I got to print using a 1960s letter press at The Arm, a print shop in Brooklyn. Where their whole thing is using “old tools to make new things.”
You have to set up your entire layout in reverse, which kind of skews your perception of how it’s going to look on paper. So you lather the machine in ink, roll over the letters, and then run a print before you can get a good idea of how it’s actually gonna look. But then, if you wanna make adjustments, you have to measure it and do simple math to figure out what to change.
I kept wanting to optically adjust it and just eyeball the changes, but every time- Dan, the shop owner, would come over and explain that it was just easier to measure it in picas and do some simple math to make the changes. It was a humbling and slow process, but it also made me feel more connected to the output.
It was fun for a one off, but I don’t think that I would have gotten as passionate about it if i lived in a world without computers and that was the whole job. It started to feel like a construction gig?
Graphic design, illustration, poster design, print design… they all look completely different as an industry and aesthetically than they did 60 years ago. Now we’re just pixel pushing things around. Making aesthetic decisions solely based off immediate feedback. And there’s a lot of really cool stuff that comes from that, but there’s also plenty that is lost.
I don’t know if designers from the 1960s would necessarily like the job that the industry has turned into. Even though I love it.
Once again, we are entering a phase where the industry and the world is experiencing rapid change. And this workshop gave me the perspective that just because I love my job doesn’t mean that I’m necessarily going to love what the job can evolve into.
But it did give me hope to know that no matter what, if you’re passionate about the way that you make something there’s always going to be a place in the world where you can still do it. Free will, baby.
#graphicdesign #letterpress #printmaking #woodtype
Also thank you to Amanda Rios for organizing this for the Creative Club!