Phil McGrew is a currency trader. He works in one of the buildings that overlook San Francisco Bay.  Am not sure I could get any work done with those amazing panoramic views.  Phil also likes to take pictures.

Unlike my home of Central Florida,  San Francisco is not the lightning strike capital of the US. But we had a whopper of a storm earlier this year.  The kids were frightened, as were a few adults who shall remain nameless. It beat any thunderstorm I can remember back home.

NOAA Lightning Strike Frequency Map — USA

Read this great story about how Phil took what he thought was a great shot, worthy of local news, went to sleep, and woke up to big excitement.  European newspapers had plastered the shot all around, calls were coming in to negotiate deals. Nice for 20 seconds of work!

Watch this great short vid on this Sunday’s first-in-18-years Annular Solar Eclipse.

This NASA vid talks about where, how & what to look for.  Get viewing and safety tips from the experts.

San Francisco will get a partial, but won’t be very far from the “total” eclipse path.

Here’s what a total Annular Eclipse might look like.

Here you can see the corona of the sun, as the disk of the moon occludes the center

It’s that time again.

The parents on the yearbook committee of their preschool or elementary school are starting to worry.
Will the book get done in time?
Graduation is only a few weeks away!
Can our book look better than a run-of-the-mill online factory photobook?

Happily, we’ve been able to say “yes” to the groups that have come to us so far.
Yes, we can get this done for you on time.
Yes, it will be in a custom fabric, your color, with a cool foil stamp in your other color.
Yes, it will put your school in a good light for whoever looks at your yearbook.
No, it won’t break the bank, especially if we use one of our in-house templates.
No, you don’t have to do anything beyond select photos and provide copy. We do the layout, and show you proofs.

And…now is when the schools who planned ahead, working with us all along, get to see the fruits of their labor.

One school will receive their beautiful book, 80 copies, in a week or so. Their colors are blue & white. This school will enjoy a custom fabric in exactly “their blue.” The custom hot-foil stamp will be a sharp-looking white, showing their logo & year. This beautiful stamp will appear right on the cover, no cost-cutting factory tricks.
We are side-sewing their book, for extreme durability. They will also enjoy custom-printed end-sheets, with collages of kids in candid moments.

Please Stay Cool Just Like You Are.
Let’s hang out this summer.
See you in September!

Our client Julia wondered if an old book of poetry could be reproduced, in time for a big event honoring the author.  She had no idea if it was even possible, much less how she might go about it, or how much it would cost.

The book contained charming, clever descriptions of the merchant marine life, both on land and at sea.  There was only one photo.  While most people think “photobooks” when they think “Memento”, we like to think we’re photography & publishing problem-solvers in partnership with our customers.

Land & Sea Maritime Poet

Problem 1: What to do about all that text?  Scanning and printing as an image would leave the letters looking fuzzy.  So Memento offered our Optical Character Recognition capability.  Our system not only converted the scans into real text documents, it also matched almost all the (very unusual) spacing, punctuation, margins, bolding & italics.  She paid less, and likely got better accuracy (100% by the way) than if she’d paid us or someone else to manually transcribe.

Problem 2: Need the cost to hit a certain hurdle.  No problem, Memento offers two levels of printing, matched to the budget & quality requirements of our client.

Problem 3: The event was in the near future.  Memento’s high service level came through again.  We personally delivered the books to the Palace Hotel, here in San Francisco, the morning of the event.

Result, in Julie’s words:

Katheryn,

I wanted to let you and Josh know that the books were very well received – everyone was delighted!
Thanks so very much for all of your help, the attention to detail, and for just “getting it” when I had no idea how to convey what we wanted.  

You guys rock in every way!

Regards,
Julie

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Check out great deals on works from all their artists. Proceeds benefit the artists, the Artists Gallery, and SFMOMA. Tara Gill will be showing her work. She’s one of Memento’s earliest clients!

Sale Hours
Thursday, May 10, noon — 8:00 p.m.
Friday, May 11, noon — 8:00 p.m.
Saturday, May 12, noon — 5:30 p.m.
Sunday, May 13, noon — 4:00 p.m.

Don’t forget to check out the Utopian Impulse exhibit at SFMOMA itself! Memento is proud to have scanned the slides, and made all the metal prints, displaying the work and influence of Buckminster Fuller.

Your viewers could only see your work surrounded by a frosting of garish ads, at a relatively small size, and often with poor color reproduction.  The color could be way, way off, even if you color-tagged your images.

But things have become much better in the last month.

If you use Chrome or Firefox, you can expand images to a true light-box viewing experience, surrounded by nothing but black.  Also, FB accepts images just over 2,000 x 2,000 pixels!  Fantastic.

Read more at Techcrunch’s review of the update.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art recently opened their Utopian Impulse exhibition, featuring the ground-breaking philosophy & influence of Buckminster Fuller. Memento is proud to have been asked to scan many historic slides and drawings for the exhibit.  We then reproduced those using our new print-on-metal techniques.  Visit the show to see shiny, crisp metallic renditions all around the exhibit.

“He was a charismatic outsider who really wasn’t accepted by the architectural establishment at the time,” says Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, SFMOMA’s assistant curator of architecture and design. “Yet his view has emerged as an emblem for ‘thinking differently,’ which is a starting point for many Bay Area initiatives.”

1976 Oval Intention

Fuller’s fearless, wide ranging thoughts brought us modernist concepts considered outlandish at the time, and now part of our everyday lives. In fact, I had no idea that the basic structure of almost every modern camping tent is based on Fuller’s Geodesic Dome concepts! Learn more about the history of the North Face Oval Intention, designed in 1976 by Fuller disciples.

Buckminster Fullerene

So revered is Fuller in futurist & intellectual circles, one of the most important material types discovered in decades were named Fullerenes.  Fullerenes include Carbon Nanotubes, Megatubes, Polymers (!) and Fullerene Rings. A specific Fullerene is the Bucky Ball, known specifically as Buckminsterfullerene.

Bucky Balls have amazing properties, both fun & serious. In addition to looking exactly like a soccer ball (hexagons & pentagons forming a sphere), they are superconducting at record-high temperatures.

Some other utopian visions influenced by Fuller, and presented at the exhibit include:

Plastiki Sailboat

Plastiki Underway

San Francisco Federal Building — Morphosis

In addition to Plastiki and Morphosis’ new San Francisco Federal Building above, the exhibit presents Fuller’s impact on Stuart Brand (Whole Earth Catalog) and others.  Creating a better future for all people ties all these themes together.  And what finer motivation could there be?

Visit the exhibit to learn more:
SFMOMA 151 3rd St, San Francisco CA 94103

Hours & Directions

SFMOMA’s Architecture & Design Forum is a great way to get involved.  The A + D Forum includes enthusiasts from around the bay area, who provide energy and gain special community and access to SFMOMA’s work in this area.

And let us know what you think about our metal prints!

More shots from the show:

Metal Prints of Plastiki at SFMOMA’s Utopian Impulse

Wall Collage of White Gloss Metal Prints

Folks walk into our studio fairly frequently, asking if we sell frames.  No, no we don’t.  But we do sell these cool metal prints, that have easel backs (that little kick stand for the desk top) or shadow blocks A shadow block is a wooden square (I haven’t been called that since junior high, at least not to my face) that hides behind the aluminum.  The block has a slot for the nail or hook on the wall, and also serves to hold the aluminum off the wall, so it casts a shadow.

We also sell these nice Chromaluxe panels.  Our client is holding one here, a 6x6” panel, which sells for $24.95.  They have a glossy white surface, which is attached to a wooden back, and in integrated easel back (aka kickstand).

When folks see the metal and Chromaluxe in our store, they like the interesting look.  But after a while, it occurred to me that we were taking what used to be a three step process, and making it into one.  Before, you had to print the photo, buy the frame, and then put the photo in the frame.

Now, our client just uploads or brings in a photo, and in as little as an hour, they have one of these touching, durable, tasteful gifts.

Yes, it’s a bunch of sales talk, but it’s also true: these things are nice gifts, they are convenient, and are reasonably priced.

This photo is just darling.  It’s a safe bet the gift was a big hit, and our customer enjoyed a nice helping of gratitude from the recipient.

She had made photo canvases at Memento Press as gifts this year.  Last year, she had us digitize and preserve her children’s best artwork.  Our inexpensive way of scanning the work of young artists was something she liked.

So Jessie figured, why not put the two ideas together?  The teacher had artwork done by each child, for a specific project.  The pieces had an aesthetic bond that Jessie knew would make them look great together.  With permission, she brought those to us, for scanning.

Jessie’s designer here at Memento made a collage of those images, along with an attractive, color-coordinated title.  Once Jessie was done with edits, we made it into the nice, large canvas you see here.