Time for the slightly late New Year's card post. Usually each year I make time to design, typeset and print the cards to send to the fellow designers/printers. I'm sure many of you already got a few cards over the years, some of them in the form of newspapers, posters or…cards. Well, typesetting with wood and metal type, proofing, making corrections, letterpress printing are the things I enjoy the most (well, except the make-ready part which might take an extra hour). But this time I've done some typesetting for someone else: for a colleague letterpress printer Jozias Boone.
Jozias had already a few ideas, had collected pieces of texts over the years and wanted the card to be folded. The concept of grasping time or taking the grip on it was taken as the starting point when designing the card. After going through several quotes or suggesting some of my own I found the majority of materials unsuitable: some of them were too long, too short or didn't have enough flexibility to play around with. Except for one quote suggested by Jozias - 'unfold the wrinkles of time'. By cutting out the words, searching for composition using the wood and metal type available at Jozias' printshop and folding the paper in all possible directions I've discovered that the word 'wrinkles' has the word 'ink' in it. Ha! Perfect find for the card sent out by the letterpress printer ;)
It was decided to print the card in 3 complementary colours. After finalizing the composition, typesetting, proofing, make-ready, and a few tiny corrections the first forme was ready to be printed on the Original Heidelberg Cylinder. Switching to the second colour within the same frame went smooth, but for the third colour, I had to measure everything once more to make sure that everything was in the right place. The next day, after the cards were dry I've prepared the fourth forme for the back side of the card, typeset in beautiful Announce, 8pt and 12pt, available in the Jozias Boone collection. Then it was time for folding and sending it out. Happy New Year to all!
letterpress printing by Jozias Boone
type composition by Armina Ghazaryan
paper freelife merida by Fedrigoni
