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.

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.

Lead Graffiti has added a second Heidelberg Windmill to its collection of presses. Our first one (middle of the image above and made in 1956) had a ‘clank’ deep down inside that has always worried us. Probably just beat to death, but then we got it for free, and it has printed well for us and will now serve as a backup. The second one (on the right and made in 1952) we just brought back from Maine.

Moving it into place was work even with our nice concrete floors (we have to get a pallet jack), but the move went smooth. We had to move our Garamond metal type (1950 pounds), our largest galley rack (probably 900 pounds), another type case (maybe 500 pounds), a C & P 10 x15 (1500 pounds), our Washington #5 iron handpress (1800 pounds), a Golding 8 x 12, and all of our spacing / wood furniture / tool box and a bit of other extraneous stuff. About 3.5 tons I would guess. Well, the new press is all in place, but needing some electrical work.

Now to move everything back into place.

A Philadelphia graphic design professor wants to do some personal design research via letterpress using wood type. She spent the day with Lead Graffiti working on our Vandercook Universal III and some of our 50 line (8.25″) wood type numbers.

Wouldn’t this idea be an interesting way to do room numbers in a design school. Or better yet in a business school. If you did the street signs in a small town it would have to change what someone felt about the town as they were driving through. Hmmm.

We are looking forward to this being day one of a lot of nice design days.

Here is a shot of the prints hanging while printing the second color. A really nice way to spend an afternoon.

Lead Graffiti had the privilege of working with S.A. Griffin and Bottle of Smoke Press to produce a keepsake which will given out during The Poetry Bomb Couch Surfing Across American Tour of Words 2010. The keepsake, designed and printed in an edition of 400 by Lead Graffiti, is a poem by Ellyn Maybe, written especially for The Poetry Bomb.

Be sure to join in when it is in a city near you.

A link with details about The Poetry Bomb: The Poetry Bomb on Facebook

It was nice to see Lead Graffiti’s name appear on the blog at Wieden + Kennedy / New York related to some letterpress support we added to Grand Army’s work in the Manifest Equality exhibition in Los Angeles.

This was their piece which was letterpress printed over old magazine pages and pieced into a collage.

© Grand Army / 2010

And Grand Army’s video of the exhibition opening.

Grand Army photos at Lead Graffiti (click next to move through them) where you can also see images of the wood type layouts.