Hamilton Wood Type Museum located in Two Rivers, Wisconsin where the Twin Rivers empty into Lake Michigan. The Museum is located in the old mill building right on the river where Hamilton Wood Type became one of the largest producers of wood type back in the heyday of newspapers as the only media source. Jim Moran is the curator/director of the museum and he is hard at work archiving the collection of type and slowly renovating the building. The press room is still active and Jim says that he prints every day he’s there. Jim brought Jim Sherraden from Hatch Show Print up for a workshop on letterpress printing with wood type. Fourteen of us from across the Midwest plus one workshop from Lancaster, PA gathered for this amazing weekend of Hatch at Hamilton.
Jim and Jim plus Mary Sullivan told great stories- patiently helped us with the machinery and let us loose with blocks combined from the Hatch collection and the Globe Collection from Chicago – a group of blocks that were used for promoting circuses, stock car races, carnivals and commercial sales. Some of the Globe blocks hadn’t been used in 50 years. It was incredible to see what we all accomplished in such a short time.
I learned a ton about the process and technology of inking the blocks and printing well but I also learned some good stuff about my own process to bring to my daily process.
1. Slow down, think, and be patient. I set some type. Something I haven’t done since my one foray in the letterpress workshop at RISD. I had grand plans for a multiline poem. But once I got there I realized setting 3 words was going to be all I could really handle. So I settled for our current mantra – right this way. Using type that had amazingly irregular widths. I set everything up – and realized only after I’d gotten everything locked in on the printing bed with the furniture just right – that there were some kerning issues with the i and the g. Did I fix it? No. Do I regret it? Yes. every single time I look at it. Next time I’ll slow down and think a little bit more as I go.
2. Embrace happy accidents. OK some might call these mistakes, but my favorite print from the weekend has this rich texture that comes from a not completely inked block that had been inked with mulitple colors layered on top of eachother. The result was a weathered quality that was beautiful and unexpected. One of the other folks in the workshop had a test sheet that she picked up and realized that she’d created a really nice texture to print onto. The structure and limited time of this workshop wasn’t conducive to too much method – so improvization became king at least for a day.
3. I love ink and paper for a reason. And I need to build a practice of working analog especially now. It’s so darned easy to jump into illustrator and mock something up – but I need to remember to step away and pick up a pencil – or better yet a brush and work away from the machine. I’ve got a good hand – with the ability to create some good line quality. My hand is better than my brain sometimes and I need to let it do some of the work. The results are more innate and more human. I think it’s easier to relate to a hand drawn line than it is to a perfect straight line. The energy that went into making that mark shows.
4. It’s so fun to make a mess. The making is the fun part. It doesn’t need to be beautiful…sometimes it’s way more fun and inspiring just to make a mess.
shades of green
It’s a bit challenging to be in the business of making things and to also be a conservationist. There’s an inherent conflict between making and saving. I’ve got more education in environmental studies than I do as a graphic designer and I still care deeply about making a difference. Our firm has adopted and worked toward the mission of the Designers Accord since the program’s inception in summer of 2007. It’s a blurry world and one that is today filled with greenwashers and folks who help to make some of our biggest polluters look squeeky clean in the name of social marketing. It’s a tricky world to navigate and do the right thing. We’re a group of designers that love tactile things – we can fall in love with a beautiful interface design – but there’s something about ink and paper that just sucks us in and lures us to make tangible real stuff that people hold (and hopefully covet). That leaves me feeling just a little conflicted.
After a lot of navel gazing – here’s where we’ve landed on our sustainability.
We power down. Everynight – after we’ve done our backup, the computers are turned off, and unplugged. No vampires. Just quiet time. When we get in each morning we rely on daylight and not artificial light until we’re getting ready for a meeting.
We wear sweaters when it’s cold. And sometimes those fingerless gloves. And sometimes the leopard print Snuggie comes out. We know that cooler temperatures keep us on our toes and more alert. And when it’s hot we try to keep the office at a temp that’s good for our machinery – but not so cool that we need to wear a sweater in the summer.
We only print when we really need to. Most of the time we proof and transmit everything to clients with PDFs and when it’s time to look at it really closely – comp it up to make sure everything will produce correctly – we make a printout – and then we recycle that when we’re done. We recycle everything we can.
We all walk/bike/bus to work whenever we can. Some of us walk in everyday, some of us bike most of the year, we share rides and we do what we can to keep our footprint small.
But here’s the big thing. Our design solutions are smart and go the distance. We design stuff to last. We don’t believe in throw away media. This saves our clients money and ultimately serves them for awhile. Could we make more money if we pushed our clients to design and produce temporary pieces – sure , but we just don’t think it’s a good idea. Our view is that temporary pieces should be distributed electronically – use social media outlets and email to do that work and reserving the printable stuff to deliver when something needs a big tactile impact.
Our work is small and flexible. Our solutions usually fit multiple purposes — we do more with less. We make things easy to grab and easy to keep. We don’t make big glossy stuff when a small simple thing will do.
We only recommend working with sustainable materials – we specify FSC certified papers, 100% post consumer recycled materials, or at a minimum materials with recycled content. We design our pieces so that we use as much of a press sheet as possible. This saves our clients money and reduces waste.
We’re always looking for ways to do things better – if you’ve got tips we’re all ears. What do you to keep your footprint small?