Pinch. A design office.

In which we receive our big boy pants.

Pinch has installed a proper, enterprise-strength server to help us slake our burning thirst for fast iron. Er, that is, meet our clients' expanding needs. The machine, an Apple Xserver Quad Xeon loaded with all sorts of technical crap you don't need to know about, was purchased from and configured by our pals at IrisInk. Craig Blanchette and Chris Williams helped us out.

Besides general file-serving and library duties, we'll be using it to maintain and serve a web-based corporate asset archive for one of our larger clients, a service that we hope to expand to other clients.

Man, it is freaking awesome. And by awesome, I mean it is totally sweet.

Posted by Adam McIsaac in Plant and equipment | 23 February 2007 | Permalink

New work (kind of): Red Letter Days.

Copies of Beverly Warren Leigh's Red Letter Days, an annotated archive of her father's letters, have arrived at Pinch's offices, marking the end of a five-year design and production process for Pinch, and ten years of research and editing for Ms. Warren-Leigh. The two-volume set, which contains every extant letter Cameron James Warren wrote and received from his childhood to the end of the Second World War, weighs in just shy of 1,000 profusely-illustrated pages.

The bulk of the book is concerned with the war, where Ms. Warren's father won three Silver Stars as an officer in the Second Armored Division, and forms an engaging social history of the period as it follows from Mr. Warren's childhood in Catholic boarding school to his return from Europe in 1946.

The text of the book seeks to preserve the idiosyncratic spelling, grammar, and punctuation of the letters' writers and contains provenance and reproductions of enclosures for all the letters. Pinch's job was to take a manuscript to which standards could not be assigned—owing to the individual styles of the letters—and assemble an orderly, coherent, and pleasant-reading book.

Pinch principal Adam McIsaac (that would be me) says that he's thankful he didn't know what that would entail at the beginning of the project, "because I don't know whether we would have had the courage to do it. As it is, we learned a ton about this kind of book design and about managing such a huge project, and we have a lovely object to show for it."

The project is illustrated in detail in the Works section of this site.

Posted by Adam McIsaac in Projects | 14 February 2007 | Permalink