Getting Back to My Roots
How analog letterpress printing is helping my digital workflow.
It happened. I had let competing deadlines at work and unnecessary meetings get the best of my designs. I had given up practicing tried and true processes that got me through college and the early part of my design career and my work was suffering as a result. The realization came over me and it wasn’t until I had created another creative outlet in letterpress that I was able to get back to the ways of old that I had lost. So, let’s rewind a bit.
A few years ago, I graduated from college with a degree in Graphic Design and went out into the world of job-hunting. A few months later, I landed an in-house design job at a non-profit higher education institution. As many of you may know, when you’re working for a non-profit, there is A LOT of work to be done, and not always the right amount of resources, time, process, etc. to do so.
My first 6 months played out similarly to my process in college; research, sketch, pick concepts, and then go to the computer. These were the basic building blocks of the design process that I had tried to adhere to and maintain throughout the growing demands of my design job.
As the months continued to progress and more and more work came in, I began to find shortcuts in how I worked. I wouldn’t dedicate as much time to the research phase or sketch. I would go weeks, months even without so much as putting a pencil on paper. This all started to build and impact the design solutions I was creating and actually made it harder to think creatively over time. I needed an outlet. And in June of 2016, it had seemed like I found one.
After spending an exciting day (and a few Old Fashions) at the HOW Design Conference, a colleague of mine had reached out in a not-so-serious manner, about opening up a letterpress studio. He had said that he had a couple of presses in his basement and wanted to have a space where he could tinker. I, thinking nothing would really come of it, said yes, but it was a Friday night, and I thought by Monday, the idea would have fizzled.
Monday came and the idea was still burning. We had found a perfect studio space that was reasonably priced in an old building in Troy, NY and thus our journey into letterpress began. A few months later we were signing our LLC papers and became Ready Mix Design & Letterpress. Neither of us had any letterpress experience, but my colleague had worked in printing before so we jumped right into learning all things letterpress as fast as we could.
At the time, I didn’t anticipate how this part-time, analog act of letterpress would impact my digital work flow at my full-time job, where I was glued to a computer chair for 8 hours a day. Doing this process of letterpress helped remind me that these are important ways to create and solve the best possible design solutions.
1) Print out your work and reconnect with it.
Letterpress is not fast-paced. On the initial onset, you can easily spend hours typesetting. Coupled with printing make-readys, weighing and mixing inks by hand, hand-trimming deliverables, that time really starts to add up. But something else awesome happens: you really start to LOOK at things. You get to hold it and absorb it. You’re connected to the piece you’re working on. You also don’t want to go through the process of setting up the press, making sure the registration is right, and inking up the disc, only to see that you’ve made a typo or one of your letters is backwards.
The same thing can be applied to work being done on the computer. It was easy for me to to fall into cruise control and be disconnected to my work. I would rarely print something out and got lost in staring at an endless sea of PDFs. It really doesn’t take that long to print a piece out, hold it and look at it and it helps you see things that you may not have noticed on-screen. I’ve started to implement this more and suggest all designers do the same.
2) Sketch with a pencil, not your mouse.
Creating a new piece and then printing it on a press requires quite a bit of planning. If a design is complex and unique, usually a polymer plate needs to be made (Boxcar Press does a wonderful job of this!) in order to print the design. Also thinking about the specifics specs and sizes need to be well thought-out. You can’t just design on a computer and hope that it will translate well to letterpress printing. It requires more thought and more actual sketching. The same can be said for every design project. The act of sketching may seemingly take up more time, which was the thought I had in my head, but it really helps give some clarity to a project.
It’s amazing how a 10–15 minute sketch session on paper can actually make translating ideas on the computer much easier and a more efficient use of time. I don’t know why I let myself lose this piece of designer gold but creating designs for letterpress has made me incorporate it back into my routine at work.
3) Limitations are good.
And simple design and great typography go a long way. On the computer, the digital world is your oyster. From the slew of illustrations, fonts, images, etc. that are available to designers online, it is very easy to overcomplicate a not-so-thought-out idea, throwing in the kitchen sink of trendy icons and sending it out.
Letterpress has its limitations. There is no getting around it. But learning to work within those limitations is one of the best parts about letterpress. It forces you to have strong concepts, simple imagery and good typography. Applying those types of “limitations” to a flyer, brochure, or any other piece of design can help you make better designs, with less stuff to get in the way of the actual message.
If this helped remind you of slowing down and getting back to the analog processes involved in design, please click the ❤ and share. Feel free to comment as well, as I’d love to hear about tips that get lost along the way as we go through our busy days!
