Gamewell Press Blog

Old Maid Card Exchange

Last month I participated in a print exchange through the Ladies of Letterpress site. If you guys haven't checked out that site recently, you should take another look - it's been getting more active as time passes. While certainly not as busy as Briar Press or anything, everyone is very friendly, and it's an interesting mix of amateurs and owner/operators of boutique letterpress studios. Yes, studios (stupid reference to a topic that would not die on the letpress listserv).

The swap was organized by Kathryn of Blackbird Letterpress, and if you go to her blog and scroll down, you can actually see all the different submissions that she scanned as they came in. I haven't yet gotten my deck of cards (I'm eagerly expecting their arrival sometime next week), but it looks like everyone did a really lovely job. They've also been displayed in two small shows, which is pretty cool. They were first exhibited as part of an exhibition of Kathryn's work at the Baton Rouge Gallery in Louisiana, and you can see a video that shows the deck on their website. Then Jessica of Heroes & Criminals Press arranged that they be shown at BookOpolis, a festival in Asheville, NC.

The original idea was that it be an Old Maid card deck, but with a twist, and be called "Enterprising Maidens," instead of Old Maid. You see an unmarried, dried-up old hag, but we see women who've got stuff to do, and oh yeah, they're not married. Like that. Every participant was supposed to choose a character, and instead of the traditional, identical matching pairs of cards, we were supposed to print two versions of our character. The theme was women, so a female character or a character relating to women. Broad enough?

When this swap was first announced on the site, I thought that it would be so cool to have a deck of those cards, but I really couldn't come up with a character that I was interested in doing. I also had a lot going on this summer and wasn't really sure I had the time or enough experience yet on the Pearl. So I didn't sign up, but I kept thinking how much I would like a set of those cards. Perhaps other people had similar concerns, so Kathryn started playing dirty. She emailed some people directly, including me, saying that we should participate. Well a personal appeal was enough to sway me, and I figured I still had a month or two to choose a character.

So I thought and I thought and really didn't like anything I came up with. It was all either boring or I couldn't figure out a good way to execute it. The best idea I had was Polly Politico, but every time I tried to create this character, I got stuck. I was going to draw some lady in a power suit? No. Anyway I was starting to get worried, when I decided to throw the character idea out the window. If the theme is women and it's a reversal of the old maid stereotype, then I figured I could paint with a broader brush, and Daring Democratic Dames was born.

I also decided that I could go off the reservation here because the original idea was to have a deck that you could maybe play with, and so everyone was supposed to print on a soft white, heavier stock cut to 3.5" x 5.5" with rounded corners. There were even plans to print a uniform back, but that idea was abandoned when Kathryn realized she's have to print the backs of almost 2200 cards. Then someone emailed asking if they could use light blue paper instead of white, and it was agreed that was okay. Anyway I decided that if there were going to be two blue cards in a sea of white, then I could have an idea and not a person as a character. I don't know, maybe everyone thought it stuck out like a sore thumb and was awful, but the nice thing about an internet/mail exchange is that no one will tell you, if so. And since it was the only idea I had that wasn't completely terrible I chose to run with it.

When I was at Dave Churchman's in April I picked up two sizes of PT Barnum, which I hadn't yet had a chance to use, so I thought that it might be fun to do a wanted poster, but in keeping with the play on the typical old maid, it's a wanted poster with a twist. At first glance you think these female politicians are wanted criminals or something, but then you see that actually we want more Daring Dames of Democracy. I thought it was a cute idea and in keeping with our recent election year hoopla. Maybe it's my way of making up for the fact that I supported Obama instead of Hillary Clinton, or maybe it's just late at night and my tendency as a former english major to be able to make up non-existent themes and symbols.

So one card is illustrated with two such dames: Hillary Clinton because she's got to be the most famous female politician right now, and Ann Richards because she was awesome. Then on the other card I put a silhouette with a question mark, which hopefully will prompt young women to become politically active. Or something. I must admit that this was also a good way of skirting around the fact that I cannot draw since one can use live trace and other Adobe creative suite tools to turn non-copyrighted/publicly accessible images into one's own. If the finances allow it, I'm planning to take a drawing class soon because it has suddenly occurred to me that perhaps one can learn to draw, at least competently, if not like Durer. I feel silly writing that, but really it's been a bit of a revelation. I still vividly remember being about five years old, and trying to paint my dad a picture of George Washington. When it didn't come out exactly as I had pictured it in my head (I now realize that I was picturing Gilbert Stuart's paintings, so perhaps I had unrealistic expectations!), I got extremely frustrated and hung up my art smock for good. Until now. Maybe.

Since Kathryn couldn't print on the back of everyone's cards, she suggested that we could either leave them blank except for signing our names or we could put more information on the back, either by printing or writing or whatever. Some people did nothing, some put more information about how the card was printed, some used it as an extension of their character on the front. I fell into the latter camp, and in fact completely neglected to sign my name or number any of the cards. Stupid, but it was a time crunch thing. I did the corner rounding in the Kansas City airport while waiting for the 2nd leg of my flight to Seattle and mailed the cards from a tiny post office in nowhere, Montana. Anyway, I thought that the backs of the cards should look like the backs of cards - sort of busy and blue. I also felt bad leaving out all these other great women politicians and activists, so I decided to make a sort of word jumble on the back. The bottom two rows read from left to right and are my name and my press name. The other letters read from top to bottom and are the names of famous female movers and shakers from history. They're pretty much all democrats or at least liberal/radical in some way - you're not going to see Condi Rice on there. Hell, you don't see Sandra Day O'Connor on there because after the 2000 "election" she and I stopped talking - that's just how I am. However, there are some women on there who did great things for women, but had troubling attitudes about other social issues (Elizabeth Cady Stanton, I'm looking at you). Sorry. I'm not condoning that, but I was in a hurry and I needed female democrats.

"Daring Dames of Democracy" was printed with 36 point PT Barnum metal type. But all the rest was printed using wood blocks cut by Glendon on the laser cutter. This was my first time printing text or very fine lines printed by the laser cutter, and I think it went very well. Everything blue had about 85 impressions and the red had 40 or so. Really, this blog might start getting kind of boring because that Pearl prints so beautifully. I used Crane's Lettra Pearl White stock, which also behaved really nicely this time (I tend to find that stuff rather temperamental). There is no impression into the back of the card, and the front has just what I wanted. I think you can see and feel the impression on the front (it isn't huge, but it's there), but it doesn't show through the back at all. Go me.

 

As you may have noticed, I only have two rollers on the Pearl instead of three because I'm very broke (hi dentist!) and that's all that was on the press when I bought it. The rollers I'm using came with the Pearl, and while I think they're quite a few years old, I don't believe they were used much, and they seem to be in pretty good shape. I'm probably going to try to use them as long as possible and then get all three when it's time to replace them. Therefore I was a little bit worried about the how well the solid of the silhouette would print - that I wouldn't be able to get good coverage with only two rollers, and I made that question mark as big as I possibly could. However, it wasn't a problem at all. I think the ink coverage is really almost perfect. All in all, everything went swimmingly for my first big project on the Pearl.

Bye Bye Love

Wow, it's been an embarrassingly long time since my last post, but this has been an incredibly busy summer. I just got back from the Northwest where I met up with my parents, visited my Grandparents for the first time in 3 years, saw my Aunt & Uncle for the first time in 8 years, saw my cousin for the first time in 17 years (she was 6! now she's 23! that's kind of weird), and met her boyfriend's extended family. Yeah. We're not the closest family ever, mainly out of laziness, I think, since they're all great people. None of us are very good about calling or emailing or updating blogs on a regular basis.

Please note the "Lead is not Dead" shirt. I'm all letterpress, all the time.

We also spent a couple days at Glacier National Park in Montana, which is a beautiful, amazing place. You should all go and soon because they're now predicting that the glaciers will be melted by 2030 if we continue at our current rate of environmental destruction. And while thinking about how awful that is, I also spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out an alternate name for the park once the glaciers are gone. Because apparently I don't have enough of my own crap to worry about.

Even though it was August, there was snow in patches on the mountains and gorgeous wildflowers everywhere else. I took a bunch of pictures of flowers and hope to turn at least a couple of them into plates for cards or stationary. To do that I'm going to use this super-awesome and fancy and high-tech, of-the-minute tool that some of you may have heard of called Live Trace. Yeah, that's right, I've upgraded from Adobe CS to Adobe CS3 and from a 4-year-old pre-Intel iBook to a older, pre-Intel, but still better Powerbook. I'm still behind the times but way less so, and I've got Dreamweaver so I can finish my website and Live Trace in Illustrator so I can trace! in a fancy manner!

In other letterpress news, I finally got around to selling my 5x8 Kelsey, along with a bunch of excess basic start-up stuff that I'd somehow managed to accumulate, start-up lessons, and a type cabinet with 13 cases of type. Nice type too. I'll admit to considering holding onto almost all that type, but that was type cabinet number three and it had been wedged in between my kitchen table and my TV since May. I did keep some excess typecases that didn't fit into the cabinet and am now the proud owner of 14pt & 18pt Typo Roman Shaded and one 12pt & three 6pt versions of Copperplate Gothic.  I'm rather in love with Copperplate Gothic right now.

Anyway, the cabinet was between the table and the TV, and the 5x8 Kelsey had been sitting on the side table by my couch since March. We're talking about a very small room here people, and I was getting close to losing my mind. Gus, my shop cat, thought that it was super-fun to jump onto the kitchen table (where he's not allowed), clamber onto the type cabinet (which had 5+ galley trays of set type on top of it), and attempt to tightrope walk on the TV, so that didn't help either.

  Gus denies everything. You can see the type cabinet & kitchen table in the background

As you can imagine, I was sorely tempted to keep everything at first, especially the Kelsey, but after those cramped months I was so pleased to have the space back that there was very little sentimental sadness in selling my very first press. Okay there was some; when I think about all we accomplished together and how beautiful that little Kelsey is, I get a bit misty. However I'm thrilled to report that there is no letterpress equipment in my living room/kitchen for the first time since January 2008. NONE! Okay fine, that's not actually true. There are two typecases sitting on a kitchen chair, but those are totally temporary. My living room is basically a living room again. The letterpress stuff has been relegated to the hallway where it belongs. And the bedroom. And the bathroom.

Dueling Wedding Invitations, Part Two

Sorry for the delay in posting part two of the dueling wedding invitations (click here for Part One); it's taken me some time to want to look at these guys again. They were such an ordeal to print in many ways, and I wasn't as happy with the whole thing as I had hoped I'd be. This was the last project printed on the 5x8 Kelsey and then a week later I brought home the 6x10 press and spent two weeks messing around with it before finally printing my business cards. I think I needed to print those cards and be super happy with them before I could step back and think about all the things that either went wrong or I did wrong with these invites.

Below is the finished product, which in some moments I do like. They're probably not everyone's cup of tea since they're brighter and maybe more casual than the standard wedding invitation, but I think they fit the tone of the couple and their upcoming wedding pretty well. John and Alissa are having a casual (for a wedding), summery wedding in Louisville, Kentucky over Memorial Day weekend, and I do think the invitation conveys that. My main problems with it are that it doesn't look as polished as I would have liked - I just couldn't get certain things to print perfectly and while the design isn't elegant, I still kind of wanted it to look elegant (because I'm bonkers). It looks handmade, which actually pleased the bride and groom, but ironically upsets me. Obviously I'm still having trouble evaluating this printing job, so let's just move onto the process, shall we?

So everything in the invitation except the trellis border is handset metal type, and the trellis is a stereotype mounted on wood. I'm sure you know that it's best to place the type in the chase with the lines of text running parallel to the top and bottom of the chase so that when the platen closes, pressure is applied evenly along the entire line of text and the line prints evenly. If you set the type so that a line of text runs parallel to the sides of the chase, the pressure might not be applied at the same time or quite as evenly since a clamshell press, by necessity, closes from the bottom to the top.

Naturally I try to follow that principle while printing, and at first tried on these too. Since the chase is only 5 inches tall from top to bottom, I had to print the text in two sections and the ornaments in two other sections and finally the trellis. That made 5 print runs, yikes. I had kind of accepted that when I noticed that the lines of text were not straight in the proofs, and it took me a very long time to figure out why, mainly because I didn't want to admit it to myself. Each text section was lined up nice and straight when I printed it (I promise - I measured 40-zillion times), but they were zigging and zagging towards each other when you examined the proof sheet. Because of the chase size and paper size, I was lining up the first text section to the top of the paper and the second text section to the bottom of the paper. The paper wasn't cut straight (thanks, incompetent Staples), so using two different straight edges wasn't lining everything up. I'm used to my paper-cutting being a bit unreliable (at some point I really need to face facts and find some sort of paper cutter), but I expected a bit more from Staples, with their fancy laser cutting. But, hey look! At least I've finally got ink mixing down!

  

So I finally faced facts, threw the ruler across the apartment with a curse, and set about the business of making sure each print run lined up with one edge, THE SAME EDGE, of the paper (the trellis edge). Unfortunately for me, this required resetting or at least repositioning pretty much every line. I'd taken care of much of my layout in the composing stick, and the shift needed to reposition lines running from 8 inches to 5 inches was large enough that I couldn't just turn the chase and rearrange the furniture. (Just as an aside, it's dumb-ass mistakes like this that led me to start this blog. Sure the idea of using a common edge for alignment seems obvious now that you've read it, but really was it before? Not to me, apparently. Now it is, and just in case this lesson hasn't been seared into my brain, I now have it recorded on the Internet for future reference.)

Somewhere in that process I got confused about my print runs - or at least that's my only explanation now. My notes are unclear, and as it was probably late at night, my memory is fuzzy. As you can see, I printed half the Della Robbia text first. Why? I'm not sure. I believe (and this is reconstruction) that I meant to print that portion of the text and the couple's names (in Gallia) in one run and the remainder of the text in the 2nd run, but that may not be true. If that was my intention, I can certainly explain why that didn't happen: the Gallia printed very badly. So I think that I decided that I didn't have enough ink for the Gallia but adding ink would cause over-inking of the Della Robbia. I was wrong, but I didn't know that yet. So the question now is, if I removed the Gallia, why didn't I add the rest of the Della Robbia text, and just print that all in one run? I don't have the answer for that, except perhaps that I was extremely frustrated and tired from an already long evening of resetting everything and discovering that the Gallia wasn't printing well. Regardless, that was stupid and added a whole extra print run and alignment headache. Now we're back at 5 print runs (3 text, 2 ornament). Ah, hindsight, etc.

So I printed the first section of Della Robbia separately and it went fine - it even looked pretty, with a nice kiss impression. Since I already had the press inked up and that had gone so well, I decided to give the Gallia a shot (this is still the first night of printing, just very late that night). Hubris. (Yeah that's right, this is an epic battle). My original idea was to print all the Gallia in one go, and since it's a heavier font than Della Robbia, I added more ink and I think removed a sheet of packing. The print was splotchy and uneven. I decided that I would go to bed and that the next night I would split the two sections up into two print runs. For those of you keeping track at home, that makes six print runs now, and let's keep in mind that each separate run entails a ridiculous amount of measuring and fiddling to make sure everything is aligned and straight.

The next evening I inked up again and tried to print the names only. Still no good. I added ink, I subtracted ink, I added packing, I subtracted packing. I briefly hyperventilated. Seriously though, I messed with this for hours. I examined each piece of type and did loads of spot makeready, mostly without success. I believe I had the tympan sheet, the makeready sheet, the press board, a piece of Lettra and three piece of card stock as packing and it really was pretty much perfect. I was getting just the right impression (a kiss), which I think you can even see in the below picture, but the printing was still blotchy. With the impression taken care of, I decided that the ink must be the problem, but soon ruled that out as well. I suppose that inking the Gallia isn't completely straightforward since there is both line and (a small) solid in the font, but I'm pretty sure I had more than enough ink on the press. At some points the ink was filling in the white space between the lines (see the I and last S in the bride's name) while still printing splotchily in other places (see the K in the groom's name). I did loads of makeready and it didn't help. I cleaned and examined the type before re-inking and that didn't help. I tested this two days in a row, so the press was cleaned in between, and while I used the same ink mix, I also used that ink mix to print the Della Robbia. Why did it print so badly? I'm still not really sure. 

 

My best guess is the paper wasn't taking the ink well from the type, but I don't really see what was so different about this situation than any other printing situation where this didn't happen. I was using Crane's Lettra, mainly because it probably is the paper I'm most familiar with, so we decided to use Lettra since much of the rest of the invitation was a new experience so why invite more trouble? So still, I'm unclear what the problem was.

Finally, late that 2nd night, I decided that I would have to dampen the paper. I had been reluctant to do this because I had already printed on the paper and I still had a few more print runs to go, so dampening the entire sheet seemed really problematic. The only other time I've printed on dampened paper, it was a small, one-run print job and I put 4 sheets of paper in a Tupperware container, dipped the fifth sheet of paper in water, laid it on top of the four sheets and repeated the process with the rest of the stack. I then let the stack sit closed overnight. Obviously I had no time to do that in this case and the idea of dipping my printed on sheet into a tub of water made me nervous.

So I devised the only stop-gap measure I could think of. I got a container of water and a sponge and spot-dampened the middle of each page where I would then print. I tried to print all the Gallia at once, but it actually still worked better in two sections, so I just printed the names that night. As you might imagine, individually dampening each sheet took a while and I couldn't do them all at once or they would dry before I printed them. It also took some experimentation to figure out how much to dampen. Finally I worked out a system where I would dampen 4 sheets and print them and then do four more. After about 25 I would stack them up and put them in the book press. When I was finally finished I left them all in the book press overnight and collapsed into bed. The next evening I repeated these steps for the 2nd section of Gallia and I also printed the 2nd section of Della Robbia. Between spot-dampening and then doing two runs of about 110 sheets with a hand-cranked press, it was a long evening. Let me tell you, after those three nights of difficult printing, I would be happy to never see that shade of blue again.

Voila, the text was finally done, and it looked mostly acceptable. The Gallia wasn't perfect and though I sound like a broken record, I still don't know why exactly. I've printed with it before without problems, I examined each piece pretty closely, but who knows? I'll do further tests at some point but haven't yet had the time or energy. To be honest, I just had to look at the time I had left and accept imperfection (although being honest, it's pretty obvious that I haven't accepted imperfection). The really annoying thing was actually something else (it just never ends). Though I had spent hours on alignment, the text still looked crooked. It wasn't crooked, but it looked crooked. I measured with my pica ruler, I tested with a triangle and the text was all perfectly aligned with the trellis edge, but due to the white space left by using both 24pt and 14pt Gallia, some of the text looked crooked. Since attaching a slip of paper explaining that this was just a visual trick wasn't an option, I decided to just take comfort in my measurements and hope that no one else would pay attention.

Elisabeth will maybe be proud of me after looking at the above picture. After seeing the frog business cards I printed (in two parts) last August, she commented that I could be pushing the press further and she was right. As you can see from this lockup, I printed that same frog, but this time printed two other elements and utilized most of the chase. I think if one compares the two prints, the newest one, with the larger print area, actually printed much better. Look at me growing. Perhaps there is hope yet? With the frog and the flowers, I really didn't have to do anything special to make it print well, so that was quite a relief. After all the problems I'd had with the text section, I had left myself only one evening to print all the green elements, including the envelopes.

Lots and lots of late nights with these guys, but that last night was the worst. I literally stayed up until 9:30 in the morning and then woke up at 11:40 to go to work (paying work) from 1-9. So obviously one of my issues was time management. As you may have read in my previous post on these invitations, it took us longer than expected to finalize the design, and once we were done, I procrastinated for a couple days because it was my birthday and I was tired of these invites and then I got crawl-around-on-the-floor sick for a few days, and by that time I only had about 4 days left to print everything. That may sound like plenty of time, and if everything had gone smoothly it would have been perfect. Of course, things went wrong, and I'm no expert, so 4 days was really, really pushing it. To be honest, I don't know if it would have turned out any better if I'd had more time. Maybe if I had decided to throw the whole thing out and start over, but I don't have that kind of money or patience.

The trellis was the final challenge, and its printing badly was purely my amateur fault. The trellis is actually two different pieces that I bought on EBay ages ago. They don't really fit together all that naturally, as you can see in the invitation, but that was unavoidable and I had originally planned for the invitation to be smaller and to only use the larger trellis piece. Anyway the trellis looked a little weird at the meeting point to begin with and parts of both pieces required some pretty complicated makeready, but I mostly got the job done. If you can believe it, I even spot dampened it too, just in case. If you look at the finished invitation however, you will notice a small area right in the center (yes, of course it would be the center!) that still didn't print, even with all my ministrations. That, ladies and gentlemen, is where the block just slopes downward. SLOPES! I did everything I could, underlays and overlays, and it does look better than the first prints, but there was just no way to print something that didn't exist. Why, oh why did I not notice that before? I could have just cut off the whole edge. It was a silly mistake, but now I know the value of carefully proofing all new materials!

 

And that is the saga of those invitations. If anyone has any ideas about any of the problems I experienced, I'd be thrilled to hear them. Also has anyone printed with French Paper? If so, please describe both which you used and the results.

All right, the duel is over. But it wasn't really a duel, I guess. Both are still standing (in that they please the brides and grooms) and now again so am I.

Evolution of an Invitation

A lot of newer letterpress printers are graphic designers of some sort or another, and I've said before that I'm not. I've been doing a lot of reading and experimenting and I'd like to take a typography class and a couple other classes, but money is tight. My point is that I'm kind of making this all up as I go along. The design process, client relations, estimating production costs and time, these are all new to me (as such things would be to anyone getting into a new field), and sometimes I feel like there's a very steep learning curve. That's one of the reasons I've been printing things at cost for friends and family and not seeking out real business yet - when I end up hand setting parts of a wedding invitation not just once but about three different times, it's much better to be doing this as a learning experience for people I care about. No amount of money would make that tons of fun and there's no way I could charge people for that sort of labor anyway. I'd like to know how people who handset job printing deal with this. For job printing, plates seem like the way to go. I guess I'm a product of the computer age in that respect, proofing and design on the computer is way less trouble than on the imposing stone. And perhaps less fun?

All the wedding invitations I've done until now have been designed by others and I've just printed them. This is fine with me - I like to print first and foremost and this also meant that I have so far avoided learning all that wedding etiquette-type stuff. When I offered to print invites for my friends, John and Alissa, I thought it would be even simpler. John and Alissa are getting married in Louisville, Kentucky over Memorial Day weekend and it's going to be a summery, casual and laid-back kind of wedding. They don't want a typical, more formal  wedding - no colors or a theme, etc, and that sounded nice until I realized that picking colors for the invitations would now be a challenge since ANYTHING could go. I have a foundry type cut of a frog on a bicycle (you can see it here on a business card),  and John knew that he wanted to use that but really didn't have any further design specifications or restrictions in mind. He also wanted to just work within the limitations of my set-up: a size that the 5x8 Kelsey could accommodate, handset type, etc. Sounds pretty simple, right?

John and Alissa came over one afternoon and looked at my type and all the different cuts and we talked about paper and sizes, etc. I also have a Gocco, which is a small Japanese contraption that does a sort of silkscreen type printing, so we thought we could use that for any images we wanted to use that I didn't have for letterpress printing. So John goes home and thinks about this and comes up with a design that uses both letterpress and Gocco printing and a couple weeks later, he comes over so we could try it out. Sort of a test run.

This was actually very strange at first because I've never had anyone in my space during printing before. My "shop" is actually the hallway between my bedroom and my living room/kitchen, so there isn't a whole lot of room to move around. Really I'm the only person who can be in my house without knocking something over or bumping into something (usually my bike, which is also in that hallway), so it was sort of awkward having to maneuver around John to go between the Gocco on the kitchen table and the press in the hall. He also wanted to help and I really didn't know how he could besides cutting paper. But we ended up having fun, and I put him to work setting his and Alissa's names in 24pt. Gallia type for our test print. It was surprisingly nice to have a friend gain an understanding of the letterpress process. Glendon of course knows more than he wants to and I have a couple librarian friends that have done it before at Rare Book School in Virginia, but generally people don't really get it. So that was cool, but our tests were a disaster.

I don't even have pictures of them, but they just looked bad. John had decided that he wanted colored stock with the Gocco printed flower in white and then the letterpress printed text over that. I warned him that the white ink would be somewhat transparent and might not be possible, but on three of our four paper samples, the white faded so much as it dried that it was hardly visible. I told him that we could work around that to a certain extent, perhaps by adding a tint to the white or that we could use white stock and print the flower in a pale color, so we moved on to the letterpress portion of the afternoon. I had been wanting to incorporate Gocco and letterpress before, so I was eagerly anticipating this, but it looked awful. The Gocco ink and letterpress ink do not like each other. The letterpress ink on the paper and over the Gocco printing appeared to be different colors and the way the ink was sitting on the Gocco section just looked bad and mottled. The other strange thing was that I had given John a list of the fonts I owned and he picked a combination of 24pt and 14pt Gallia, and then he had even found digital copies of them so our mock-up actually used the fonts. So cool! Except that the digital fonts are much smaller than the actual size of the metal type when printed. We decided to up the size of the invitation and I began to worry that the whole thing would look too heavy.

Yeah, pretty much everything went wrong that day. I suggested to John that he just get at least part of the invitation offset printed, but he didn't want to. He didn't feel all that attached to his design and wanted to work within my capabilities. He had to leave so I began cleaning the press, thinking "crap, what are we going to do now?"

It's funny how mindless tasks, like cleaning the press, can sometimes help you work things out. So I thought about the frog cut and the Gallia font and what else I might have and suddenly came up with this idea of using these two cuts I have of a trellis with flowers running up it. It just kind of popped into my head that it would look nice in a limey-springy green and a summery turquoise. The text could be left aligned and I could sort of intersperse little flowers or swirls around the jagged edges of the text lines. I thought it could be summery and relaxed but still kind of elegant. I was actually kind of excited about this new idea. John and Glendon play together in a bluegrass band that was having a show later that night, and when I got there, I outlined my new idea, and they both wrinkled their noses. They couldn't picture those colors and they didn't remember particularly liking the cut I was thinking about. It actually turned out that both of them (and, well everyone) thought that my trellis was a picket fence, so no one liked it. They're right too. It's a very ugly picket fence or a very nice trellis and I'm glad I looked at it wrong! But John was willing to give it a shot - he didn't have a better idea.

So a couple nights later I handset the text, which was such a pain. I don't have tons of Gallia, so I started running out of certain letters pretty early. If we had used that original set-up, I would have had to print it in three sections to get all the letters. And then it looked like crap (does anyone sense a theme here?). I was just doing a very quick proof - inking up the type with brayers instead of using the rollers - and I didn’t even attempt to fix the leading, but I wanted to give John and Alissa an idea of what I was imagining so that we could figure something else out if they still hated it.

Both of them liked it more than they thought they would, and we decided to work with that design. John and I both agreed that the 24pt and 14pt Gallia was too much and that we needed to break it up with a smaller, less noticeable font. This presented a new problem since I have Futura & Della Robbia in 8 and 10 pt, an unsorted mishmash of things in the 10 & 12pt range and then a bunch of 18 and 24pt fonts. I was pretty sure that the Gallia required a san serif font, so that narrowed it to Futura, but I was worried that the 10pt would look too small, so I did some mock-ups on the computer, using a few different options, including throwing out the Gallia completely and using Greeting Monotone or Pacific. Results, in keeping with the project so far, were surprising.

It turns out that John hates Greeting Monotone, which I find weird since I really like it, and though he liked Pacific, he had grown quite attached to the Gallia so wanted to stick with it. The Futura looked weird with the Gallia - it was way too round and seemed cartoonish. The Della Robbia, while a bit small, looked much better, so 10pt Della Robbia with 24pt and 14pt Gallia was the new plan. I hand-set everything again, this time adding in leading and John and Glendon came over to "help" again. Since neither of them was convinced that the blue and green were perfect, I suggested that they choose another color to print with, and after much deliberation, they settled on a kind of hunter green. I hate that color, but I rolled my eyes and inked up. We also added various ornaments this time, and John had thought my idea of interspersing the ornaments at the ends of the text lines sounded difficult (which was true), so I had him choose which ornaments and where to put everything. I think he was right about ornament placement since with the large Gallia and the small Della Robbia, ornaments scattered throughout may have looked odd. Anyway, I printed some proofs and we made some changes and I thought to myself that perhaps it would have been simpler to have just bought a plate from Owosso!

We did agree that this print was headed in the right direction, but John didn't want the body text left aligned right near the trellis border. He thought it would look better if aligned more at the center. I still disagree with him about this, but I reset the stupid text that way for the next proof and he continued to like that best. I have to admit that I didn't argue with him much about changing it back since I would have had to respace everything again and at that point I was getting tired of the whole process. With this proof I also simplified the ornaments and placed them so everything seemed evenly weighted. The I chose a pinky, raspberry color that I thought would look equally good when paired with the turquoise, lime green or hated evergreen colors.

This proof, with minor spacing changes, became our final working copy. John and Alissa deliberated about the colors and finally decided on the two original colors, which was sort of funny since I had since decided that I liked the pink and blue best. Below you can see the final product. In the upcoming post, Dueling Wedding Invitations, Part Two, I will go into excruciating detail about all the problems I had printing that, but I wanted to first detail the design process for this. Lessons learned? Custom design is a conundrum. How one keeps the amount of changes and time spent on design under control is something I'd have to seriously work on in a paying situation. When/if I ever begin doing this for money, I think I'll offer templates that can be modified or hi, I'll print your design. Also, boy oh boy, handset type is great for me and my projects, but when printing for business, not pleasure, I believe I would mostly stick to plates. And, I am flighty, and by the end of this whole thing (at least a month and a half), I was thoroughly sick of these colors, these cuts and this type. How do you keep from burning out? I'm sure there were other design lessons, but right now I can't think of them, and I'll probably remember them next time I make the same mistake. And then I'll let you know so that you can either not make the same mistake or laugh at my stupidity -  I'm fine with both.

Fudging and Frustration

About three months ago I registered my press name with Briar Press. This has no legal standing or anything, but I suppose it affords a certain moral standing should some upstart printer decided to name his or her press "The Gamewell Press." If that happened, the Briar Press community should theoretically stand behind me in the ensuing imaginary smackdown. BUT anyway, what you do is write a little blurb about your press and its goals and print three copies of a prop card which you should then send in to Briar Press within a month. Here's the link, if you're interested in doing the same for your press. I highly recommend it just because it's nice to be part of the community, and I suppose it is one more way to get your name out there.

However, I then promptly forgot about printing the prop cards, which by the way, are not a big deal. Briar Press staff (3 people, I believe) are the only people who will ever see them, so it doesn’t have to be the BEST PRINTING EVER. I mean, you shouldn’t send crap, as that defeats the whole purpose, but my original “git er dun” attitude obviously went up in smoke. Prop cards, according  to Briar Press, are about the size of index cards and are carryovers from the days of rolodex or card files. As such, the printer’s last name, first name should appear in the top left corner for handy alphabetization. The prop card should also include the press name (obviously) and the address. After that you can pretty much do whatever you want – add your email and webpage (probably more relevant than address in our electronic age), list all the typefaces you own (I wouldn’t recommend that one), write your favorite printing quote, use a cute dingbat - you get the idea. And if you don’t, there are examples posted on the webpage.

So as I said, I just sort of forgot to print them until the deadline had passed and Briar Press reminded me. Then one night I was printing some business cards, and I thought I‘d incorporate the image I was using for those into the prop cards, so I cut the paper and printed them. Stupidly, I only printed three – I should have done another for myself, but I didn’t for some reason. I was having a lot of trouble with ink that day. I’ll go into more detail about that later in an ink mixing post I’m writing, but basically, I couldn’t get the color I wanted and then I put way too much ink on the press. I cleaned some off, but it still wasn’t enough and blah blah – it was a frustrating day actually. So I printed the dingbat first and then four hours and four glasses of wine later at 1:30 in the morning, I decided that I would also print the press name in the same color.

Two asides here: 1.I print on a Kelsey 5x8, otherwise I wouldn’t drink and print. That would be wrong and dangerous. Also, I don’t usually drink that much and print but it was a long day. 2.I also generally think that you should not try new things or hard things late at night when you’ve been printing for hours. I think I, at least, tend to get impatient and sloppy and a bit stupider. If I just clean the press and go to bed and ink it up again some other time, things always go better. However, I rarely take my own advice because I am impatient and I always dread cleaning the press (even though it isn’t actually a hard task or even a time-consuming one – I just often make it out to be).

Anyway, due to my irritating over-inking, I printed things for the prop card at both the start and the finish of a multi-hour session and I think the ink colors are quite different because of the varying amount of ink put down for each impression. This is definitely something to watch out for. I was originally going to print the press name in 36pt Gill Sans Cameo Ruled, but I really couldn’t get it to pull a good print. By that time it was after 2AM, and I wasn’t going to screw around with make-ready and overlays so I switched fonts. Of course that meant that I had to redistribute the gill and set the press name again and lock it up again and figure out my registration again. This time I used 24pt Futura Inline, a font I’ve used a couple times and really like. It turned out fine. I cleaned the press and dragged my weary but to bed.

Then I ignored the prop cards for another few weeks until I decided that it was getting ridiculous. I decided to use a pale bluish gray color for the rest of it, which wasn’t what I had originally planned, but I didn’t feel like doing the rest of the print job for another project that needed the original planned brown color. This time the ink mixing went so well, it was amazing. I would say that I’ve finally figured out the science of ink mixing, but every time I say that, I really screw it up again. Hopefully I’ll get the ink mixing post out right after the holiday. This time I decided to play it safe, and I used a dingbat that I've used successfully before and my old standby Della Robbia for the address, etc. Those went fine, and all I had left to do was my name. That is when I realized that I have no acceptable fonts for my name and the project got put off for another 2 weeks. Can you believe this? I'm in the process of cleaning this Kaufman/Brush type script that I don't actually like, but I really wanted to use it for my name on this card. It's 18pt and would have been a good size, but I hadn't yet cleaned any capital Ms or Ps. Anyway, this font indecision held me up for another week until I gave up and used 14pt Greeting Monotone. It's not great but it's done. At this point that is all I care about.