lead me

LetterPress - Printing Kahlil Gibran from Callil Capuozzo on Vimeo.

last week, on a tuesday just as lovely as any tuesday in February ever was, this is what I was doing.

only it was here in Texas, not in Rhode Island (if any two states could be more opposite, I do not know how--not that I've ever been to Rhode Island. is it nice there?). and we were not exactly printing poetry. but aside from those technical differences, it was just about the same process. getting all the itty bitty letters to line up. filling in all the gaps (every single weirdly-shaped one. all of them) with leads and spacers and appropriate widths of furniture. tightening the quoin, everso carefully. slathering a sheet of glass with sticky black ink. rolling and rolling and rolling the ink, to get it just exactly right for inking the type... and then the most exciting bit: setting that perfect blank paper down, rolling it under the platen, and letting that press do its simple, heavy work. rolling it back out and peeling that freshly inked page away from the type-block is pretty lovely too. there's a crisp, rippling sound in it. and then you lay that page down gently and scrutinize it for errors.

we found lots of errors. proofing letterpress prints takes ages. getting the balance of the old Washington Press just right takes ages.

but the archaic novelty of it... oh, it's great. one of these days I'll take pictures of our actual letterpress lab on campus. for now, enjoy these semi-random videos that sort of evoke the experience of working in such a place. (the first far more than this last, I confess. but I do love this movie.... love love love.)



this week in 5340, our class is going to be in the lab looking at type and talking about printing presses. such an awesome little class, this has been. I still need to blog about my hand-bound book, sometime. put that on the list. (it's a long list. getting longer. I need to blog more often.)

seam rippers and magic

my very clever sister taught me how to ride a bike and how to draw a nice-looking fish. once upon a time we found a reason to fight over almost anything, except for that one day we scribbled life-size portraits of ourselves on the wall in red colored pencil.

today our creative work doesn't overlap so much as it did then... but I did get to make-over her little blog, and put together a banner and business cards for her brand new etsy shop.

the process went through a few phases. Kara had a name picked out already: whitecarnation. she asked me, the geek that I am, to help her make it look cool. working with nothing but a name and a few rather unexciting stock photos, I threw together these:

not bad... but not very evocative either. she used the green one for a while before throwing it out and putting up a nice gray and white banner of her own making. and that was cool too... but then she wanted to get really serious. so over Christmas, she dug through her scraps and arranged a few lace flowers among a field of miscellaneous fabric pieces. many, many pictures were taken.

{ random fact: that's my very favourite brown skirt, down at the bottom there. }

once I got all the pictures off the camera onto my as-of-yet nameless macbook, I went to work tweaking the saturation until we got just the right look. lots of texture, just a little bit faded. smooth a bit of Museo Light on top and you've got something pretty amazing.

and maybe it's just because she's my sister, or maybe it's because I was in a good mood that day, but I think I'll nominate her for the best client ever award. it's always wonderful when we're impressed with each other. and when we can be in the same room and see just what's happening. and when it's clear that we really love what we do. maybe all clients seem awesome when those things happen...

anyway, it's worked out that Kara gets a day or so of graphic design from me, I get free alterations on all the clothes that don't fit me anymore from her. it's perfect.

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i've taken up, for my extracurricular christmas studying this year, the subject of typography.

somehow i'm not nearly as afraid of type design as i am of open source computer software. it isn't that surprising, i suppose. type design grows a little bit naturally out of my background as a technical writer and my secret otherlife as a wannabe designer. i already knew about serifs and roman faces, baselines and kerning and justification.

i've been reading Jan Tschichold and prowling the web for information on all the basics. counters, bowls, cross-strokes, terminals, descenders, hairlines--so much terminology, i'm never going to remember it all.this may be the beginning of something. or it may be just another phase.

either way, should be fun.