Flush — A Design Blog by Ivan W. Lam at ivanwlam.com

Two weeks ago, I took a one-day letterpress class with a few designer friends at the San Francisco Center for the Book. I had learned about this place for a while, and had wanted to take the letterpress or bookbinding class but never found the right time.

At Letterpress I, we pretty much learned the basics of a letterpress shop and how to set type and print it. We had two exercises: the first one was to have the entire class of ten create a type specimen with whatever typeface we want, and the second was to make our own page of type that would assemble into a book.

We get to pick from probably about a hundred drawers of type. Here’s the one that I chose for my type specimen: an 18-point drawer of Century:

The lettepress is not all about type. It also has decorative pieces as well:

We learned how to set type of a composing stick, and here’s mine for the type specimen:

The instructor (left) telling us how to set up the press. We never really set up the machine ourselves, which was good, because I didn’t want to break anything. We mostly just turned the handle to roll the press over the type.

And here’s the result of the type specimen done by the class.

Even though the photo is taken on an okay camera on my ivanPhone, you can tell the subtle relief the paper makes from the print. Mine is the one in the middle with the numbers.

With our second exercise, we get to do whatever we want. Being a designer, I had trouble coming up with the perfect idea. Since our prints would be distributed to the other classmates to keep, I couldn’t really do anything too personal.

Finally, I came up with a simple Beatles quote. Then I had a layout all ready in my head, but soon realized that the art of setting type does not yield for craziness. I also learned that, even though as a designer I am aware that white space is not “nothing,” that philosophy quickly turned literal as I had to fill all the emptiness in my layout with type spaces. I soon developed a mini-hatred for spaces, for 1) there was so much math involved with em spaces and en spaces and “3 to the em” and “5 to the em” and “10 to the em” to get every nook and cranny filled to avoid moving type pieces during the actual printing, and 2) I had to put those spaces of different point-size and widths back in the correct cases afterward.

Eventually, I finished setting the type, and an image of the actual type set up on the machine can be seen in the first photo of the post. Here is a video of me doing the actual printing, recorded on my ivanPhone by my friend Tracy.

We had two machines running, so we could choose one of two colors to print our designs. We could also print on red and/or white paper that the instructor had prepared. I wanted to do white on red, but after doing a test print, white on white seemed like the better choice. You can be the judge.

After everyone printed their designs, we got to do a little bit of book-binding lesson, where we sewed our books together with a Japanese stab binding. Here is the book. The book cover is actual from a photo polymer plate that the instructor already had and used to print the covers for all her Letterpress I classes.

It was a fun day learning the letterpress and physically making my own prints. I highly recommend it to the Design students at my alma mater and at any school to consider taking the class while still in school, despite it being just a bit pricey for students. Nonetheless, it would most likely improve their design skills and thinking in class projects.

The center has a volunteer program where you can exchange hours with classes, which I am considering doing in the future. Once a student takes all three levels of the Letterpress classes, he/she gets to buy lab time and print whatever they want. I don’t know what I would actually print with the letterpress, but it’s good to have the medium-of-choice option open.

Flush.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 8th, 2009 at 15:33 and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.