Ben Kiel and Rich Roat of House Industries, the wonderful & nearby digital type foundry, spent a late night at Lead Graffiti working on a poster Ben had designed for Richard Sachs Cycles. The posters are going to be sold at the Shimano North American Handmade Bicycle Show in Richmond, VA at the end of February.

As it turned out, it was the largest photopolymer plate (about 17″ square) we had ever printed. Luckily we have been experimenting with a new base material for photopolymer plates to fill the beds of our Vandercooks. Up until now we didn’t have enough bases to cover the space required for this project and at the same time fit within the form size on our Vandercook Universal III.

The poster was a first time use of a beautiful new stencil type from from their forthcoming Eames Century Modern collection that is set to premiere in March.

Here is one more photo of ink hitting paper.

Other blog hits on the project.

          thewashingmachinepost.net

          trackosaurusrex.com

The Wieden + Kennedy Attack guys of Grand Army occupied Lead Graffiti for a weekend long letterpress experiment with fun. Ephemera happened. Ink happened. Wood type happened. A boatload of leading and furniture happened. Hopefully some equality will happen, but that is for a later post.

a bit of teaser: images from the printing (then next to see the images)

a bit of film: GrandArmy x Star Wars

Six wonderfully aggressive graphic design seniors from Philadelphia University took it upon themselves to set up a Creative Letterpress workshop with Lead Graffiti on Saturday, January 9. We wanted to set up a group project that really let them see how letterpress worked and also might provide them with a piece they could use in their portfolio.

Each student was let loose in our wood and metal type collection to develop a spread about typography or design. They also each set their name in large metal type. These pages were printed on three different colors along with a cover called “Textiments.” After the workshop Lead Graffiti bound the three signatures together. Each student got three copies of the book with their spread as the center of the opening signature.