This week we moved on from our previous letterpress workshop and endeavoured into the world of metal type letterpress. This uses the same methods as woodblock but you are working to a smaller scale and therefore have to be more precise.
With metal letterpress you are subject to more detailed typefaces which gave us an opportunity to mix and match and find out what works well together and how to lay type out to harmonise with one another.
To start off with we all selected another randomly generate ‘concrete poem’ style sentence and gather our equipment – a composing stick, furniture, spacing, ink, rollers, paper and of course the letters.
I’m not the most confident with letterpress, however, I enjoy the process and find it quite therapeutic. I think there’s a lot of room for error with it, and with type small errors are very noticeable because we’re so used to digital type. But maybe that’s just the perfectionist in me.
It was good fun getting to play around with compositions, typefaces, ink etc, there were loads of variables. It’s not a process I think I’ll do much of during the rest of my time on the course, only because it’s not my sort of aesthetic and I’m more keen to a modern practice. But it was still useful to know.
Yolanda Wafaquani’s Graphic Design Blog 