Project: The Process of Designing & Letterpressing

We recently finished designing and letterpressing business cards for our friend Suzanne and thought it might be fun to do a quick walk-through of the process (design development through production), since some of you may not know too much about how it all works.

Suzanne is a multi-talented woman. She is a phenomenal cabaret singer, as well as a music teacher. She also moonlights has an herbalist, concocting all kinds of home remedies, lotions, potions and elixirs to heal us harrowed souls (she made cough drops this winter and they were delish!). She may, at some point, want some business cards for her holistic health counseling work, but for this set she wanted to focus on her vocal personality. While Suzanne can put on a show that's out of this world, she is not your typical show-girl; she is quiet, earnest, honest and extremely humble. She did not want her card to sport cabaret or Broadway imagery, with stage lights and a stylized portrait of herself (that's the vision I had). She wanted to tap into her nature-loving side with imagery that also speaks to her herbal business. Intitial layout sketches:



Early on we were inspired by several pattern books, including The Grammar of Ornament (Owen Jones), Full-Color Picture Sourcebook of Historic Ornament (Auguste Racinet), and Plants and their Application to Ornament (Eugene Grasset). Suzanne was drawn to Italian floral imagery (coincidently, she's Italian!), so we narrowed down the options and she picked out a few favorites:

Images from The Grammar of Ornament by Owen Jones

Once we had a better idea of what she liked, we sketched out some new patterns that were loosely based on the historical specimens:

At our next meeting, Suzanne liked a combination of what we'd come up with, so we integrated two of the patterns with Adobe Illustrator:

For Suzanne’s cards, we chose the font Garamond Premier Pro, a digital typeface designed by Robert Slimbach in 2006. In typography nerd jargon, this font is referred to as a “revival”, i.e. a contemporary typeface design based upon an antique metal (or wood) typeface. A certain Mr. Claude Garamond created the original version of this typeface sometime in the 16th century and it has remained a very popular typeface, with many revivals and iterations. Any letterpress studio with metal type on the premises is almost certain to have at least one well-worn set of 12-point Garamond.

Garamond page from one of Oliver's type books

With the design phase complete, we were finally ready for the letterpress phase. “Traditional” letterpress consists of picking out and arranging (by hand) each individual letter (usually made of metal or wood).

Left: Metal type, via Yee Haw Industries; Right: Wood type, photo via Nick Sherman

Hand typesetting allows a skilled craftsperson immense control over the typographic refinement of their designs, but one is limited by whatever specific fonts you have physical access to and, as you can imagine, it is a very time consuming process.

Image courtesy of Yee Haw Industries

Unfortunately, handset metal type wasn’t going to work for this particular project since we also wanted to incorporate the custom pattern into our design. Luckily, contemporary letterpress artists have the option to send a digital file to a place like Boxcar Press, a letterpress studio in Syracuse, New York, which will magically turn your digital file into a photopolymer plate (you can read all about it right here).

After repeating our single card eight times to create an 8.5” x 11” letterpress template with crop marks, we had our final plate layout, ready to be sent off to Boxcar Press:

Once Suzanne chose the paper (110# Savoy from Reich Paper) and ink color (Pantone Violet), and the photopolymer plate and paper arrived in the mail, we headed over to The Arm in Brooklyn to make our cards!

General shots of the studio and Oliver manning the press



Oliver aligning the photopolymer plate on the press, a Vandercook Universal III



Inking the roller



Align paper, press lever, which which activates an electric motor that rolls the paper across the inked plate. (Note: letterpresses typically have a manual crank, like the Vandercook Universal I or the Chandler & Price platen press).



Printed sheets, ready to be cut to size


FINAL PRODUCT!