We just completed a whirlwind 8 days with Virginia Green from Baylor University. Virginia wants to jump into the deep end of the pool of letterpress. She got a nice grant to come, study, and print at Lead Graffiti.

The photo above illustrates a few memorable events. From the top left: when we got back from picking Virginia up at the airport Ben Kiel of House Industries was printing a poster for the Tour de France; visiting with Roland Hoover, former letterpress printer for Yale University; talking with Mike Kaylor, looking over the woodcuts and letterpress with Chris Manson; setting a full 15″ x 20″ area of 48 point Garamond; visiting Mike Denker and his wood type collection; drooling over a Kelmscott “Chaucer” with Rebecca Johnson Melvin of Special Collections at the University of Delaware, and speed printing twenty 2-color carefully registered notecards, including trimming / creasing / folding, in less than 90 minutes.

I think she knew she was here.

Often there is a discussion of how high a resolution you should scan an image in order to convert it to a vector-based image usable for letterpress.

Below are three images of Adobe Caslon Pro 18 point. An image of the digital font was produced in Photoshop in resolutions 4800 dpi, 2400, 1200, 600, and 300. If you were scanning from a printed image you would be including any degradation of the type outline based on the quality of the printing into the image.

The images were brought into Adobe Illustrator and converted to vector-based (outlined) images using the LiveTrace option.

I then took overlaid versions of the 2400, 1200, and 600 dpi versions so you could see the differences from one to the other. The red outline is the lower resolution.

The main problems above occur around the bottom serifs. Generally the type has become slightly bolder a the lower resolution.

At 600 you are losing any sharpness around the outside corners of the lower serifs and around the top. Clearly the type is becoming noticeably bolder.

The question after this is, “How much detail do you want or need?”

Keep in mind these images are from 18 point type. If you were doing a Bewick illustration (which I should take a shot at) with lots of thin lines, it would almost assuredly require the 2400 dpi or even 4800 and then a careful manipulation of the tonal value to maintain the highest quality with the least loss of detail.

In my past life I was the head of Advertising Design in the Visual Communications Group at the University of Delaware. I had the opportunity to contribute to the education of a lot of really good students. The recent 57th Cannes International Advertising Festival gave out only two Titanium and Integrated Lions awards.

BOTH of the awards included the work of former students.

Marco Kay & Karl Lieberman were listed as copywriters for a project for the LIVESTRONG FOUNDATION produced by Wieden + Kennedy / Portland, Oregon. That is doubly wonderful as the Tour de France starts this coming Saturday toward which I will likely devote about 6 hours a day. Clearly, Lance is in my head.

D.J. Pierce was listed as Associate Creative Director and Art Director and Kat Street was listed as Interactive Art Director for TWELPFORCE for BEST BUY produced by Crispin Porter + Bogusky / Boulder, Colorado.

Wow.

We’ve accommodated more than 220 workshop attendees in our letterpress and bookmaking workshops in Lead Graffiti’s 2,200 square foot studio space.

Our new scheduling sequence offers our Vandercook and Chandler & Price platen workshops during the same weekends. Want to get into letterpress? Sign up for our introductory Metal Type Composition workshop and then jump into the deep end of the pool with a Vandercook and Chandler & Price weekend of wood and metal type, photopolymer plates, and a lot of other things letterpress and you will be ready to print.

These are mostly technical workshops. After completing the workshop you can rent our space and equipment for your own personal work.

Metal type composition | description
     Sunday, August 8, 10am - 5pm
     Saturday, September 11, 10am - 5pm
     Sunday, October 10, 10am - 5pm
     Saturday, November 6, 10am - 5pm
     Sunday, December 5, 10am - 5pm

Vandercook | description
     Sunday, August 22, 10am - 5pm
     Saturday, September 25, 10am - 5pm
     Sunday, October 24, 10am - 5pm
     Saturday, November 20, 10am - 5pm
     Sunday, December 19, 10am - 5pm

Chandler & Price platen | description
     Saturday, August 21, 10am - 5pm
     Sunday, September 26, 10am - 5pm
     Saturday, October 23, 10am - 5pm
     Sunday, November 21, 10am - 5pm
     Saturday, December 18, 10am - 5pm

Creative Letterpress | description
     AIGA / Baltimore - late summer/early fall - no date set yet.

Pastepaper primer | description
     None scheduled

One day, one book | description
     None scheduled

Classic clamshell box | description
     None scheduled

Coptic stitch binding | description
     None scheduled

One of our new accounts we gained at the 2010 National Stationery Show was GreerChicago. Not only did they really like our Boxcards, but ordered a plate and we created a “Chicago TRASH” version that you can see in the foreground below printed on Coca Cola packaging.

They even bought some New York City TRASH cards. Hmmm. Sounds like a bit of card rivalry.

How cool is this display? We’ve got our own table with metal wires and magnets to hold the cards. Most of the time you expect your cards to just take up one of the ‘card cells’ on a wall of cards.

This is just plain nice. Now we need to figure out something nice to do back.

You can see GreerChicago’s website here.

Lead Graffiti welcomes its first intern, Garrett, a 4th-year graphic design major at Maryland Institute College of Art. Garrett started at the Delaware College of Art & Design where he took a Lead Graffiti Creative Letterpress workshop with his professor John Breakey. He followed that up with a Chandler & Price platen workshop and seems as though he found an interest.

He jumped in on day one helping us fold and sleeve some of our greeting cards to fulfill orders we had received from the National Stationery Show. We think he wore the shirt for Ray and we played a number of LZ (we considered calling our studio Lead Zeppelin for a while) albums over the day to celebrate.

We hope we can make it a great experience and that it will help his portfolio.

Our Lead Graffiti Boxcards got the most attention at the National Stationery Show.

Printed on recycled boxes from packaged goods the front image has a nice randomness.

Want to help us by saving your packages? Get in touch and we’ll tell you what we are looking for and how to best preserve them.

We are headed to the 2010 National Stationery Show which is being held at the Jacob Javitz Center in New York City. The flurry of final details was fun and the image above is our booth set up in our studio the day before we drove up for set up.

We just finished doing our handrolled signage (shown above) from some wood type in our collection for our lines of cards. They will add a nice texture and information to the Lead Graffiti booth.

We are excited to see if there is interest this year in some of our new offerings.

Monograms - write like you mean it
Tag. You’re it. - 12 cards to swap with a penpal
Boxcards - what goes around comes back more fun
Just My Type - type with a splash of surprise
Woodcuts - sow, reap, eat, drink & write
Hands Up - applause for life’s little victories

Obviously, we’d love to have stores selling greeting cards stop by, but we’d also love to meet people from other letterpress shops.

Jill, Ray, Tray, and Terre will be holding down the fort. Lead Graffiti is in booth 2767.

Here is a great example of something I really like about letterpress.

We have a friend who is currently the president of the Newark, Delaware branch of the AAUW (American Association of University Women). She showed us the certificates they had been giving out for an award to young women who were high school juniors and excelled at science and mathematics. The certificates were the same as about 99.5% of all certificates given out at schools. Laser printed, awful design, poor typography, poorly written, mediocre paper…

Could we help?

Absolutely!

We provided what we thought was a cleaner design (plus we got to throw in a few moustaches), giving credit to AAUW Delaware, and printing on a nice thick paper with plenty of impression for the 52 individual certificates.

We used grey and AAUW teal for the certificate and black for the handset name (42pt Garamond), high school, and date (24pt Garamond).

The snag in the process what that even though we had a great system to doing the handsetting it took us about three times longer for that part than we thought. We have a very thorough run of Garamond foundry type with a lot of each size so we set about 40 of the certificates before we ran out of the first sort.

The certificate itself was printed from photopolymer plates.

Even though we proofed all of the handset text beforehand (in full galleys) we thought it might be important to lock the type in place and just print it individually one more time so we could look for small details like broken serifs, etc. We took some wine colored French Paper and cut it double size and printed the text on it for the proof and then used that as a folder to hold the certificates. That worked out very well with only the added cost of 30 sheets (20 x 26 cut in half worked perfectly) for the folders.

Here is what the folders looked like. It helped keep the certificates free from fingerprints and they could also be shown easily to others without having to drag it out of an envelope.

There seemed to be a lot of smiles in the photos our friend took at the ceremony. We hope we added to a few of them.

A fun way to spend a couple of mornings with our Vandercook Universal III.

Might be nice next time to get in some help (high school students or AAUW members) who could set the type. Might help them connect to the project even better. It would also be a great project for an intern, but we’ll worry about that next March or April.

I have a design book somewhere I believed mentioned a technique for justifying type that was called something like half justification. This is from at least 20 years ago and I’ve never been able to find the reference again. As I remember the piece was from England. The idea was that if the length of the text was within some predetermined distance of the maximum possible width the line would be justified. If it fell short of that it would remain ragged right.

The first example below is 12 point Rialto on a 20 pica measure set flush left / ragged right.

Below is the same text, but if the text length was 19 picas or more the line was force justified.

I like the way that looks and was thinking about trying it on an upcoming project.

Especially from British readers of this post, does anyone know what this is called or if it is even something compositors actually did? Have an example?