One of our esteemed Boxcar platemaking customers, Suann Song from Simplesong Design, is guest blogging on design*sponge this week where she showed off her Boxcar base and KF152 plates and is sharing insight into letterpress printing, design and more. Check it out!
We think it’s beyond cool when people decide to tackle letterpressing their own wedding invitations. Like Lindsay, Beverly and Neil, a graphic designer and an architect, designed and printed their own letterpress invitations. We love the hands-on approach! These were featured on Mint earlier this week – the couple used photopolymer plates from Boxcar Press and Neenah paper, and got to take over the printshop of their friend Amos Kennedy of Kennedy Prints. How sweet is that? Beverly and Neil printed invitations, thank you notes and all of the corresponding envelopes, then added a cool textile inspiration by sewing the invitations.
You can read more about these invitations on Mint.
photo via Mint
Around here, we certainly understand why brides opt for letterpress when thinking about wedding invitations. But a bride who wants to take on her wedding invitations as her first adventure in letterpress printing? Now that is something we can really appreciate!
Lindsay’s wedding invitations were recently featured on The Little White Book after she took advantage of the opportunity to take a letterpress class at The Bowehouse Press in Richmond during her final semester at Virginia Commonwealth University. She used metal type for all of the text, printed in a cool mossy green, and KF95 plates for the flower design, printed in cream. A big congratulations to Lindsay on her awesome first printing job and on her upcoming wedding!
[Photos by Lindsay Benson]
It is always a good day around here when we learn of letterpress printers getting cool press, so it was fun to see letterpress mentioned last week by Forbes! Congratulations to everyone in the article (which you can read here), including Ben Levitz of Studio on Fire, Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina, and The Arm in Brooklyn – all Boxcar platemaking/supply customers! We were also excited that Forbes did a shout out about our Boxcar platemaking services….go letterpress!
On a side note – we also happen to love Studio on Fire’s sweet blog, Beast Pieces and seeing how all that photopolymer translates into mind-blowing prints. You can read more of Ben’s inspiring take on the
letterpress renaissance and the benefits of using photopolymer plates here.
Where will letterpress pop up next?
We loved seeing Jessica Hische’s awesome business cards featured on FPO this week. Jessica is a designer based in Brooklyn and we are huge fans of her work. Her sweet letterpress business cards were printed using a standard Boxcar Base and 94FL plates at The Arm – check out that cool shot of her Boxcar plates!
[Photos by Jessica Hische]
Receiving awesome letterpress samples from our platemaking customers never stops being fun for us. These come from Officiana Briani in Raleigh, North Carolina where Brian Allen brings over 30 years of work in the field of typography to his love for letterpress. Brian tells us that his primary press is a Swiss-made Gietz, approximately 12×18 inches, unknown model, unknown date of manufacture, likely from the late 1950s or early 1960s – a sweet press, with adjustable roller height, considered one of the best hand-fed platen press ever made. He uses a Boxcar Base and KF152 photopolymer plates, except for those occasions where he turns to handset and wood type.
In addition to past work as a typesetter, calligrapher, digital typeface production worker and letterpress printer, Brian loves to teach the letterpress craft. “Teaching letterpress is a very important part of my mission, sharing my love of letterforms, etc. Most students are young women, but all are people seeking balance and to regain a sense of touch in their lives. Fewer than half of the students have thoughts of printing themselves, the rest just want to see what it’s all about and get their hands inky! I share my 30 years of knowledge of type and letterforms, let students look through my large library and soak in the camaraderie with other students who have felt alone in their passion for handcraft but have found a home at my studio. I love to emphasize finding the extraordinary (lovely letterforms) in the ordinary (a lowly trade). Words and their expression still matter in my world.”
Brian also has a really cool Albion handpress that he eventually plans to use to print posters, but currently uses for demonstrations when visitors come by the studio so they can print their own copy of a keepsake to remember their visit to Officiana Briani. Brian says, “It entrances and seduces people into the magic of communicating with letterpress! The press is an Improved Albion 18×24 from the 1850s, made in London. It’s a crude/elemental machine, but symbolizes much – the arguments over who we were to be as a country were printed on a wooden handpress, one lever pull at a time, just as our single vote makes a difference in the aggregate. The most refined thoughts of the Enlightenment were given physical form with a handpress, and I use mine to emphasize to young people that an individual’s thoughts and actions matter, can be given form. Truly the power of the press!”
Brian’s career has been a true evolution that has led him through three decades of work with typography and even led to his personal handwriting being developed into the Microsoft font Segoe Script, for which he is listed as co-inventor on the patent. He tells us that he found his path “accidentally, but inevitably by working first as a typesetter in Boston and New York in 1975-79, taking calligraphy classes and reading the history of printing and typography. In 1982 Sumner Stone hired me at Autologic, Inc. in Southern California, to work in the pre-desktop world of digital type. Autologic made 700 dpi typesetting machines for the newspaper industry. We used the German IKARUS software to digitize outlines of alphabets, which were converted to run-length encoded bitmaps.”
After a time, Brian found himself at Imagen Corp. making type in a proprietary digital format for before moving to IBM to make fonts in the Folio F3 format, then PostScript Type 1 followed by TrueType formats. During this time, he opened his first letterpress shop as a part time venture, before leaving IBM to make letterpress his full time career. Eventually he closed his shop and returned to font production before finally returning to letterpress in 2005 when he moved to Raleigh and set up shop with Officiana Briani.
According to Brian, “The 1980s/early ‘90s was a very exciting time to be involved with fonts as the desktop revolution happened…It is quite amazing to see how many “civilians” know what a font is now. I was a part of the “font wars” in the late 1980s – the format competition between Apple, Adobe, and Microsoft, with Type 1 and True Type. Now of course, we have the blend of Open Type. The font wars are over. What comes next?”
It just makes our week when we receive beautiful letterpress things from our platemaking customers, so we were thrilled to open our mail a little while ago and find some great letterpress pieces from Fitzgerald Letterpress in New Orleans, printed on a Heidelberg 10 x 15 windmill with a Boxcar Base and 94FL photopolymer plates. 
Owner John Fitzgerald was kind enough to send us some thoughts on letterpress and printing in New Orleans. John writes, “I’m running a mostly one-person operation in the Bywater section of New Orleans. Things are still a challenge here, but they were before Katrina too. I do custom work like invitations and business cards, plus some note cards and art prints that I sell at a local art market and wherever else I can. The letterpress scene here is small. When I moved here in 2003 there was one artsy letterpress outfit (Hot Iron Press) and they have since shifted to a fine art focus and don’t take much custom work. This town is not really up to speed with the hip, new letterpress scene, which is fine with me because being hip is a lot of work. As it is, there are a few people who like the look and want letterpress. As more people see it and want it word spreads and some day New Orleans will join the scene (which by then it will no longer be hip and we can all relax.)”
“The original idea came to do a print depicting something like the “last supper” but inclusive. We call it “All Are Welcome.” Girls stand very close to girls and boys hold hands with boys, men hold babies, old fat skinny young – we are all here. My wife Katy Quigley made the drawing and I cut the block and printed on Crane Lettra 14 x 20. Then Katy hand tinted them. People like the image so I scanned a print (not tinted) and sent you a re-sized file. Then I ran about 500 of them on Cougar (Domtar) 80# cover, natural white. Then I scored and trimmed them to A-7 size and wrapped them with a matching envelope. I think I’m done running cheap paper. Next time I’ll go with something like Crane Lettra (they also have a nice matching envelope.) The run was smooth and trouble free once I got the feeder to cooperate. I did a version of Pantone 4625 with some 874 metallic gold thrown in for that extra opaque punch and subtle glow.”
Thanks so much for sharing your work with us, John!
Okay, we’re in love.
Actually, we fall totally head over heels in love with the Studio On Fire calendar every single year, and this year is no different. The design is always amazing. The letterpress printing is always amazing (amazing solids, great impression, super crisp type).
And we’re so thrilled that the calendar is printed using our Boxcar Base and Boxcar’s photopolymer plates.
Studio On Fire, by the way, is a design and letterpress shop based in Minneapolis, Minnesota and they consistently create some of the most original letterpress work out there — so go check them out and get inspired! The calendar is available for purchase for $30 from their web site — and sure, it’s March, but that means you can still get nine more months of authentic over-the-top letterpress pleasure from this calendar. Also check out their awesome letterpress blog Beast Pieces.
We get so excited when we see Boxcar’s photopolymer plates & the Boxcar Base hard at work making really beautiful stuff! Thanks to Chandler for sending us pics of “Prop Cake,” the latest installment of the Feminist Broadside Series, designed by Chandler O’Leary of Anagram Press and letterpress printed by Jessica Spring of Springtide Press, using a Vandercook Universal One, Boxcar’s 94FL plates, and the Boxcar Base. The Feminist Broadside Series has been such a success — the last two broadsides are SOLD OUT (yay!), and this one is going fast too I’m sure. Jessica and Chandler will be speaking at the Tacoma Art Museum on May 12, and the power duo had a great mention in City Arts Magazine. To purchase the latest broadside, go to Anagram Press’s etsy store. Check out the first broadside and the second broadside in the series
Chandler writes about the new broadside, “Because we believe everyone deserves an equal slice of wedding cake, the next broadside in the series features a quote by Alice Paul: ‘There is nothing complicated about ordinary equality.’ ‘Prop Cake’ features an original illustration inspired by the architecture of San Francisco, epicenter of the battle over Proposition 8 in California. The broadside is printed from hand-lettered typography, on 10 x 18-inch archival, 100% rag, recycled paper, in an edition of 108, and is priced at $30.”
