Each year of our Tour de Lead Graffiti project we’ve chosen one (solid and also outlined) or two typefaces for the main type for the posters.

This year we’ve decided on Impact and Bernhard Gothic Medium.

You can tell we aren’t much of wood type purists.

It will be interesting to work with two sans serif typefaces.

We are having both faces made into 2″ high wood type which will be cut using a CNC router. Last year we used copperplates to make the type, but had some frustrating problems with the type height. I’m not sure we can solve it this year, but we are sure going to try.

We’ve loved Bernhard Gothic as a metal type since our earliest days of printing via letterpress. Impact is the typeface we use on our Boxcards.

Should be fun.

We are happy to announce the newest book from Lead Graffiti entitled Boxcar Poems 1 - 12, a series of poems penned by John Dorsey for this edition.

Edition : 125 hard cover copies (4 1/8″ x 5 1/8″), printed via letterpress, signed by the author, and wrapped with hand-painted paste paper

Clamshell box : numbered 1 through 12 and includes the metal slug of the first line of the Boxcar poem bearing that same number designation / $110 each

Hard cover : numbered 13 through 125 / $25 each

Click here to purchase.

. . .

John Dorsey is the author of several collections of poetry, including Teaching the Dead to Sing: The Outlaw’s Prayer (Rose of Sharon Press, 2006), Sodomy is a City in New Jersey (American Mettle Books, 2010), Leaves of Ass (Unadorned Press, 2011), Street Maps for Lost Souls (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2012), and White Girl Problems: Poems & Stories (NightBallet Press, 2012). His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He may be reached at archerevans@yahoo.com

. . .

Some details about the printing and binding:

Binding : The meander book format bound without glue or sewing offered a connection to walking among railroad cars in a trainyard, crisscrossing tracks and ducking under the cars. Lead Graffiti paste paper painted for this book has a combed-box design by Jill Cypher.

Printing : The book was printed slowly & patiently via letterpress on our Vandercook SP15 and Vandercook Universal III. The 14 inside pages are printed in three colors using hot metal type from our Intertype C4 and wood type. The cover title, inlaid in a debossed rectangle, along with the endsheets and spine are printed in 1 color.

Paper : Inside text is printed on paper retrieved by Newark historian, Robert Barnes, from our local Curtis Paper Mill around 1997 when the mill closed. The paste paper is Mohawk Superfine Soft White 80# text, endsheets are Fabriano Tiziano Steel Grey 160 gsm, and the spine is French Construction Brick Red 100# cover.

Typography : Vogue, linecast on our Intertype C4.

The meander is a book form we’ve used in about 40 Lead Graffiti Creative Letterpress workshops. We’ve wanted to print a more serious book using this binding technique for a while. John’s 12 poems match the number of interior pages required for the text. Jill designed the paste paper to reflect the color that comes to  mind when we think of boxcars, though you probably don’t actually see them like that except in old movies.

We are starting to get ourselves organized for our annual endurance letterpress project called Tour de Lead Graffiti. This is the 100th edition of the Tour which runs from June 29 through July 21 and we wanted to use the opportunity to take things up a notch, so this year we will include a linoleum cut by Jill to show the stage’s profile on the 7 mountain stages (stages 2, 3, 8. 9. 18. 19. & 20). The flat stages are just flat stages so the profile wouldn’t likely have any detail. The Tour de France hasn’t even listed the profiles for the flat stages.

Shown here is the prototype, but it turned out nicely so we may stick with it although we might reduce some of the texture. This one is for Stage 18 which includes 2 runs up Alpe d’Huez, once from each side. The people who set the course this year must have snickered a bit when that idea was brought up.

The poster image that will be completed on the day of the stage will likely overprint the profile and it may be that we will do the composition without much, if any, regard to the fact that it is there.

The stage profile, along with the signature block, will be preprinted ahead of time which locks us into the number of each poster we can print (typically about 40). This gives us enough to compete our 26 clamshell box portfolios and another 15 to give to the particpants and have some that we can sell or give away individually. Most days we have Friends of Lead Graffiti working as collaborators and each will get two copies of the day’s output. Inevitably we will blow a couple of each run, but those drop back into the makeready stack and will eventually be turned into postcards which are quite fun.

One decision we will have to make is how to include the linoleum cut as part of the composite print we will be producing. The composite is a poster that includes every run from every poster overprinted onto a single sheet. Last year that total was 108 runs. It may be that we will include a couple of profiles from mountain stages to at least include the element. Profiles from the flatter stages would just overlap into a mush that wouldn’t add much to the piece.

You can click here to see the listing of the stages and who is currently going to be working with us.

Link to TdLG 2011 | link to TdLG 2012

My review of Feedback will follow links two AIGA articles written by Steven Heller and one by Ellen Lupton.

Too Many Grads or Too Few Competencies? The Design School Dilemma / September 8, 2005

What this Country Needs is a Good Five-Year Design Program / April 7, 2004

The Re-Skilling of the American Art Student / March 29, 2005

University of the Unimpressed / May 16, 2013 (design education in England)

. . .

I was invited to participate as both a panelist and a reviewer at the AIGA / Philadelphia Feedback, a portfolio review for 2013.

I made a comment in the panel about not liking teachers (having been one for 3 decades). I cannot remember what I actually said, but it was something to that effect. That wasn’t exactly what I meant to say. I had just done a portfolio review a couple of weeks earlier (and also Feedback last year) and had felt very critical of teachers based on student solutions that must have been approved by the faculty, types of projects which just didn’t lend themselves to interesting portfolio-quality solutions, lack of educational opportunities being offered, lack of outside interactions, etc.

Clearly, there are lots of good teachers and I admire their knowledge base and the problems they have to deal with in regard to student work ethics, school administrations, the fact that logically most people probably have to teach more computer skills than design skills, etc.

I love a lot of teachers, what they do and what they accomplish. I really, really dislike that SOME people are in a position to teach, as I think they often do far too little to push a student to work at a level that is near their potential. They probably all feel like they are trying as best they can, but to me they clearly aren’t trying nearly enough. Teaching is a privilege.

. . .

A couple of other thoughts. It is clear that some schools choose to not participate, probably with the sense that they can invite in their own reviewers and control the review better if they just do their own. Generally speaking, I wouldn’t argue against that. When I was the head of Visual Communications at the University of Delaware we always did a review in New York with our New York graduates. It was a nice way to get out of town, to get a review in the city where most of our students wanted to work, and to connect with our grads on a face-to-face basis. But we also always did at least the AIGA / Philadelphia review along with the Art Directors Club of New York (who didn’t do it this year for some reason). The reason we always wanted to do reviews that included other schools was to encourage our students to look at the portfolios of at least 4 or 5 students from other schools. You could always look at one portfolio and then ask that person who had the best portfolio from that school in their opinion (other than their own, of course). That usually got you to a good portfolio. So, now you could see something of who was good from some other place. What kinds of projects they were doing. What kind of look they had. Strength of typography, photography, printing, etc. I think students who live in an insulated word have a very narrow view of the what the competition looks like. From my nearly 35 years teaching at the University of Delaware, the names of the schools I’m talking about are going to go unnamed, but you know who I’m talking about, were always like this. I don’t get it. I wanted their students to see my students, because if they were better I wanted us to both know it and I wanted to know it to help me be better a better teacher. We both lose without the interaction. But then you can stick your head in the sand and always think and believe what you want, regardless of what reality is. The students and faculty from the schools that participated in the AIGA Feedback are to be commended. Now the schools that participated need to do whatever they can to produce better students than the ones that don’t. That will be the ultimate reward. I don’t understand how students don’t resolve this on their own by just taking their own initiative and doing something like Feedback.

It isn’t hard for me to imagine that the best reviews you might get over the whole night are the ones that happen between the reviews you signed up for.

Enough of that.

. . .

Once again I talked with 10 or 11 students.

Clearly, 10 students out of 50 or so is only a narrow view of the participants, but the work I saw this year was far better than it was last year. I’m not sure why, but it was much better thought out, craft was nice, students were more articulate when answering my questions (and I always have a lot). It was nice. Now that I’ve been out of the classroom for 6 years it was good to see that design is alive and well.

. . . T H A N K  Y O U S

I’m going to make this point just in case you haven’t read my review of last year’s Feedback. Every student who had the opportunity to visit with someone who had taken an evening away from their family, work, TV, reading or whatever they might have done otherwise on a Thursday night, should send a physical, non-digital thank you. And I mean that even if you want nothing to do with the print world and only ever see yourself making websites in the future. Send it with a stamp through the U.S. Mail. This has to be done within 10 days or just be unthankful.

. . . W H A T  D O  Y O U  W A N T  T O  B E

Last year I complained that far too many students couldn’t answer my first question, “What do you want to be?” Clearly they had that answer this year and quickly. I have to admit it was a bit surprising how many students want to do print (not web). There is great print being done, but it seemed odd that there was so little digital work in the portfolios. Honestly, designing the opening page of a website isn’t much, if any different, from designing a great spread in an annual report. I cannot imagine not having at least one website in  your portfolio. Design the opening page, then two visually different pages you would link to from that opening page, and then two more visually different pages that would link from those pages. Done. You risk leaving a hole in your options of creative capabilities. Then produce a print piece that goes along with it so you can show you understand the kinds of issues a company has to go through in today’s world of visually communicating with its target audience. I don’t think it is critical that you be able to code it, although I’m sure others would disagree. I don’t actually remember seeing a good digital design (might just be my memory), but that just doesn’t feel good.

. . . C O N C E P T !  B R A N D I N G !

I’m sure every school teaches what they believe concept and branding are. Honestly, in looking at the portfolios I’m not sure I think anyone is doing it very well at all. I think too often when a project had a good concept, the student didn’t know it because it would show up once and then not again in the project. I think my years teaching advertising design at the University of Delaware gave me a good idea of what concept and strategy was. I think the word ‘branding’ was a bad choice in that it kind of brings to mind branding cattle to say, “This is my cow.” Just putting a logo on it or having continuity to the layout isn’t what branding is. I think this is a serious fault in much graphic design education today.

One of the best people I’ve ever seen explain what ‘BRAND’ is was Marty Neumeier who was the publisher of a great design magazine a number of years ago called Critique. You can see one of his presentations from back in 2010 here, which I think does a pretty reasonable job explaining it. Just for the record I have no stake in Marty’s world and have only passingly met him once in my life. Find a core idea and then build your design around it. It seems like so many projects are just ‘arranging’ things. Design is about ’smart’ more than ‘taste’ to me. There is a tendency to “write out what you want me to know.” It is like the piece was written by a marketing person (nothing against them, but marketing isn’t a creative strategy. It is just saying what you want people to know and that just isn’t enough to ‘grab onto’ people in today’s competitive marketplace.

Doing a good job of branding is to have me figure it out without you saying it.

When I used to teach every student needed an xRay, which was what I called the strategy statement, before anything else could happen. I kind of wish a school would invite me up to speak which would make me break out those files and rethink them.

. . . P O R T F O L I O  P A G E S

Another rather negative bit from the review is how nicely students could design a brochure or poster, but how poorly they design a page in their portfolio to show that brochure or poster. Rectangular photos that make the work look like something from some grandmother’s photo album (nothing against grandmothers, but they usually don’t know much about designing a portfolio). At least for us at Lead Graffiti, we make THINGS. We want them to look like THINGS. We go to a lot of trouble to photograph them and to make them look like THINGS.

I suspect some of this comes from programs that don’t have a strong photographic experience. I would find a way to change that. Students need to see the need for photography and then do something about getting it. Photography is just too useful of a tool to not dive into it deeper than most all of the students did.

This is a photo of a book from one of our letterpress workshops.

The result is a THING? And that photo looks so much nicer on a page than a rectangle with that image in it. The rectangle says “this is a flat, dimensionless (well it does have 2) object.”

It might be that when a student is doing their own portfolio page they are too embarrassed or humble to do it well. Kind of like the problem of needing to brag on yourself. Most people write their résumés very amateurishly because they cannot openly talk about themselves in a positive way.

So, imagine a designer you love. Let’s just say it is Stefan Sagmeister. Assume that he knows you and likes you as a designer and a person and wants you to get that great first job you want. Design the page for you that Stefan would design for you. I promise it will likely be better than whatever it is that you are doing. If you reviewed with me you’ll know the school I’m talking about, but many of the pages just looked the same from one project to the next and one portfolio to the next. It looks like the school is trying to promote the school and not you. YOU are the focus of your portfolio.

Personally, I also think that too many of the pages fell into what I call the “jigsaw puzzle syndrome.” The pieces are lying on a flat table and they can never get on top of any other piece. Here is another photograph we use in our online portfolio showing certificates. If they never touch I can get maybe 1/2 as many in the photograph. Those are also real shadows and not something created in Photoshop.

I thought the scale of pieces shown in the portfolios were strangely too small. I said so many times that something should be twice as large. Not 10% larger. 100% larger. And sometimes even more.

It also seemed that there was often a small, 10 or 12 point text sentence in the corner explaining the project. I think you would be a lot better trying to find 2 words and then doing them in 60 point time at the top in some light color so as to not overpower that connected to the project. Not big and black but big and light. Don’t compete with your project, but help me, the reader, understand right up front what we are talking about. Send me a jpg of your project and I’ll send you two words back.

. . . B U S I N E S S  C A R D S

I walked out with about 20 business cards, 10 student and 10 professional. EVERY student business card but one was visually more boring then the most boring of the professional cards. Where did that come from? And it would also be nice to see someone put their email address in something more than 8 or 10 point type.

. . . 3 - M I N U T E  P R O J E C T

In my part of the panel discussion I complained about student pieces that I would think I could design in 3 minutes. Maybe that scared off a lot of students from signing up with me that had those in their projects in their portfolios. Good. But I didn’t see very many of those this year.

. . . P R O J E C T  O R D E R

This may just be that my opinion is different from your opinion, and that is OK, if you are being very thoughtful and deliberate with the organization of your portfolio.

The piece that best says what you want to be should be first. The second best piece should be the last piece in your portfolio to leave them with a good impression. Your third best piece should be second and all of your others should be 4th to next to last with some thought to pacing. This year as well as last, I almost always disagreed with what was first. You need that killer piece first that makes the reviewer say, “I need to hire this person.” And then as much as possible, you need to not let them change their mind.

. . .

Feel free to share these statements with anyone you like, especially faculty you like and students who will be graduating next year. Most of the things that really matter in a portfolio have to be pretty well done 2 months before portfolio reviews start. It is just hard to avoid getting caught up in it “I just need to get this thing done.”

I would love to talk to schools, but not in May when they are graduating. October or March of the junior year would be a lot better. I would love to do a formal presentation and then spend the rest of the day talking to students who don’t want to go away.

. . . F O R  A I G A

Do Feedback sooner. I would say the middle of April or change the name to “hiring.” The point of feedback is to be able to give it and then have the people have the time to do something about it. May 9 is just too late to expect the critiques to lead to any meaningful change. I would be willing to bet not one student did anything I talked about because they just want to get a job.

Also, I would like to have a record of what I did. I would like to have a list of who the students I talked to listed with their names and what school they came from. I want both of those pieces of information. Just make a signup sheet, have the students sign up (did they do that online or the day of Feedback) with their name and school, and then give me that sheet.

I understand the scheduling problem, but I think 15 minutes is just too short. You’ve got to make it at least 20.

I really had a good time. I wish the letterpress workshops I offered had been given out sooner so maybe I could have had the opportunity to talk to the winners a bit.

Make sure the students have a place to sit between their reviews and do something to encourage the students to look at each others’ books.

Here is another thing that I always loved about my students at Delaware that lead me to believe we were doing some things right. We would go to a portfolio review sponsored by maybe the Philadelphia Art Directors Club. By the end of it the students had figured out who was good and hard at the critiques. When the last review was finished UD students would surround them. They would always get another 2 or 3 reviews out of them. And the other students would be crowded around watching even if it wasn’t their portfolio being reviewed. The Art Directors Club of New York use to really encourage other students to sit and watch the review before theirs. That way they could listen and not be the target of any criticism. I really liked that.

. . .

There are probably typos and awkward wording. I’ll keep working on this for another week or so. This is actually round 4 of reworking this which I did on May 15.

Happy Star Wars day.

Tray, a Lead Graffiti printer, is a member of the 501st Legion, a group of probably 6,000 members worldwide, who portray the nefarious or Dark Side characters of the Star Wars films and other media with some serious costuming effort.

Tray and fellow area colleagues built Emperor Palpatine’s throne and the window behind it for Celebration V and Celebration VI, two major Star Wars conventions. Today happens to also be the first Saturday in May which is Free Comic Book Day and about 6 of them always dress up for a few hours at Captain Bluehen, a Newark, Delaware, iconic comic book store. Throw into this mix, that today is Ann Lemon’s birthday. Ann is a former and seriously in the top tier of favorite students of Ray’s ever in Visual Communications at the University of Delaware.

Ann wanted to throw herself a birthday party and rented out Lead Graffiti for a Star Wars-related letterpress workshop. The result of the workshop will be a 16-page, hard cover, meander book printed 2 colors, all bound without the use of glue or sewing. You can see the look of the book here.

So, we put up the throne and window, the guys are coming dressed in costume for the start of the workshop.

The photo is of Emperor Nichols with his throne waiting for his new apprentices.

Now everyone needs to be cool with a bit of a photo session.

This should be a dark day for the dark side of the dark arts.

Time to start getting organized for the upcoming 100th running of the Tour de France. These are the stage dates and the people who have reserved those dates.

Saturday, June 29 - Stage 1 — Porto-Vecchio > Bastia / 212 km (flat)
. . . Megan Zottlemeyer
Sunday, June 30 - Stage 2 — Bastia > Ajaccio / 154 km (hilly)
. . . Tim Pacific & Christine Fajardo
Monday, July 1 - Stage 3 — Ajaccio > Calvi / 145 km (hilly)
Tuesday, July 2 - Stage 4 — Nice > Nice / 25 km (team time trial) (flat)
Wednesday, July 3 - Stage 5 — Cagnes-sur-Mer > Marseille / 219 km (hilly)
Thursday, July 4 - Stage 6 — Aix-en-Provence > Montpellier / 176 km (hilly)
. . . Rebecca Johnson Melvin (Independence Day and we’ll be rooting for Americans)
Friday, July 5 - Stage 7 — Montpellier > Albi / 205 km (hilly)
. . . Kieran Francke
Saturday, July 6 - Stage 8 — Castres > Ax 3 Domaines / 194 km (mountain stage)
. . . Kseniya Thomas / letterpress printer & friends
Sunday, July 7 - Stage 9 — Saint-Girons > Bagnères-de-Bigorre / 165 km (mountain stage)
Monday, July 8 - Rest day — Saint-Nazaire
. . . Lindsay Smith
Tuesday, July 9 - Stage 10 — Saint-Gildas-des-Bois > Saint-Malo / 193 km (hilly)
. . . Yvonne Lin
Wednesday, July 10 - Stage 11 — Avranches > Mont-Saint-Michel / 33 km (individual time trial) (flat)
Thursday, July 11 - Stage 12 — Fougères > Tours / 218 km (flat)
. . . Lindsay Schmittle & Ben Gallegos
Friday, July 12 - Stage 13 — Tours > Saint-Amand-Montrond / 173 km (flat)
Saturday, July 13 - Stage 14 — Saint-Pourçain-sur-Sioule > Lyon / 191 km (hilly)
. . . Adam DelMarcelle & Mathew Samuel
Sunday, July 14 - Stage 15 — Givors > Mont Ventoux / 242 km (mountain stage)
. . . Bill Roberts / Bottle of Smoke Press (Bastille Day and we’ll be rooting for the French)
Monday, July 15 - Rest day — Vaucluse
. . . APHA monthly meeting / anyone can join it, but it might be crowded
Tuesday, July 16 - Stage 16 — Vaison-la-Romaine > Gap / 168 km (hilly)
. . . Kory Walton & Ryan
Wednesday, July 17 - Stage 17 — Embrun > Chorges / 32 km (individual time trial)
Thursday, July 18 - Stage 18 — Gap > Alpe-d’Huez / 168 km (mountain stage)
. . . Reserved
Friday, July 19 - Stage 19 — Bourg-d’Oisans > Le Grand-Bornand / 204 km (mountain stage)
. . . Ryan Beck + friend
Saturday, July 20 - Stage 20 — Annecy > Annecy - Semnoz / 125 km (mountain stage)
. . . Emily Chernuka / designer & mom
Sunday, July 21 - Stage 21 — Versailles > Paris Champs-Élysées / 118 km (flat)
. . . Ann Lemon, Amos Burkhart & Hugo (He’s from France. Cool.)

Signed on, but currently without a specific date

Gianna Rico / designer
Krista Serianni / designer

Below is the result of our afternoon’s diversion for the 449th birthday of Shakespeare with a nod to the events of the Boston Marathon. It ended up taking 9 hours including a Taco Bell run.

We will add a closeup of Shakespeare’s name, which to us looked really fabulous. We were experimenting with printing ink on paper and then offsetting it back to the type and printing it.

The poster is 14.5″ x 22.5″, printed on Somerset 250 gsm and 300 gsm, in 10 runs through our Vandercook Universal III.

The number of runs required had a lot to do with not having enough characters in some typefaces. The large type at the top is Bradley (wood type) and Caslon Italic (metal type). The Bradleyh was our first shot a couple of years ago at making wood type and the first time we’ve used it where it was dominant. We could only find 1 “O” so we had to print the main quote over three runs. “All’s Well that Ends Well” is printed in 54 point Satanik and we only had four “L”s so that took two runs. The colophon was cast in 12 point Palatino on our Intertype C4 with a dingbat from our collection.

“Shakespeare” was the star of the day. We’ve been bouncing around in our heads about the possibility of printing and then using the printing as a plate, so we tried it. Shakespeare was printed using our 12 line Clarendon on a very hard, smooth stock with very little pressure using our handrolling “typeart’ technique. This was done twice, once with the grey and once with the red-orange. Then we repositioned the wood type and used the just-printed sheets to ink the type. Then the type was printed onto the Somerset stock. So to get “Shakespeare” took 4 runs. You cannot tell much from the poster image as the scanner just doesn’t show the impression of the type. Look below the poster for a better image of how that type looked.

The offset in the position of the type originally and then after provided that area of blind debossing which we suspect would confuse anyone fairly well versed in letterpress technique.

The colophon reads “An afternoon’s diversion by Ray Nichols, Jill Cypher, Tray Nichols, and Bill Roberts remembering and considering the lives of those disrupted by misguided beliefs and the deeds that follow them. Printed slowly & patiently via letterpress at Lead Graffiti, Newark, Delaware, April 23, 2013 on the 449th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth.”

. . .

Below is the offer we made just in case anyone wanted to join in.

We don’t know the exact date of his birth, but William Shakespeare was baptized on 26 April, 1564. Usually you subtract 3 days from the baptism date, so we generally celebrate his birthday as 23 April. He also died on 23 April in 1616. The same date.

Hmmm. Next year will likely be his 450th birthday. Should start planning on something special. Maybe approach the Folger Library with a project. Might be a good place to send this poster when we get it finished.

Anyway, to celebrate a bit of Shakespeare today, we are doing a “Lead Graffiti Afternoon Diversion” based somehow on Shakespeare which gives us a good excuse to put some ink to paper as we have nothing else critical or binding to do at the moment.

Are you one of the people who has been saying they want to do a bit of letterpress? You a student with too much to do? Perfect. Cut class and come join in. Don’t email and say you are doing it. Don’t call and say you are doing it. Just come and do it. Starting at 1pm in our studio after a nice, quiet lunch. If you want to come for lunch (you’ll need to pay your own way), you can meet at the studio at 11:30. We will be eating at the Glass Kitchen on Route 40.

Sometime between now and tomorrow around 11am we’ll figure a topic. Maybe a sonnet. Maybe a quote. Maybe celebrate the lives that have been disrupted by the Boston event. Currently thinking about “Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.” from All’s Well That Ends Well, Act 1 Scene 1. I’ve got what might be an interesting way to do his name which would be a good visual way of reflecting on Boston using our typeart technique that would use both of our Vandercooks and requiring three passes for the final print.

So, 1pm if you are interested. Not sure how long it will take. 5 hours or so at least. You’ll get 2 copies.

Lead Graffiti has added a Miehle V-50 vertical cylinder press to its arsenal of printing options. The press was purchased from Henry Morris of Bird & Bull Press. It prints a 14″ x 20″ sheet, so it will allow us to do volume printing on books up to at least 9″ x 12″ which we hope will offer us some great opportunities as we try to move our efforts more and more toward books.

This shows Tray talking about printing dampened paper on the Miehle. Hmmm. That will be nice.

Henry signing a copy of his type specimen over to Lindsay who bought his metal type collection. One of the highlights of the day was Henry showing us his book of letters mailed with invented stamps, a number of which were postmarked from Sans Serriffe. San Serriffe is one of the great ideas for a book. If you don’t know about it, find a nearby university with a good special collections and check it out.

One more photo of Henry showing us how the press works. It is going to be fun just owning this press.

Lead Graffiti letterpress & bookmaking workshops through June 2013.

A number of area schools schedule workshops for their students and we like to try and keep Saturdays open for them. If you can put together enough people for a specific workshop we will be happy to consider scheduling it.

LETTERPRESS

Creative Letterpress (open registration)

• Sunday, May 19
• Sunday, June 16

VANDERCOOK / technical

• None until after TdLG

BOOKMAKING

Classic clamshell box

• Sunday, June 9

We did a wonderful creative letterpress workshop for 13 Boy Scouts and 4 scoutmasters who had come to complete their Graphic Arts merit badges. Our ‘meander’ book workshop is perfect for this group. The Boy Scout Law has 12 words to it. Our meander book has 12 pages in it. The book also has a title page and a colophon page, and the book has a cover. So the words for laws were divided up and one took on the title page.

The image above shows the lockup of wood & metal type on the left and the finished broadside on the right. We’ve rotate two rows of pages on the right so the bottoms are all oriented the same.

Here is the group gathered around our Intertype C4 during the tour of the studio space. The Intertype is always a big draw on visitors to Lead Graffiti.

It is one of the nicer designs for merit badges.