I replaced a couple dozen of the posters on the DNA Pizza walls. See if you can spot the new ones!
It has been a while since I've hung any new posters. I was kind of paralysed by choice: what to put up, and what to take down. We're kind of in a one-in-one-out situation at this point. Though there are a few spots left where new frames could go, those are mostly up high or in shadow. In fact, quite a few of the posters are already in places where you can hardly see them.
Well anything worth doing is worth overengineering, so the first thing I did was make a map. I built a little web app, and manually replicated the sizes, contents and approximate positions of every frame for the 418 posters that are currently hanging.
From there, I can flag them as being candidates for replacement, and what I might replace them with. This also let me do some data analysis on what's up there, telling me things like which artists appear multiple times (do we really need 5 Nina Hagen posters, and 7 Thrill Kill Kult posters? Maybe not, but they're pretty good posters!) And it can show me a list of small posters in too-large frames, and so on. Plus, this histogram of which years' events are most represented on the wall:
The drop-off in that graph after 2014 is when "ad mats" really took over the world, as I complained about at the time. We basically never commission custom posters for shows any more, because it's expensive and we no longer have any go-to artists for that anyway, so we end up using the promo images sent to us by the bands' agents. And those almost always suck, making me not want to hang them.
Another thing that had been a big roadblock to updating these things was printing them out at larger than letter-sized, which used to require preparing and formatting a CMYK TIFF, uploading it to a print shop, waiting a week, sending someone to pick it up... But it turns out that these days it's possible to buy an inkjet printer that can print at 11"×17" or 13"×19" for under $300, and at shockingly high quality! This is a game-changer.
Anyway, now I've got a long list of candidates that are hanging up that I wouldn't feel bad about replacing, so as good posters arrive in the future, it will be easier to give them a home. But currently my list of "posters that are not hanging that maybe should be" is a pretty short list.
16 Responses:
Richie Black's also the go-to poster-maker and graphic designer for Shotgun Players in Berkeley. Goddamn him for being so good and Saul Bass-y with his images.
Any recommendations for a ~$300 13”x19” printer?
I’ve been feeling the need to jumpstart my creativity again by spending money on equipment, and this is less expensive and of more everyday practical use than another nice camera lens or guitar.
I got an Epson Workforce Pro WF-7310 for $150, but there are many other entrants in that category.
Oh, I just figured out something I was confused by. I thought I had ordered a 13x19 printer, but this one only fits 11x17 in the paper tray, so I figured I must have mis-remembered what I ordered. But no: apparently 13x19 is manual feed only. I wish I had known that before taking a box cutter to the stack of 13x19 paper I had ordered!
Today I put in a brand new "high capacity" set of ink cartridges, and fully depleted it by printing 25 11"x17" pages. The inks were $80, so this comes out to $3.20 per page. That's not so bad, considering the convenience of not having to go to a print shop...
A CISS might be worthwhile if this is to be a regular occurrence (e.g.). The manufacturers are selling models with them built in these days (Epson call theirs 'Ecotank'), but the RRPs are beyond eye-watering.
I have an Epson SureColour P405 which used to retail around that; does A3+ and can print rolls up to 3.5m. Only downside is that the ink is stupidly expensive.
Keep the files from which you print those posters. The inks will fade over time and you'll want to reprint them. Especially when one color fades faster than others and e.g. human faces morph to zombie faces.
(Source: my thirty years engineering printers.)
Catching my eye immediately were those for Front 242 and Digable Planets, now lost.
I like the graph style is it from GD::Graph::histogram? I'm looking for a portable plot package that's not from python.
It's the Google thingy. I've used it for a bunch of things. It's good.
I'm curious about the steady decline over the course of the 90s, to almost zero, followed by the huge spike in 2002.
Well, the late 90s are a combination of "what people felt was notable enough to post online or try to sell on eBay" combined with "the club's decline under Rob Schneider". And 2001 is when I reopened the place and record-keeping became real.
I still can’t get over fox “news” rob schnider owning The DNA Lounge.
For go to add the 😂
This post on your main blog spills into the sidebar, I think because right margin is not set as it is in the topmost post. Tested on Windows/Edge and MacOS/Safari.
Accurate! A useful expansion of the web app would be to track the duration of display for posters without image source files and compute rotation schedules to allow each poster some time resting in darkness. One could even prioritize resting rare posters that already exhibit fading. Glazing that filters UV can help, but resting works on paper in a dark, acid free environment is still recommended for image permanence. Moving hanging hardware sucks, so to avoid that the inventory of various poster sizes would impact such a rotation schedule. As both a preventative conservator and a goth, I endorse this approach.