The Tale of Woe

Or, the Tale of a Rich, Diversified Experience!

The Design department decided, to enrich our curriculum and experience as designers and human beings.... all of us Sophomores embarked on a letterpress project. As I posted earlier, I designed compositions around a quote by Barbara Kruger.

We began the project by composing sketches. Our goal was to emphasis two different aspects of the quote in order to convey two separate meanings.

While I did compose diverse options, most of  my options were extremely "poetic". Mind you, this is not the first time Marty has described my work as such. I'll blame this one on being a Creative Writing major. After seeing my sketches, Marty urged me to push away from the dancing text and try for a more "rigid" approach. The first fix was to apply a rigid alignment, so the words could anchor to something solid. I did the final rearranging with digital iterations.

Selecting type was one of the challenges of the assignment, seeing as how our supply was limited. After selecting type and arranging the compositions digitally, we then made notations to guide us during the printing process. Once all the necessary prep work was done, we moved into the closet of a type room to begin placing our letters on galley trays.

This part was surprisingly not too difficult, minus all the squinting. The most difficult part was locking all the letters soundly in the galley. This part of the process created a volcanic eruption in every participant with the flow of lava taking the form of creative curse words. After the frustration, the printing part came next.

My first attempt was a disaster all around. My intent was to use orange, but apparently mixing yellow and red produces coral instead of orange. Further, I put way too much ink on the plate, causing the letters to be unreadable on paper.

The 48 point font picked up a lot of ink, while the 14 point text lower on had a difficult time picking up the right consistency of ink. My second attempt yielded the exact opposite results as my first attempt.

Instead of a mixed glob of ink, I used pre-made ink and spread on only a tiny bit. I think the results are quite.... poetic. Later that night, I took a stab at round two on my other design. 

I again experienced trouble inking the plate evenly, causing some fading on the right hand side of the postcard. I'll need to do some hand touching before critique tomorrow to fill in the "N".

Overall, the experience has been one worth having. A certain kind of respect is developed for the history of technology when working with letterpress. Our generation especially takes the technology we have at our disposal for granted. We simply can't comprehend all the tools employed by the "designers of yore". I am reminded of the portfolio I had the chance to look at in the Fall during Alumni Weekend, in which a 1960s Design graduate brought their portfolio. Their work looked just as clean as our work does - employing hand techniques, not our digital ones.

My interest in letterpress is piqued, but the practicality of doing it myself in the future seems limited. I understand the importance of tactility, but at what cost to impracticality?