Letterpress
Mind your p's & q's
Setting a classic Serif type in a tangible way, helped me to fully understand all the differences and similarities between characters for future designs. Every single letter found and picked up felt like little triumphs, every word, a piece of a puzzle, every sentence, a road to success and each of my poems, a milestone. When I first arrived to the studio, I was completely drawn towards all this metal, the weight, the precision, the math. Setting a classic Serif type in a tangible way, helped me to fully understand all the differences and similarities between characters for future designs. In the mechanics of Letterpress my mind would just relax from the madness in the creative, it is like putting to work only one side of my brain and letting the other bits to have a brake.
'Printers Soups' as knows amongst printers when all the type falls from the stick.
Paper selection from G.F. Smith on a screen printing testing sheet and random tactile happiness.
Deliciously oily and colourful paints ready to be tested on the press with newsprint.
Fully furnished layout.
Words, don't come easy
For this piece I produced lots of ideas on how to play with the type. Justifying text is one of the hardest things to do plus, overlapping text and paragraph styles had challenges of its own, so I had to improvise a lot. There were so many printers’ soups to eat across the birthing of this book, I believe I put a stone LOL. The good thing about doing your own poems is that you do not own the words to anyone, it is your piece, your work, your thing, it makes me feel like an editor n’jefe of my own editorial world. Halfway through my poems I was setting type so fast that I had to stop because I ran out of Times New Roman O’s. Seeing my own words in a galley, furnished and wrapped with a string, ready for inking, is one of the most beautiful and rewarding experiences of my tangible maker-self.
Correction process
Sketches for lettering