Daniel Morris, Letterpress printer
Interview, february 25, 2017 The Arm Letterpress, Brooklyn
DANIEL MORRIS founded the Arm Letterpress Studio in Brooklyn, NY in 2004. Since then, he teaches classes on letterpress printing through workshops and collaborative print projects in his studio.
Dan comes from a family that has worked in printing for five generations and when he is not teaching, he spends his time restoring antique printing machinery for colleges and other print shops.
During the ‘print your own wood type poster’ workshop we attended in February at the Arm Letterpress, he shared with us his knowledge about wood type and printing presses. First, we had to choose a sentence and then select the letters and fonts we would use. Actually, that’ was the hardest part! Mostly because their collection of 20th century wood type offer an infinity of possibilities for associating font.
Then Daniel taught us how to set the letters properly in the galley and gave us tips on how to optimize kerning and spacing. We realized that good spacing requires way much more work and precision than on software!
After that, he guided us through the process on the studio’s Vandercook presses to print gradients and/or flat colors for our wonderful wood type posters. We all really enjoyed the printing time because you eventually see the result and sometimes the mistakes you’ve made in spacing, and it’s really fascinating to see the difference between the composition on the galley and the printed poster. At the end, we felt proud for what we had achieved, making a poster from A to Z following the entire process.
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Margaux Saulou & Gaëlle Pérot
February 22, 2017. The Arm Letterpress, Brooklyn, New York.
