February 15th, 2010
Kent, A.K.A. Dad. The large printing presses crank loudly as my dad stands by them and takes control. He pulls the paper out and hands it to me. I feel the indent in the words that sink into the paper, the solid red color that soaks into the thick paper.
That’s my dad; he printed this.
I remember the time when my dad stood behind me on the press and he let me control the press. The most fun thing of all is making stuff with him. We would build and build, then, we would have a problem. We would share our ideas. Then boom, we would come to a conclusion, and fix our problem.
His belief is to carry on hats and letterpress printing. He has favorite hats and hats he doesn’t like. but I’m pretty sure that by the end of the year he wears all his hats at least at one point.
Printing, he is great at it. No matter what, he loves his job. Plus, he comes homealmost every night with a great story to tell.
That’s my dad.
(This piece was written by my 12 year old son as a birthday gift for me.)
Posted in Musings | 1 Comment »
February 13th, 2010
Printed in two colors with a blind stamp of the client’s logo in the background, this business card is printed on 160 pound stock. The deep impression of the blind run lends the 3 dimensional air of Art Deco architecture to what might be considered a 2 dimensional medium.
The card is undersized by a little bit, it measures 3.5 by 1.75 inches, which helps it stand out in an understated way.
The client, Kenneth Kunkle offers legal services to creative professionals and he worked closely with The Nomadic Press to come up with a design that had both the look of a serious professional and a hint of artistic flair.
Posted in Business Systems, Printing Projects | No Comments »
February 11th, 2010
There seems to be a lot distressed wood type being used in the design of print ads these days. And when I say “seems to be” I mean that if you don’t look too closely you might mistake it for distressed wood type.
Let us look a little closer though. A case of type (not a drawer of type) contains many separate pieces. The nature of movable type is that copy is set from a case and used for the printing of a job and then, when the work is wrought off, the type is laid back into the case from whence it came. Some of the pieces of type are used more often that others. Some pieces are treated more roughly than others while some are treated more gently. Some type gets dropped, some type gets nicked.
Because of this, individual pieces of type have all lived very different lives.
When I look at mock-distressed type I am always a little irked by the similarity of the degradation of the letters. It is as though each piece has been abused in exactly the same manner and to exactly the same degree. Each one dropped, each one nicked, each one carefully roughed up.
In the end, what should be an interesting crowd of faces, with disparate scars and wrinkles reflective of their varied life experiences is, instead, a clownish homogenization of a rustic ideal.
Yesterday I placed a form of wooden type in the bed of a press and, as I printed the run, each face kissed the sheets of paper with its own intensely personal passion. The lingering impression of each kiss a poetic indication of a life well lived.
And I am always left wanting just one more kiss.
Posted in Musings, Type | No Comments »
February 9th, 2010
Matt board isn’t just for framing pictures anymore.
A wedding planner and a wedding photographer, who together run a business in Texas, recently hired The Nomadic Press to print their business cards. They wanted something very thick stock so we all decided to use matt board.
The color choices are a little limited when you use matt board but the results are a lot of fun. This card is printed 1 over 2 so the printing costs are reasonable. The thick edges are colored silver (I gave them a bid for gilding the edges with silver leaf but the cost was a bit prohibitive).
The design they supplied is tasty, and it is telling of the fantastic work that they both do professionally. If you are thinking about getting married soon, think about Texas.
Posted in Business Systems, Printing Projects | 1 Comment »
February 8th, 2010
It used to be that one would go visiting and leave behind an indication of having called. This was the calling card.
Usually it was imprinted with just a name and perhaps the name of the club that one was a member of. If the person you were visiting was not at home when you called, then the calling card was left on a silver tray for them to take up upon their return.
The position of the card’s placement on the tray, and the bending over of one or another of the card’s corners, held deeper meanings.
These days, the modern business card is printed with a persons name and title, the name, address and logo of their business, their telephone and fax numbers, email addresses, twitter addresses, and facebook and linkedin information. Whew.
In practice, there is so much information contained on a modern business card that it is a wonder that they have remained 2 by 3.5 inches in size and have not ballooned to the size of greeting cards.
The custom business card shown here is understated in its simplicity. Printed in one color, it has an abundance of white space which shows off the letterpress impression nicely and lends a calm and professional air to the image of this company.
Now where did I put my silver calling card tray?
Posted in Business Systems, Musings, Printing Projects | No Comments »
February 5th, 2010
Oh man, is the type on this card small or what.
The red type in this image has a lower case x-height of about 2.5 points. It works just fine in a body of text, but I would not wish this point size on my fiercest competitor in a line of stand alone type.
Photopolymer plates work amazingly well with small type, but lines of little type, all on their lonesome, seem to fare poorly. Especially the “dots” in email addresses which tend to suffer under the heavy impressions called for in modern letterpress printing.
Whenever possible, I have the graphic designers that I am working with boost the point size of the “dots” in the design of email addresses by at least one point. In the end it is not noticeable but helps everything hold up a bit better in the printing process.
Dotting your ‘i’s and crossing your ‘t’s has long been a euphemism for sweating the little stuff and for making sure that attention is being paid to the details. Here at The Nomadic Press, I am crossing my eyes and dotting my coms.
Posted in Business Systems, Printing Projects, Type | No Comments »
February 4th, 2010
Having spent a good part of my life treating the printed word as a precious thing has put me at a bit of a risk of thinking like a museum archivist. Although I take great pains to use stable materials in the printing and binding of the work produced here at The Nomadic Press, that does not mean that all printed materials need to be handled with an obsessive reverence.
A couple of winters ago I was reading a pretty good book. As I finished reading a page I would tear it out and throw it in the fire. This meant that I was always reading just the top sheet of a book and I never had to hold the tome open (one of my pet peeves is books that are printed with no space in the gutter, thus forcing the reader to exert constant effort just to keep the damn pages spread apart).
This winter I decided to finally finish Homer’s “The Iliad” and finish it I did. I shredded my copy of it and built a display case for the leavings. I know, one might say that this puts things back into the world of the museum.
Rather, I consider it more of a object for a cabinet of curiosities. In any case it was fun to make.
Next on my reading list, the burnt ashes of “War and Peace” in an urn. And I’ll try not to set the Nomadic Press print studio on fire.
Posted in Miscellany, Musings | 1 Comment »
February 3rd, 2010
Sitting here, in the middle of winter, I am comforted by images of warm Summer retreats. Here is a wood engraving of a North Woods escape.
Executed in end grain maple, this image was cut from wood that the Hamilton Wood Type Museum had finished in preparation for the production of wood type.
Hamilton Wood Type products were a staple of custom letterpress printers for decades. Type cases, type cabinets, wood type. If you were printing then you were using Hamilton.
Hamilton also produced drafting tables for use in design studios, both architectural and graphic, as well as equipment for dentists and homemakers. My two children spent a good deal of time sleeping in a crib that was manufactured at Hamilton’s facilities in Two Rivers Wisconsin.
Little letterpress printers from the start, they now ride bikes in the Summer, hither and yon through the woods, as I sit with my engraving tools and incise lines into thin slices of trees. Life is good.
Posted in Wood Engraving and Block Cutting | No Comments »
January 18th, 2010
Years ago (indeed decades ago) in 6th grade, somebody had our class work on some lino cuts. That project may have been the beginning of my love for letterpress (or relief) printing.
Block cuts are a fairly immediate creative outlet. Sure, you can spend hours and even days working on a block, but you can also sit down and gouge one out fairly quickly and, with the aid of a brayer and a wooden spoon, have yourself a fist-full of prints in no time.
For finer lines, and for a longer lasting block, one must move on to wood cuts or wood engraving.
Like lino cuts, wood cuts are created using a cutting tool that is a sort of gouge. If you imagine a spoon with the bowl ground off half way to the handle and then sharpened, then you have the rough idea of what a wood (or lino) cutting tool looks like. The tools one uses are usually smaller than a spoon, and some have a bowl who’s bottom is triangular.
These tools are used to scoop out pieces of wood or lino. Everything that you leave behind, at the original surface of the block, gets covered with ink and prints onto paper.
Wood engraving uses a tighter grained block of wood (and the cut is made into the end grain) and the tool is a sheared off rod that sort of peels or shaves off bits of wood.
The shelf in this photo shows an assortment of blocks at the Nomadic Press.
Posted in Wood Engraving and Block Cutting | 1 Comment »
January 12th, 2010
Business Cards from the Past
While sorting out some of the letterpress work produced during the last year I came across this business card in the archives. Werner Design Werks did the design and The Nomadic Press produced the letterpress printing.
The work created at Sharon Werner’s design studios has always been beautiful and this custom letterpress piece is no different.
Though this example is nearly a decade old, it already looks as though it is 60 years old. And yet . . . it also looks like it came off the press yesterday. It is both crisp and faded at the same time.
Werner Design Werks is one of those volcanic design companies that Minnesota’s tectonic environment seems to give rise to. They came out of the ground on fire and have not begun to cool down yet.
It has always a pleasure working with them.
Posted in Business Systems, Printing Projects | No Comments »
