By RITA REIF

AST TOPSHAM, Vt. -- Several times in recent months, the graphics designer Ivan Chermayeff packed an odd-ball assortment of found objects in his BMW and drove from New York to this village 50 miles east of Burlington.

Nancie Battaglia for The New York Times

The printer Jon Cone, left, and Ivan Chermayeff in Cone's workshop.

When he arrived at Cone Editions, an art-print workshop, on one occasion in March, he had five suitcases stuffed with old gloves, flattened steel buckets, rusted iron numbers, hole-riddled boards, mailed envelopes with canceled stamps, food choppers, boot jacks, buttons, beach pebbles and rope winders, stuff he had collected over decades. "He knew where each piece came from and how long he had waited to use it," said Jon Cone, a master printer and founder of the workshop that bears his name.

Chermayeff also knew exactly how he would use the artifacts. A painter and collage maker, he was producing assemblages for the first time. He worked 12 hours on each of the next four days, transforming the objects into 30 masklike fantasies of faces and busts of people and animals. Using an innovative print-making technology, he turned the assemblages into high-quality prints.

Half the prints are now on view at the Ricco/Maresca Gallery, in Manhattan, in a show that also presents 20 collages by Chermayeff, through June 26.

The prints are produced in editions of six and come in three sizes, each corresponding to the size of the assemblage from which it was made: 2 feet by 17 inches, about 3 feet by 2 feet and about 4 feet by 3 feet. Prices range from $1,200 to $6,000 each.

Chermayeff began the first assemblage in the show, "Tibetan Monk," with a wooden rope winder that he envisioned as a head with a wide-brimmed hat. "The four holes in the winder became the eyes. nose and mouth," he said. "Then I gave it a body, cutting a robe out of a piece of vermillion paper and adding buttons -- pebbles -- to bring it to life."

On a return visit to the workshop three weeks ago, Chermayeff brought the makings of another assemblage, "Blonde Afro": a seat from an Alvar Aalto stool, painted yellow, was used as the hair; a rusted 30-pound iron switch-plate, pierced with holes for bolting to railroad ties, became its longish John Carradine-like face, stones its earrings and papers for its red dress and pink hand.

With its eft shoulder cut off, the figure seemed to turn from a front view to a side view. The change exaggerated the ugliness of the face, giving it a haughty look. "That face needed an attitude to carry it off," he said.

"Sometimes faces are entirely of my own making," he said. "Sometimes they already exist in the things I find." The switch-plate was an example of the latter and was one very few artifacts in his assemblages that he bought from a gallery. "When it was shown to me, I immediately saw the holes for the eyes, nose and mouth -- a face," Chermayeff said.

He had to improvise, however, on a crushed steel bucket that he found on the street and used as the head of the wrinkled-face, one-eyed man in "Target," another print. A black pebble became the eye, a strip of black tape, the mouth.

"There's no difference for me between making an assemblage and a collage," he said. But to capture three dimensionality in a two-dimensional print "requires a lot of work," he said, adding, "most of it not by me." He stabilized parts in the assemblage so they did not move while it was scanned. He and Cone then used a computer to adjust the colors, correct the shadows and touch up the imperfections on the image.

"I might put in 10 minutes of conversation to tell Jon what should be done," Chermayeff said. "But he then puts in long hours of work to make it happen."

Chermayeff's assemblages are as direct and colorful as the distinctive logos his firm, Chermayeff & Geismar Inc., made for Chase Manhattan Bank and the Mobil Corp., as well as its posters for Masterpiece Theater. His street sculpture, the vermilion No. 9, on Fifth Avenue, bears his personal design signature: bold scale (it is 10 feet tall), voluptuous roundness, brilliant color and wit. After 27 years it is still patted, leaned on and much photographed by passersby.

He decided to make assemblages after the gallery owners, Roger Ricco and Frank Maresca, showed him examples of the high resolution prints Cone produced. "Ivan is an image maker," said Ricco. "It seemed a wonderful opportunity to introduce him as a print maker."

Cone uses a scanner of his own design that is large enough to accommodate works, like the assemblages, that have to be scanned on a flat surface. The images are then digitally printed with archival inks on thick quality paper. "It's 100 percent rag, extremely white and porous to retain the color," he said.

Now Chermayeff's assemblages survive only as prints. They were dismantled on the scanning bed an hour or so after they were printed. The scanned images will be erased from the computer after the editions are completed.

"I care about the process, more than the end result," Chermayeff said. "Of course, I want a piece to be the best I can make it. But all the same, the act of doing it is what I enjoy -- making something out of not much."