Boing Boing » letterpress

The Tweets of Rupert Murdoch, as letterpress greeting cards

Xeni Jardin — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 19:16:47 +0000

Artist Michelle Vaughan's “100 Tweets” is a hand typeset letterpress project printed at The Arm in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

For “100 Tweets”, I spent months combing my Twitter feed in search of 100 comments which fit into the vision of the project as a whole. Because Twitter allows 140 characters, building a template for typesetting was a straight forward procedure. In the beginning, I collected snarky, throw-away tweets mostly centered on banal and mundane comments. This eventually evolved into a more personal project, as I looked for tweets which mirrored my own opinions and thoughts, but were well-executed by the author. “100 Tweets” also records pockets of time and history in short observations.
The process was laborious but satisfying.

Her first series of five 5x7 greeting cards were tweets by Rupert Murdoch from early 2012.

"The typeface is Perpetua and they are printed with various shades of Pantone reds and pinks on Italian Magnani stock."

They'll be available starting in February, 2013. (via @felixsalmon)

Letterpress A-Go-Go

Glenn Fleishman — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 04:29:08 +0000

Kyle Durrie, a letterpress printer, wants to put a portable press in the back of a bread truck, travel the country, and teach about printing. It's a charming idea, and she's already beat her Kickstarter fundraising goal.

The Modern Face of Letterpress

Glenn Fleishman — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 08:54:02 +0000

Meet Stephanie Laursen. She's a letterpress printer, who wants to set up her own shop one day. She's already apprenticed at three locations. She's practical about what she needs to make it work. As far as I can tell, she didn't fall through a wormhole from 1930. Stephanie is fully rooted in 2010.

Stephanie was assisting in the letterpress shop today at the School of Visual Concepts (SVC) in Seattle, where I'm attending the two-day Type Americana conference and seminar. The event is one day of history and one day of hands-on sessions. This isn't a tech conference: half the attendees and speakers are women, only two people have laptops out (I'm one of them), and everyone is paying attention. The subject matter requires a reasonably intimate knowledge of the last 140 years of type design to follow the speakers; I'm stunned by how many young people, SVC and other students, are nodding along.

Today, I've heard about Frederic Goudy, the Bentons (père et fils), and W.A. Dwiggins, as well as the life of Beatrice Warde, the collapse of a preeminent type foundry after a hundred years, and a wood-type museum's resurgence. Sumner Stone (Adobe's first type design chief) reminisced about the history of fonts before and at Adobe.

The school has a beautiful letterpress shop, the cleanest one I believe I've ever stepped foot in, with a full panoply of flatbed and platen presses, metal type, wooden furniture (the blocks used to space elements in a locked-up page), leading (mmm....delicious lead), and the like. It smells marvelous. Jenny Wilkson assembled and runs the shop.

Kate Fernandez, a designer, put together a keepsake for the event, and participants were invited to pull the second color on the poster, which was printed with a combination of wooden and metal type. I was the last to go. Stephanie, a bit north of 20, told me about her career so far, which included a stint in Nashville at one of the oldest continuously operating presses; it makes use of type that goes back generations and slightly more modern printing equipment from the 1950s. That's her ampersand tattoo above, which she had inked after she left the Nashville shop to continue her journeywoman apprenticeships and finish at California College of the Arts.

I said, with my 42 years of perspective, what are your plans, young woman? What will you do with this letterpress experience? She has many ideas, including getting a job at or having work printed by Chronicle Books and opening her own shop in which wedding invitations would form the backbone of income.

I've been discovering over the last few months that that's a viable plan. While letterpress may seem quaint and nearly obsolete, you can buy restored gear or old presses that can be refitted; use a combination of handset type, engravings, and photopolymer plates (created often from pure digital output); and take instruction at hundreds of places: schools like SVC, book arts groups, private presses, and extension programs. It's not a boom industry, but there's interest beyond nostalgia.

Photopolymer plates seem to have had a strong hand in resuscitating letterpress by combining digital design with physical printing, without requiring handsetting all type or engraving all illustrations. Stephanie said a plate for a wedding invitation might cost $40. As noted in my previous item about hard-impression letterpress at the Economist, and the item here at BoingBoing with close-ups of Apple's new letterpress hybrid iPhoto cards, photopolymer plates let you use soft, deep paper, and press hard into it without worrying about damaging your irreplaceable wood and metal type.

Letterpress lets you get your hands dirty and produce unique works of beauty, turning elements of mechanical reproduction to your own ends. You control the process from start to finish, and the results, like all crafts, are as limited or expansive as your own skill. You need no intermediary. Type hits paper. And young people like Stephanie, perhaps for the first time in 30 or 40 years, are thinking about letterpress as a path for a profession.

More photos | Seattle City Arts magazine on Washington state letterpress

The back of Stephanie's business card, with a bit of extra contrast to reveal more detail that requires subtle examination.

A Close Look at Apple's Letterpress Cards

Glenn Fleishman — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 10:15:00 +0000

Apple embraced its inner Martha Stewart by adding a letterpress option for ordering photo cards from its iPhoto '11 software. The cards are printed in bulk by letterpress with one of a handful of standard designs, and then surprinted on a high-end electrographic system (cough, fancy laser printing) with text and photos. I took photos of a set of samples that Apple sent me of the cards, and some close-ups of the one I liked best to show the debossing (printing pushed into the thick paper). The letterpress work is first rate, but the textured paper doesn't hold laser printing well. The type is spaced oddly between characters--in the parlance, poorly kerned--and looks rather blocky. The cards also have rather trite designs, necessary for mass sales, I suppose. The best is a non-denominational tree (one could argue it's pagan, even) in three colors. It's an odd notion that to get the feeling of authenticity, you're purchasing a mass-produced artisanal item. I'm still trying to wrap my head around that. Letterpress was a commercial art in the past, and now is rather twee and nostalgic, while also requiring the use of metal, oil, ink, and power.