, Chicago’s Printers’ Ball has been the city’s premiere annual event for publishers large and small, whether they print magazines, books, zines, or posters. The clamor surrounding each year’s Printers’ Ball demonstrates that Chicago still loves its print, no matter what the beancounters over at Tribune Tower might think. The city is also on the bleeding edge of new media, and this year the Printers’ Ball is welcoming online publishers into the discussion, declaring the year’s theme “Print <3 Digital".

Even though we at Is Greater Than publish to the digital ether, we still love our physical printed objects, screenprints in particular. We're excited to offer up this video of Delicious Design League at work to preview this year’s Printer’s Ball, which takes place this Friday, June 30 from 6:00-11:00 p.m. at The Ludington Building at Columbia College Chicago (1104 South Wabash Avenue).

Delicious Design League is a screenprinting shop founded by Jason Teegarden-Downs and Billy Baumann in 2006. Since designing the 2007 Printers’ Ball poster, Teegarden-Downs has become the chair of the Chicago Printers’ Guild, one of the event’s sponsors.

The Chicago Printers Guild partnered with the Center for Book and Paper Arts and Poetry magazine to create the 2010 Printers’ Ball Art Book. The organizers at the Poetry Foundation explain the project:

The project pairs 20 local printers with 20 local writers to make a book of broadsides. Each broadside is hand-printed, and the sets of twenty are bound by the Center for Book and Paper Arts in an edition of fifty. Forty editions will immediately go to the participating artists and the remaining ten copies will be donated to local and national arts organizations. Since this is such a rare, fine printing that would otherwise be unavailable to the general public, we’re digitizing the book for electronic distribution. Copies will be available the week of the Printers’ Ball. This is one way we’re showing people how PRINT <3 DIGITAL. This fine-printed book can belong to anyone with a click! The purpose of the book is to commemorate the Printers' Ball, but more importantly it's an exercise in collaboration. We took the opportunity to engage two communities of artists who otherwise have little contact. To get things started, we had a mixer at the Center for Book and Paper Arts to introduce the writers to the printers. We asked each writer to bring in an object that either represented the piece they were contributing to the book, their work in general, or something that they just liked or is important to them. We anonymously set out the object on a table and let the printers take turns choosing the object they responded to most.

Check out what Delicious Design League does in the following video, and we’ll see you this Friday at the Printers’ Ball:

Also be sure to head over to the Printers’ Ball afterparty at Reggie’s Music Joint sponsored by our friends at Make: A Chicago Literary Magazine. I’ll be doing a short interview at 9:45 with Brandon Wetherbee of the You Me Them Everybody podcast.

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Paul M Davis is a Chicago-based freelance writer obsessed with the media, class and arcade-style video golf. He is also the editor of Is Greater Than. His personal site can be found at www.paulmdavis.com.

View all articles by Paul M Davis.

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