Award-winning Los Angeles-based graphic designer Ophelia Chong is working on a couple of designs for Socialized. While much of Ophelia’s art takes its themes and inspirations from Web 2.0 and the digital world, she uses techniques drawn from the pre-digital era, combining hand-carved woodcuts, letterpress printing, and other materials.

Right now, Ophelia is working on some Socialized patches, that are similar in approach and materials to this piece:

Copyright Ophelia Chong 2008. All rights reserved.

She’s also designing the long awaited Socialized t-shirt. I learned growing up in the Valley that when you have your own company you get to (have to) make cool t-shirts.

Here are two wood blocks that Ophelia hand-carved for the background of the patches. The woodblocks themselves are works of art.

After printing these, she will overprint the patches on a letterpress using movable wood type. (This method originated either with Johannes Gutenberg or the early Chinese depending on whose version of history you believe.)

I’m very familiar with hybrid creative models, and the synthesis of old and new methods and design. My wife is an amazing graphic designer who combines a hip modern style with frequent historical references. She designed the awesome business cards and other identity for Hyde Park Associates, my first blog and consulting company. The centerpiece of Hyde Park’s design was a post card of a speaker (actually, not figuratively) standing on a soapbox orating in London’s Hyde Park, which I saw as the perfect metaphor for the public speaker today.

My parents are prototypical steam punks. I learned about letterpress printing from my mom, who took up the hobby around 40 years ago and still maintains a print shop in a barn nearly a century old. As a kid, I loved the whirring and clanking of her Chandler and Price press, and the smell of ink and solvents in the print shop. I still do.

As I understand it, my dad “showed up” at our house one day with a printing press for my mom and sort of “forced” her to take up the hobby. Whatever. She’s still doing it and seems to love it.

My dad is a technologist whose experience goes back to the vacuum tube era and who, at 81, consults the Veterans Administration on technological and computing solutions for rehabilitation. One of his many hobbies is designing computer interfaces for pre-digital technology. He designed an interface for a Linotype typesetting machine so that he could compose on a Mac in Microsoft Word, and then send pages to the Linotype to be cast using hot lead. He briefly worked on a similar interface for a Jacquard loom, a design which requires hundreds of relays, and is also doing one as the front end to a pipe organ. That’s my dad.

Wood type is really cool. This beautiful type is often seen being sold a letter at a time at flea markets and antique stores, and having grown up in a letterpress household, seeing this is heartbreaking. In many cases the amazing fonts that produced the “handbill” graphics look of the Victorian era are lost to us.

In the book world, people who tear apart beautiful books and sell the illustrations one page at a time are known as “breakers.” It is not meant as a compliment.

So I am thrilled when I see someone who understands the appeal of letterpress printing, and still takes the time to do it. And I am equally thrilled to have someone as creative and tuned in as Ophelia designing for Socialized. In the words of Wayne Campbell, “We’re not worthy!”

One final note. I have received mostly positive comments on the design aesthetic for the Socialized blog. Understandably, most people dislike the totalitarian regimes of the last century, and some have uncomfortable associations with their iconography. I chose to mimic these designs for several reasons. For the most part, it’s a joke. I am mocking myself and the “social media movement” for sometimes taking ourselves too seriously. In a general sense, I am also mocking anyone who “takes up the flag” and follows a movement without understanding its underlying implications, or who fails to look to the history books for lessons that can be learned from failed utopian movements. If I am making any “political” statement with this, it is “watch out for politics and politicians.”