Letterpress!

I met with Melinda from the Boston Paper Collective on Tuesday. They have an awesome community book arts studio, you should definitely check it out if you're in the Boston area. Their handmade paper is truly astounding. Marbling, painting with pulp, sculptural work, they have some incredibly talented people working there.  So how does my visit tie into "Are you my typeface?", other than it's a great opportunity to learn about letterpress? Well, I'm now working on making a limited print run of one of the posters.  There are lots of ways to do it, but I'm experimenting with using a CNC router on plywood make the forms. Whatever the outcome, I'm definitely going to take advantage of the instruction the studio offers to learn all the ins and outs of letterpress.   Hopefully we'll have some cool hand-printed posters to send out to you guys.  There's lots of other options with what to do with the printing capabilities offered by this studio. So if you have ideas of things you'd like to see, leave a note in the comments.

Even more posters

I had the original poster design printed yesterday to see how it looked at full-size.  The printer had some  problems with the layers in the pdf, so the printing isn't quite right.  Either not everything printed, or the colors came out wrong.  Anyways, a good reminder that you should always do proofs before doing a big print job.  Luckily, I was only doing one-offs as a test run to help me with the design process.  Check out the results below, more pics after the break.

Poster Redux

I've been working on more options for the poster.  I played with the saturation on all of the layers, on some of the layers, moved around some stuff. I have lots of different options right now. I also learned how to add a poll to the blog. So maybe you guys could vote on your favorite one.  A little crowdsourced designing anyone?  Anyways, images after the break.

Production Notes

Trying to get the book into production has been an incredible learning experience for me. This post is more of a list of things I'm currently doing to try and get the book published and out to people. I'll edit this post when I either think of or find out about more stuff.

I decided to self-publish instead of looking for a publisher for a variety of reasons, but the main one is I like learning how things are done. I could have looked for a literary agent or simply contacted publishers trying to get it accepted and they would have done all of the work of getting the book out there (printing, marketing, distribution,etc.) Finding someone to take the book, I think, or at least I read on the internet, would have been as much or more work as what I'm doing right now and I wouldn't have learned as much.

Working on the poster

As part of the preparation for launching a kickstarter fund drive, I've been working on a "Are you my typeface" poster. I wanted to include a poster as a kickstarter incentive for many reasons, foremost I had a lot of font jokes I wanted to make.  Below are some of the concept ideas I've been working on. With these I'm trying different ways of placing the "a", to try and make it more visible among the busy background image.  Not really sure which one I like best at this moment. Maybe something will come out of these when I look at them again later.

Making a board book

For those of you interested in  making your own board book, my advice to you, It's not that hard! In fact, it's really easy!  I took pictures while I was making mine and I hope they help you.

What you need:

Tools:

• Paper cutter and exacto knife(not strictly necessary, could use scissors)
• Wood Glue
• Color printer

Materials

• Art chipboard (available in large sheets at your local art supply store)
• Cardstock (I used 110 lb weight)

Digital Protoypes

I spent a lot time working with digital protoypes to work out the main design for book. Illustrator was powerful and useful tool for me to quickly iterate through a bunch of ideas in terms of layout and form. I'm going to now try and take you through some of my digital prototypes to try and illustrate my thought process.