Four years ago today I made my first newspaper blackout poem, and to celebrate the anniversary, I’m giving away a signed, limited-edition print of “Overheard On The Titanic,” hand silkscreened by my friend, painter and printmaker Curtis Miller:

YouTube: Silkscreening Newspaper Blackout Prints

There were only 18 of these babies made: one is hanging on the wall in my library, sixteen are in a flat file waiting to be sold in the distant future, and one could belong to you.

All you have to do is leave a nice comment below, or tweet with the hashtag #newspaperblackout some time in the next week before next Monday, Oct. 26th, Midnight CT. I’ll pick the winner at random.

The giveaway is now closed. Congrats to the winner, Matt Wilson, and thanks to everyone who entered! More contests to come.

After that, you can browse the new Newspaper Blackout Archives or read my favorite poems from 2006-2008.

Thanks so much to everyone for reading! Y’all rock.

Buy my book and more prints in the store

Our Visual Note-Taking 101 panel made the cut for the first batch of 2010 SXSW programming!

Here’s the description:

Ever since Leonardo put pen to paper, visual note-taking has been a route to improve the quality of your thinking, make information more memorable, and make your ideas easier to share with others. Learn practical techniques and “tricks of the trade” from modern visual note-taking masters: how to write, sketch, and diagram ideas live, in real time, as you hear them.

The lineup isn’t finalized yet, but I’m hoping that Sunni Brown, Dave Gray, and Mike Rohde will all be able to sit on it. Read about our previous work together on the topic.

Thanks so much to everyone who voted!

Other panels I’m interested in seeing: Dan Roam‘s “Blah Blah Blah: Why Words Won’t Work” and Casey Caplowe from GOOD Magazine on “Interactive Infographics.”

See my visual notes from SXSW 2009.

In addition to staying up til 1AM getting these 20×200 prints going, I’m guest-blogging this week for one of my favorite blogs: Joe Sullivan’s The Book Design Review (@theBDR). I‘ve made two posts so far I made three posts:

• David Mazzuchelli’s Asterios Polyp and the need for 3-D views of book cover design
• How publishers and authors can use Flickr to set up a Blogger Kit for their books
• King-Cat Comics by John Porcellino

All of the posts got me thinking about how to best present books online and make it easy to spread them around the internet. It was really fun: Joe has some really smart readers, so be sure to check the comments.

I’ll update this post with links as I go along. Next up is the design of John Porcellino’s King-Cat mini-comics and its successful transition to the book collections.

PS. This is how my second post on the Blogger’s Kit began (with doodles, of course):

see it bigger

After a summer of promising y’all prints, I’m really happy to announce that Jen Bekman and the folks at 20×200 are releasing two editions of newspaper blackout poem prints next week on Tuesday, September 29th!

[ On sale now! ]

If you’re not familiar with 20×200, here’s the formula:

(limited editions x low prices) + the internet = art for everyone

Blackout poems for everyone! Prints as cheap as $20. Recession friendly. I hope y’all will buy one or two.

I’ll post images of the poems on Tuesday, but until then, you can subscribe to their really great mailing list to get advance notice of when they become available.

More on Tuesday!