W+K Studio Blog

We’ve got a fresh new batch of letterpressed goods! Therapy not included.

Some Depth

I thought I would also share a couple interesting letterpress projects to be aware of.

Letterpress has had a substantial growth in popularity over the last few years, and seems to be surpassing silkscreening as the designer’s choice for printmaking methods. Maybe because it has more limitations than screenprinting, and the mechanical nature of letterpressing lends itself to a slightly more “hand-made” aesthetic somehow. It’s interesting how having limitations in image-making can make the result more human. Maybe I’m wrong, but that ‘s how it seems to me, because many folks in the design and printing industry are breathing new life into the art of letterpress by recovering these abandoned tools from ebay, craigslist, basements, or even the dump, and restoring presses for use, taking printmaking workshops on the road, digitizing typefaces and archiving letterpress ephemera online. A noble cause, if you ask me, and one to be excited about.

Get in the Van

The first project I want to mention is by Kyle Durrie. Her plan was to build a mobile print shop in the back of an old delivery truck and take it on the road, visiting schools, art spaces, city parks, music festivals, craft shows, parties, and anywhere else that might have an interest in learning about printing. The project was sucessfully backed through Kickstarter. We have mad respect for this adventurous and ambitios project, not to mention the sweet logo made by our pal Mette. Check it out.

Saints of the Press

Keegan and Meegan Co. are going to save a beautiful piece of printing and cultural history. Also successfully funded through Kickstarter. A mechanical/analog tool of the past, saved with the help of a new digital tool – beautiful.

In the 1950’s, in The Dalles, Oregon a burgeoning printer bought a 12 x 18 Chandler and Price cylinder printing press. It was top of the line at the time. Once he received the press, he proceeded to drag all 3000lb of well-built machinery down a flight of stairs into his basement. For the next 30 years he printed beautiful broadsides on this press. The most prominent being broadsides for the Pendleton Round-Up, one of the top ten largest rodeos in the nation.

Archive

Right now. Head over to the Wood Type Museum hosted by Unicorn Graphics. Scans and scans of  wood type, and catalogues from Hamilton, Morgrans & Wilcox, and lots of others. Go. NOW!

Behind the Scenes

Lets go a step further into the process. Watch this trailer for Making Faces: Metal Type in the 21st Century and get a glimpse of a process that is no longer necessary in practice, yet mesmerizing and inspiring to watch. This is for the hardcore typophiles.

Steven Heller writes about the film for the New York Times:

In the film, Rimmer, who died in 2010, painstakingly demonstrates the lost art of pantographic type making. The pantograph is a mechanical device, based on parallelograms, which allows the movement of one pen, in tracing an image, to replicate that movement with a second pen. A craftsperson can draw on one side at a particular size, and on the other the type is “reproduced” at a chosen point size.

The End

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TO THE DEATH 80′s CELEBRITY BATTLE
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This Friday, 4PM PST
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Will the eternal 80s handle the many multiple music styles of the Shaolin? Strap those headphones on and listen to find out.

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Font Identification

Would you like to know what cool web fonts are being used on your favorite websites? WhatFont Tool has got ya covered. Go grab the bookmarklet and start confirming those hunches.

Or if you work in STUDIO, you could use the human design network via mass-email approach.  Some type expert will sort you out.

Photoshop Grids

This nifty tool for the grid savvy, this script will make creating grids in Photoshop CS 5 far less manual and painful. Thanks Mirtho.

Scriptographer

I have been surprised lately how many designers I’ve spoke with who haven’t experimented with this tool. IT’S SO RAD!

Easy to install and  open source so there are often new tools to try out. If you dig it, make sure you donate to the people behind it.

Like the Voronoi tool:

The Ribbon!

Phyllotactic spirals!!

More about Scriptographer from the site:

Scriptographer is a scripting plugin for Adobe Illustrator™. It gives the user the possibility to extend Illustrator’s functionality by the use of the JavaScript language.

The user is no longer limited to the same tools that are used by most graphic designers around the globe. Scriptographer allows the creation of mouse controlled drawing-tools, effects that modify existing graphics and scripts that create new ones.

But Scriptographer is also a webpage on which users can exchange scripts and ideas.

Scriptographer gives the tool back into the hand of the user and confronts a closed product with the open source philosophy.

Analog

But the ultimate tools for exploration and experimentation still remain: