Letterpress

As I wanted to explore with techniques available at the time of Etta's song release I began to think about letterpress, the main use of mass print at the time. It was also suggested during the crit that this would be a good way to explore printing methods, in order to aid my personal development throughout the course.

 As I was yet to experiment with letterpress I found the experience highly insightful, and overcame many learning curves. Firstly, due to Caslon Italic being used I had to arrange the text with consideration of asenders/decenders, insuring that the type wouldn't appear poorly kerned.

Another challegnge in which I tackled was that of not inking the plate properly, and thus ending in a result whereby the entirety of the type was not printed. Once this flaw was discovered, it was easily resolved, and altered in order to develop further prints.

 

 Multiple types of paper/card were experimented with in order to develop a varient of approaches, although I found that some worked more succesfully than others. I discovered that embosed papers often cause the text to appear grainy, in turn making the text appear less impactive. Glossed cards also didn't work as strongly as cartlidge paper, due to the ink not being fully absorbed by the paper, causing an outlined text.

 As monotype are judges for the secret 7 competion, I wanted to involve some sort of type based design. Although letterpress is an effective method to express type, I felt that a front cover maintaining such simplicity wouldn't be chosen by the judges to appear in the exhibit. Also due to local shops no longer having secret 7 digipaks I belive that the effective nature of letterpress would not be the same if scanned in, and would appear the same as an average printed typeface.