Translating Digital Designs into Letterpress

Translating your digital designs into hand crafted letterpress pieces that are unique in today’s printing consortium.

Cognition Studio’s Kristine Johnson recently wanted a “more hands on” feel for specific projects and found making good use of the letterpress to get that unique quality in a world filled with 6 color printing, aqueous coating and non-recycled materials. Making custom art pieces that have a personal touch, but that are balanced by cost effectiveness and have a cool factor can be challenging but very rewarding.

: Laura Marchbanks Photography

: Marchbanks Photography business cards and sticker

: Close-up detail

: Colored edging

: Colored edging

: Close-up detail

: Birth announcement cards

: Close-up detail

: Thick paper

: Modern twist

: Cognition Studio business cards

: Cognition Studio 2008 holiday card

: Extra thick paper

: Highlight on blind deboss

: Close-up detail

: day of mailing

: Vandercook at SVC Seattle

: Inking linoleum cut

: Hot off the steam roller

: Steam rolling our prints

Here is a little background: “Letterpress is the oldest of the traditional printing techniques and remained the only important one from the time of Gutenberg, about 1450, until the development of lithography late in the 18th century and, especially, offset lithography early in the 20th.

Originally the ink-bearing surface for printing a page of text was assembled from individual types by a typesetter or compositor, letter by letter and line by line. The first keyboard-actuated typesetting machines, the Linotype and the Monotype, were introduced in the 1890s.

Letterpress was originally carried out on platen presses, in which the paper is pressed against the flat, inked form by a flat platen; later, the platen was replaced by a roller in the flat-bed cylinder press; still later, the printing form was wrapped around one cylinder and the paper was passed between this cylinder and a second, creating a rotary press.

Letterpress can produce work of high quality at high speed, but it requires much time to adjust the press for varying thicknesses of type, engravings, and plates. To compete with offset printing, letterpress printers have developed printing plates made from a photosensitive plastic sheet that can be mounted on metal.” Source - http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/337488/letterpress-printing

Taking purely digital creations and translating them into letterpress crafted pieces isn’t as easy as you would think. Having a clear understanding of how presses work, what happens to the ink when pressed into the paper and working with the limitation of vector (line) based artwork and one color can be challenging for young designers who’ve trained solely in a digital era.

My recommendation, focus on getting back to the basics…really think about your design in terms of contrast, composition and messaging. Working out a design that translates into letterpress means ditching all you know about Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign or HTML. It means thinking in black and white, the balance of space, form and function. Thinking about the page, how the design is effected by the hand holding it, the physical user experience. Throw in the delicate play of color on paper: ink bleeding, paper pushing, texture in your hand and all of a sudden your possibilities seem endless! But not really. Just like any medium, personal restraint is clearly important and working within the constraints of the medium are vague to newcomers.

So how do you work with the limitations but push the envelope? Think outside the box. And rely on what you do know. Good design is simply good design. The use of the letterpress medium is just a bonus. My advice to young designers wanting to dabble in letterpress: 1) take a class (it’s fun to get your hands dirty); 2) design in black and white. Think hard about what your brain sees and play with that image/experience until you have achieved that ‘a-ha!’ moment. Remember you can’t throw the kitchen sink at a letterpress design (and you can’t do it quickly either, they call it a craft for a reason), but you can think outside of the box to achieve that “wow” feeling by applying innovative thinking you cull from the digital world that you do know and love so much.

“The process requires a high degree of craftsmanship, but in the right hands, letterpress excels at fine typography. It is used by many small presses that produce fine handmade limited-edition books, artists’ books, and high-end ephemera such as greeting cards and broadsides.

To bring out the best attributes of letterpress, printers need to understand the capabilities and advantages of what can be a very unforgiving medium. For instance, since most letterpress equipment prints only one color at a time (unlike presses for offset printing four-color process printing), printing multiple colors can be challenging. The inking system on letterpress equipment is less precise than on offset presses, which can pose problems with some graphics: detailed, white (or “knocked out”) areas, such as small, serif type, or very fine halftone, surrounded by fields of color, can fill in with ink and lose definition. However, a skilled printer can overcome most of these problems.

While less common in contemporary letterpress printing, it is possible to print halftoned photographs, via photopolymer plates, on letterpress equipment. However, letterpress printing’s strengths are crisp lines, patterns and other graphics, and typography.” Source – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letterpress_printing

The letterpress movement has been helped by the emergence of a number of organizations that teach letterpress such as Columbia College Chicago’s Center for Book & Paper Arts, New York’s Center for Book Arts, Studio on the Square and The Arm NYC, the San Francisco Center for the Book, Bookworks, Seattle’s School of Visual Concepts, Black Rock Press and the Minnesota Center for Book Arts.

Affordable photopolymer platemakers and milled aluminum bases, have allowed letterpress printers to produce type and images derived from digital fonts and scans. Photopolymer plates have encouraged the rise of “digital letterpress” in the 21st Century, allowing a small number of firms to flourish commercially.

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Tags: graphic design, hand-crafted, Letterpress, traditional printing, Vandercook press

This entry was posted on December 21, 2008 at 5:11 am and is filed under Boutique Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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