Letterpress Workshop

After a gruelling week in the studio my letterpress workshop elective is over and what an exprience it was! I’ve never worked with letterpress before so I was very eager to get my hands dirty in the studio. The process is absolutely amazing to me and I love the tactile quality of the work produced. Every letter is backwards as it’ll print “right side” once it hits the paper. And the smaller the type face the more you have to pay close attention to grammatical errors and line spacing between the body of text. Then you have to register it on a press and properly ink the drums. What a process!

Alex Cooper is the LCC’s letterpress shop guru & manager and the guy was just a breeze to get along with and very encouraging and helpful from start to finish. He certainly knew his typography; I’d show him a letter slug trying to figure out the name of the font and he would just blurt out the name & point size in a single glance all non-chalant — and mind you the letter is backwards! What a frigging skill.

All of the students were assigned a number to explore, and the letterpress poster I created centered around the Cuban 5 since I was given the number five. Compared to one of my earlier concept this poster was relatively much simpler in execution. But because I didn’t have all the characters present in the typeface I was using, I had to set and register each line of type individually so what should have been two passes through the press (the red bars and the blue names respectively) become 6 passes in total.

Unfortunately along the way I made plenty of mistakes and I even chipped a couple of the character slugs much to Alex’s dismay. I still fell crummy about that, even though Alex tried to reassure me that it was kool. He laughed when I said I’d be willing to replace the character stating that the cost of the thing was way out my range.

In the end, I found that I enjoyed the process of letterpress and I was pleased with the final results of my poster. Some of my other classmates took more ambitious approaches with their designs (i.e. lots of small type and character setting) so they’re not quite finished with theirs yet. I hope to get down in the studio again over the summer and create a couple more letterpress editions if time permits.

I’d just like to conclude by stating that the workshop really helped me appreciate the level of artistry and craftmanship that goes into producing prints in this manner. It’s sadly becoming a lost art, but buddies of mine like Kiyotaka are keeping the craft alive through centering their business around the medium. But I’d be remiss not to acknowledge that the experience also served to help me really appreciate the modern advances in print production while reminding me that the computer is just another tool to be utilized. The real creativity comes “offline”.

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