This was our second Creative Letterpress workshop in a week. This time it was with ten members of the .918 Club of Lancaster, PA. They operate a working letterpress museum at The Heritage Center Museum in Lancaster. We’ve volunteered a number of times, but lately have slacked off due to workload and Kalmar Nyckel obligations. To help pay them back we offered them one of our book workshops using letterpress.

This 16″ x 20″ piece is folded in quarters and torn along the folds to create an accordion-fold, caterpillar book. Here are their pages based on quotes related to printing.

In the printed piece every other row swaps top and bottom. We put everything in the same direction to make it easier to read.

We printed a few extras that maybe they can sell at their museum shop. It is a great example of letterpress.

Now to do some distributing of type.

Every design student in the country needs to do this letterpress workshop. They will forever feel the relationship between type and type size, understand what the word leading means, and should have their attention to detail nudged in the right direction. It isn’t bad that at the end of the day they walk out with a pretty impressive portfolio piece that gives them a good talking point at interviews.

This was an impressive effort by a group of second and third year typography students with Professor Diane Zatz at the Art Institute of Philadelphia on February 20th. We thought everyone did a great job of controlling the chaos of walking into our studio with 600 cases of wood & metal type, thousands of dingbats, learning about leading and spacing materials, composing sticks, California Job Cases and then pull this off in essentially 10 hours.

We’ve always wanted to count all of the pieces that go into making up one of these. So, wood & metal type, spacing, and leading totaled 1,422 pieces. This 16″ x 20″ piece is folded in quarters and torn along the folds to create an accordion-fold, caterpillar book. Here are their pages based on quotes related to creativity.

In the actual printed piece every other row is rotated 180 degrees We thought it would be better to let you read it so we’ve put all the bottoms at the bottom.

This is how the lockup looked.

We enjoyed the company of six members of AIGA / Baltimore who spent a nice day at Lead Graffiti on a joint book project hand setting wood and metal type. The whole story.

It is a wonderful group project where a 16″ x 20″ broadside (printed one side only) is produced collectively using wood and metal type. The piece is printed via letterpress in two colors, and through some careful folding and tearing, is bound into an accordion-folded book. Without gluing or sewing, the book is made with bookboard covered in Lead Graffiti pastepaper.

It makes quite a nice group project and the results of this particular workshop displayed especially creative uses of typography. But then you might expect that from a group of professional designers.

Click here to see images of each page of this project and more information on how the workshop operates.

We’ve been doing a number of Lead Graffiti Creative Letterpress workshops for professional designers and students which have a creative result.

We try to do each of them at least a bit differently from each other. Some have results nice enough to be put into the spotlight.

A link to the workshop portfolio main page.

This is the link to the page describing our Creative Workshop.

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.

A group of 24 students and faculty from the Delaware College of Art & Design came by Lead Graffiti in Newark, Delaware on February 5, 2009 to get some first hand experience at setting type the old-fashioned way and then printing it on our Vandercook SP-15. Each student took one letter from the poem Alpha by Edwin Morgan to set. Those were put together and printed as a broadside each student could take with them. It looked like the students had a good time.

Click here to see the whole 2009 story.

Click here to see their 2008 workshop story.

How about a basic type composition and printing on a tabletop letterpress workshop that results in an edition of Valentine’s Day cards? You can choose from our collection of images and metal & wood type to design and print a small edition of cards.

Lead Graffiti is offering just such a workshop on Sunday, January 25th. Check out the link below for some ideas using our collection of type and images.

We were thinking a good line for this image would be “A tisket, a tasket, and a big Valentine’s Day basket for you.”

Click here to see more images and ideas.

We like to run workshops that will be fun and lasting. We also like working with kids as we think any of these workshops will help them learn patience, develop handskills, value the relationship between effort and results, and strengthen their creativity.

Costs of workshops includes all materials (paper, bookboard, board cloth, paste, etc.) along with a light lunch (usually Nick & Joe’s Pizza, which we especially like) for the workshops scheduled for six or more hours.

Letterpress workshops:

Saturday, January 10, 10 - 4
Metal type composing and tabletop letterpress printing / $120 - COMPLETED
Sunday, January 25, 10 - 4
Metal type composing and tabletop letterpress printing / $120
Focus of this workshop will be making a small edition of Valentine cards.
Saturday, February 7, 10 - 4
Vandercook SP-15 / $120
Sunday, February 22, 10 - 4
Metal type composing and tabletop letterpress printing / $120
Saturday, March 7, 10 - 4
Chandler & Price platen press / $120
Sunday, March 22, 10 - 4
Vandercook SP-15 / $120

Bookmaking workshops:

Sunday, January 11, 10 - 5
One day, one book / $140 - COMPLETED
Saturday, January 17, 9 - Noon
No sew, no glue books / $60
Saturday, January 24, 2 - 5
Pastepaper primer / $60
Sunday, February 8, 10 - 5
One day, one book / $140
Saturday, February 14, 9 - 1
A pair to remember / $70
Saturday, February 14, 2 - 5
The hard case of the two books / $80
Sunday, March 8, 10 - 4
Classic clamshell box / $140
Saturday, March 14, 9 - 1
No sew, no glue books / $70
Saturday, March 21, 10 - 5
One day, one book / $140

Participants can be as young as 9 for any of the bookmaking workshops or 12 for the letterpress workshops. For younger participants bookmaking workshops provide wonderful handskills that are being lost in a world of joy sticks. We would love to do a workshop limited to young participants if there is enough interest. We would also be willing to run a series of workshops for after school either in consecutive days or the same day for several weeks. Let us know if you have such an interest.

A family or perhaps a design studio can buy out a workshop session with at least 4 attendees and we can provide a more focused discussion, if that is useful (wood type, mixing presses, wedding invitations, etc.).

With 5+ from the same family / business scheduling at the same time, we will discounts (5th and 6th at 50% off). It is worth mentioning that we can do workshops most any day and any time of the day if at least a group of three schedules at the same time. Make us an offer.

Depending on interest we may remove workshops with less than two subscribers. There are other letterpress and bookmaking workshops we can offer. Feel free look through the list on our website to encourage one and an approximate time frame.

If you are in the area of Newark, Delaware, let us know by email a couple of days early and we’ll see if we can schedule a tour of the Lead Graffiti studio.

Spent a nice Sunday afternoon workshop “letterpressing from the hip” with a friend who didn’t feel like buying holiday cards.

Here is one of handrolled backgrounds and some six line Goudy Italic in wood.

Will need to let these dry and then print one more afternoon on the inside which was typeset today. It would be fun to have the time to advertise for just such a workshop.

We got two ideas today that we are going to print tomorrow. We’ll show some images.

We enjoy inviting young friends to our studio. We’ve found it to be a great way to offer a short break to our parenting friends as well as offering a hands-on experience to a new generation of letterpress printers which really excites us a lot. We also believe it offers some good social benefits as well.

Click here for the longer story.

Above Kieran working on a holiday card.

Above Lucie working on a set of thank you cards.