Some reminders don’t fit on a sticky note. You need to see the bigger picture. On a poster for example. In your own design, printed by you.
On Friday December 27th I would love to work with you to set and print that text using the wood type of Grafisch Atelier Hilversum.
Preferably no wisecracks, but a meaningful text. A motto, slogan, an extra large note to self.
Grafisch Atelier Hilversum maintains a special collection of wood type that we can use on this day. Which style fits your message? How and where on the sheet? Plenty of detail to geek out on. Simple is not that easy sometimes!
Would you like to join? Still two spots open. Can do half a day or a full day. More info (in Dutch) here.
The third and final print run uses good old black for the colour. This was the most complex forme of the three. Indeed, the challenge was to learn whether everything could be made to print nicely and evenly within this single form, because it combines small, thin type with the solid surfaces of a brick-forme (LEGO) and some more type of different sizes in between these two extremes. Eventually we made that work.
We also switched to a different press. From the manually operated Vandercook to the electrically operated Grafix. A smaller and faster press that may just be a bit better suited for this more demanding forme.
It not only needed tweaks to get everything to an evenly printed height. Some final layout changes needed to made as well. Calculations made while building the forme turned out to be slight miscalculations. A few points of lineheight needed to be shifted around to get things aligned correctly.
With an electric press the printing is definitely much faster than setting again. It took only 1,5 hours to get half of the edition printed. Another effect of large editions: you need a lot of space in your drying racks.
Getting 700 sheets back out of the drying rack and stacking them is work, too. Nothing takes only a little while with these numbers.
Set up the forme for the second print run in the Vandercook press. Exactly 12 ciceros from the top.
Top is bottom, left is right, high is low. Mirror thinking and setting remains challenging.
You will get the sheet including the part that has the small dents made by the paper grippers. That’s (within the) margin as well. (That’s cryptic yes, for now.)
A project: printing almost 700 sheets of A3 paper using a minimum of three print runs. Manully. So that we may have 650 good ones in the end.
The first print run consists of a single pinkish red line, 1 cicero width, positioned exactly 25 cicero from the left long side. Speed of printing is three plus sheets per minute, so around 200 sheets per hour, or 3,5 hours of printing in total.
Setting, proofing and correcting the exact layout usually takes longer than the printing itself. Even with an edition of this amount, ’the printing itself doesn’t take that long’ still holds. Likely because I’m not that experienced a typesetter yet. I’ve really honestly started to rely more on calculating and counting to get things in the right position on the sheet, but am still easily seduced into the ways of trial and error.
Even after more than 600 prints that same line still stands the same 25 ciceros from the left margin. The combination of a massive thousand kilos of proofing press and the very exact precision in adjustments and production that can be achieved with it is fascinating.
Of the Common Linnet and the Sanderling is a zine with notes on the design and printing proces for two prints from the 50 birds series.
These prints were made towards the end of the series. The complexity of the designs had increased quite a bit by then. More and more print runs for a single design were the result. All those details had to be figured out before production could start. For these two birds I explicitly kept more notes than I would normally do to record all the considerations that come into play.
28 Pages with thoughts, proofs, production and assorted predicaments.
