Week 6- Outside of Class

Letter Press Workshop (OFF CAMPUS EVENT) 

Friday February 28, 2014

.918 Letter Press Club of Lancaster, PA. www.918club.org

The .918 Club brings together the volunteers of the Heritage Press Museum to share ideas and suggestions concerning the educational demonstration of letter pressing and print history. During our workshop we were able to come up with our own phrase that would fit onto a 5×7′ piece of paper. The phrase I chose to do was “Remind yourself that it’s okay not to be perfect”. There were no guidelines or instructions that we had to follow when creating out layouts just the process of setting up our type on the composing sticks then onto the tray. Step one of using the composing stick was setting the knee to the right number onto the bed so it would be the same size of a 5×7′. We were reminded to not set type backwards but it still seemed backwards when we were laying it out, it seemed like it was. With letter press you have individual letters made of lead that are placed backwards so when its flipped the type is set the right way. In order to make sure its the right way you can look at the niche (indent) on the lead block. After we picked out our typefaces from the trays we set them into our composing sticks and then we had to place leading widths in between the letters, words and lines. The next step was to test if your layout was set up correctly. I only had one small mistake and that was having me “C” go in the wrong direction of the word “perfect” but considering my quote it worked well. I only got time to use one color of ink because the progress of creating my layout took longer than expected because it was difficult to find a typeface that I was happy with and then finding all the letters that I needed for my phrase because sometimes the typeface wouldn’t have enough of one letter if it was used multiple times in a phrase like the letter t or e.

Overall I thought it was a good experience to learn the basics of letter press. I took a lot out of the workshop like organization skills because if you forgot where you got your tray of type or individual letters it could of been stressful and chaotic. I personally thought there should of been less students at the workshop because the room was so small to work in that it became difficult sharing the same typeface or moving around the area that people were working in. If there was less students at the workshop the chaos would of decreased because more people would of gotten the attention and help that they needed because for the most part it was everyone’s first time constructing a layout and using letter press.

Logo Animation Sketches & Illustrator file

Below is the symbolic scoring of the animation of the end tag. Nature Sound Production would a corporate company that creates sound for TV shows. And also is the recreation of the companies logo in an illustrator file.