My Weekend Away from the Web

This past weekend I attended a conference on what I would call the antithesis of web design. I spent my weekend in Two Rivers WI at the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum, geeking out over letterpress at the Museum's third annual Wayzgoose Conference. The conference is a gathering of typography enthusiasts, of people across the country who get giddy at looking at wood type and antiquated ways of printing with them. I had an absolute ball.

I've been immersed in the world of web design for several years now, but my background in design is quite traditional. I studied print and identity design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), and was lucky enough to take a letterpress printing class while I was there. SAIC didn't have a letterpress facility at the time, and was lending its presses and extensive type collection to Columbia College's Center for Book and Paper Arts, one of the most fabulous centers of its kind in the country.

On the way to the conference (an over 6 hour drive), I stopped at the Center to break up the trip and take in their current show on "Experimental Letterpress in the 21st Century". I had to sneak in to the letterpress studio of course, a place I spent many late nights laboring over the press and getting ink all over my hands and clothes. This weekend was about getting back to my roots – both where I started off as a designer, and where the printed word started off in the first place.

Letterpress was developed by Gutenberg in the 1440s and started the communication revolution that we now see daily, floating in front of our eyes in pixel form on a glowing screen. Until the very late 1800's, letterpress was the means of printing any written word. It's a laborious process, but one that produces beautiful results — if you look at a sheet that's been letterpressed, you can see a slight bite into the paper where the wood or metal type was pressed and left an impression.

Letterpress is enjoying a revival at the moment, just like LP's are now that music is almost entirely digital. Matthew Carter, one of the world's preeminent typographers and a keynote speaker at the conference, summed it up nicely: "This whole letterpress thing is funny. On one hand it’s all good ol’ boy geezers, and on the other it’s attractive young women". Carter is the designer of many of the web fonts I use on a daily basis – Georgia, Verdana, Tahoma, among others, so having him at the conference was a bridge for me between the typefaces I look at daily on my screen, and the old-school fonts that adorned every surface of the Museum. He spoke about how technology has influenced type design, and was quite adamant that it hasn't.

The highlight of the conference was a two-hour session with Jim Sherraden — Manager, curator, and chief designer of Hatch Show Print, a letterpress studio in Nashville, TN that's been making posters for the music industry since 1879. Jim brought along one of his staff, Brad Vetter, to help with the workshop and talk about the process behind making one of their posters. Jim demoed some techniques I wasn't familiar with and let us loose on the presses. It's hard to describe the rush of cranking a piece of paper through a large, flatbed letterpress with its rollers running and motor humming and seeing a gorgeous print come through the other end. There's nothing quite like it.

While at the Center for Book and Paper Arts, I photographed several pieces that I really loved, vowing to look up the artist after the conference to see if I could afford to purchase one of their prints. On the last day of the conference, right before everyone said their goodbyes and went home, there was a print swap/sale where conference attendees could swap their own work with other attendees's work, or buy some if they didn't have work to swap. Being in the latter category, I was thrilled to bits when I saw that the artist I so admired at the Center was Mr. Brad Vetter himself. Needless to say, I walked away glowing with two new pieces to hang above my desk, a reminder of an inspiring weekend and the history infused behind every letter I type on my screen.