On the way to the pool at this morning at 6:30, I heard, through the fog of sleep, the following 3 songs in quick succession:”Feeling Like a Million” by Josephine Baker, “Whistle a Happy Tune” by Gertrude Lawrence, and “Chasing the Clouds Away” by Maurice Chevalier. On the way to work I listened to (at full volume) the King of the Swingers, Louis Prima. This doesn’t really have anything to do with my design job here at the theatre, except for the fact that it put me in a great frame of mind to design the logo for “Discovery Day at Long Wharf Theatre,” one of my many tasks for today.

Oh, and Matt Jordan: Grey is indeed a color, even though it doesn’t fit scientifically with the “Mr. Roy G. Biv” wavelength definition taught in color theory. I like grey too, although I am more partial to acid green & purple.

Time to go to work.

I had an interesting conversation with a vendor recently. He was lamenting the fact that the old print production methods are no longer taught to up and coming graphic designers. Because no one physically pastes type to a board anymore, the designers of today have no experience with that difficult and often frustrating lost art. Rubylith film is a thing of the past, as well as the t-square, type spec ruler and scaling wheel. It can make it challenging to communicate your needs to a printer if you can’t speak the language.

I recently had an experience that underscores the idea that vendors these days expect that their clients are ignorant of these techniques. Our season brochure had gone to print, and I instructed the salesperson that I had set the book up as printer spreads as opposed to reader spreads. In reader spreads, the file is laid out the way one would actually read the book. In printer spreads, the pages are re-arranged so that they form “signatures;” basically the way the printer needs to set up the book for an accurate outcome. I did this so that the printer wouldn’t have to…time is money, after all. The salesperson forgot to tell her production staff, and they proceeded to re-arrange all the pages so they were completely out of order. Fortunately, this happened in the proofing stage, so it was easily corrected.

One doesn’t necessarily need to know how their car engine works in order to drive their car, but educating oneself in the mechanics of how things work can save time and money. A very important thing to strive for in the world of non-profit theatre.

By MANSUR MIROVALEV, Associated Press Writer

Fri Sep 7, 5:51 PM

MOSCOW - Mark Weil, an Uzbek theater director whose productions caused controversy in the tightly controlled former Soviet republic, was stabbed to death outside his home, a theater spokeswoman said Friday. He was 55.

Weil was attacked in front of his apartment building in Uzbekistan’s capital, Tashkent, late Thursday night, said Oksana Khrupun, a spokeswoman for the Ilkhom theater. She said he died on the operating table at a hospital.

Actors at the theater, reached by telephone, said Weil was taken to the hospital by neighbors who described seeing two young men in baseball caps waiting for the director in front of his building.

Police were investigating, but refused to say whether they had identified any suspects, Khrupun said. Calls to the police were not answered.
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