Learning the Basics

Recently I took a trip to the National Print Museum in Dublin and took a day course in letterpress printing. It is a course that is only run twice a year and is a dying art. Recently the art of letterpress has had somewhat of a resurgence, mostly with designers who want their business cards to stand out a little from the crowd.

I would recommend that any person who is in education in, or is currently working in, a field that is involved in digital design or digital art to spend some time thinking about the way that their particular discipline was plied before the computer came along.

Inkjet killed the letterpress star.

When working on a computer to create a design the “ctrl+z” is only a stretch of the fingers away, so there is an enormous amount of trial and error. It is so easy to type the copy into a program and try a number of different fonts in a program, experimenting with different styles to see what looks best.

On my trip to the print museum I was given the chance to experience how type was set before the computer came on the scene. It was an insight into a trade that went into decline about the same time as the first Apple Macintosh computers were making their ways into design studios.

Methods and Madness.

From the first few minutes I became instantly aware at how much time was taken with planning out the designs. We were given a stack of blank business cards and a pen and told to think about some layouts that we would like to try out. As a designer who is used to doing a quick sketch on paper then opening Illustrator and experimenting, this was a little frustrating, as I just want to get started. We were told to seriously consider what fonts, and what font sizes, we would like to use for each item on the cards. Normally when doing designs I have a rough idea of what font I am going to use but this could change and be experimented with, with the click of a mouse.

When we finally got around to setting the type it became clear very quickly why so much planning was required before getting stuck in. Setting type by hand is a very precise and time consuming activity, and if the wrong size of font is chosen and it doesn’t fit into the available space, the type needs to be removed, replaced in the case boxes and reset using a smaller font size. This took up to 30 minutes for each line of text, so after messing up one line of text, you made sure it didn’t happen again.

Even with planning everything out correctly, things were bound to go wrong and at one point I knocked over two lines of type that I had spent quite a while putting together, meaning the type had to be sorted through and the type reset.

Sense of Achievement.

Even though the setting of the type took a lot of thought, precision and hard work, when the type was finally set properly and securely held in a frame there is something very satisfying about hand printing and seeing the instant outcome with the ink still wet on the cards.

At the end of the day, with ink on our skin and sweat on our back it felt good to get away from the glow of the monitor and do something that really changes your perspective on how design has progressed. Since the workshop I have spent far more time planning than I ever did before, and I think that due to this my designs have improved. I would recommend days like this to everyone.

All of the pictures that I took on this day can be seen at my flickr.