V-Day in... September

One of the wacky things about printing for the wholesale market is the scheduling. While it's just September, our Valentine's Day cards are finished and ready to go! There are three new ones to add to the catalog this year and all three are unique in their inspiration. The first one was built around this simple, skinny wood type, with the idea that we could add ornamentation for a folk art sampler feel.

That was the easy part! Next came the ornaments, forced into typographic lettering.

Here's the final card, printed in orange, lavender and pale yellow. The close up shows how the background was printed with the textured back side of wood type.

For the next card, I wanted to see if we could create a heart shape out of ornaments, but in a less obvious way. Thus I designed a gatefold style card so that the two sides would come together much the way a paper cutout heart does. Here is how it looked printed flat:

Printing gatefold cards requires a little thought and precision in the layout so that the two sides come together correctly when folded. This makes for interesting forms. As seen below, the words 'Be Mine' were on opposite sides of the chase.

Here's the final! Hundreds of little ornaments make up the textured, afghan-like pattern.

The final card was a bit of a fluke, and came from listening to a lot of The Crystals in the studio, specifically 'Today I Met The Boy I'm Gonna Marry'. I pulled out our Moore Wood Type hearts to see if this card could come together organically.

It's not every day we get to use our Cooper typefaces, which is a shame. This seemed like a golden opportunity to pull the Black Italic together with our cursive-styled Monoline Script.

And there you have it! I printed the stars first in one direction then the other so that the subtle, largely transparent colors would overlap and create other colors. Then the burgundy text was printed on top.

Three great cards, in my humble opinion, that were very fun to design and print. And when all was said and done, the forms fit comfortably on one galley, ready to be distributed back into the collection. All three are now available in our etsy shop.

An Artistic Approach

One of the best collections in the studio is the 19th century typefaces I've been acquiring over the last 15 years. Most of them are pre-1900, and some were created before the standardized point system (it can be pretty annoying to space 13 point type when the spacing doesn't exist!). Luckily, Skyline Type Foundry is creating new casts of some of these typefaces, using the original matrices but with new metal. The beauty of these is that we have access to antique typefaces but in the form of new type.

I wanted to spend some time with these typefaces and ornaments to create new pieces that mimic 'artistic printing' of the 1890s and challenge my typesetting abilities. I immediately sketched out a bunch of ideas for text and layouts based on actual print samples from the time (for inspiration, check out the incomparable Stephen Saxe's photo feed).

The series is open ended; the first three are completed, and two more are just about set and ready to go. Then there are other ideas still on paper, waiting for the chance to pull out more of this gorgeous type and get it on press.

The first print celebrates our home state of Illinois. The inspiration actually came from receiving a new wood block of Illinois from Moore Wood Type. This is combined with an antique copper cut (love the line detail in this), a mash up of typefaces and two simple curves. In this image you can also see the Illinois woodblocks.

And here's a close up of the detail in the copper cut and type. Rustic, the type for Land and Lincoln, is so kitschy and great.

Each print for sale also includes an ink jet print of the form, or type set up, so that the viewer can appreciate just how the print was put together, and understand that it wasn't done digitally. Here's the form for the Illinois print:

The second print in the series is pulled from the song 'Deed I Do, a big favorite. This one works in a brand new cast of Arboret, a lovely and complex typeface (in 12 and 24 point), along with a set of ornaments to mix and match. So beautiful.

My favorite thing about this print is the little line of ribbon type. This was a real find back at the Wayzgoose in Phoenix, as it is not only awesome, it includes a second set of solid background sorts so that you can print it in two colors. The pale purple ornaments are wood, and the yellow is a linoleum cut.

Here you can see the various elements of Arboret to create all the floral ornaments.

The third print is really fun and is perfect as a gift for someone that just accomplished something great.

The border is made up of detailed ornaments and decorative rules (lines), set in a rectangular shape. There's a funky blue background around the edge made up of what we like to call 'icicle border'. This is also one of the best ampersands in the studio. The second light color for 'true greatness' is a linoleum cut; it's not perfect, but then again, very few artistic prints are.

All of the prints are available for sale in our etsy shop. Over the next few weeks (years?) we'll be adding more prints as great ideas strike and more type makes its way into the studio. I make an effort to curate what typefaces find a home at Starshaped so that we can be sure that they are getting used and pulling their weight, so to speak. There are still many that haven't gotten their chance to shine, so they will be getting a stage soon.

A Calendar Year

Every year, Starshaped is asked to create a calendar in any form, and while we all love the idea of putting together such a piece, the timing has never gelled with the custom print schedule. This year we've done it ahead of schedule and have two great calendars to offer! I loved the idea of a wall calendar that can hang to display one large image throughout the year. One of the other driving forces for this decision was to be able to use a complete font of calendar type, purchased last year from Virgin Wood Type, meaning that even the individual pages of the calendar would be printed.

As you can see, each date is cut to be on the same size block of wood so that it's easy to interchange them and keep the same form when you move from one month to the next. Their beauty is that they aren't perfect; there are many quirks from the routing and carving process which gives them more character than if the pages were to be output digitally. I added the month and ornamentation at the top to round out the print, also leaving a bit of room at the bottom on which users could write notes.

One of our most popular prints has always been one titled The Stars All Lead Me Home, which is currently sold out with no plans for reprints. So I took that theme and recreated the city and stars for the first calendar which you can see here:

Each calendar was printed in four colors. The first for this one was a white linoleum cut to provide a base for the rest of the colors. Then came the cityscape in a bright, happy blue.

The star setup was a bit tricky; I had the drawing for the linoleum cut done, so I used that as a base for laying out the stars in their various size. Then spacing and leading needed to be filled in around them to keep the block solid and easily locked up for printing.

They are printed in a soft champagne metallic ink and finish off with a little moon in the corner.

One of the hazards of the trade is the presence of work ups in a type form. You can see below that one of the thin spaces between the R and S has literally worked its way up to printing between the two letters. We all have to be vigilant in checking prints to keep this from happening on multiple prints.

Here's that pesky little space:

Because one is never enough, there's a second calendar as well, in the same format as the first. This one is a mash up of various wood types to spell the months of the year, coupled with a beautiful '2014' and corner elements, all printed in four colors.

Here are the forms for the months as well as the '2014'. Some really incredible wood type all in one place!

The detail shows a little more of the great effects of overlapping and subtle colors. The corner pieces are printed in both dark brown and gold.

Printing the calendar pages was no small task, given that we did an initial run of 100 of each calendar and there are 12 months in the year (you do the math, and allow for the overrun of misprints!). These were done on the platen press for speed and the corners were rounded afterwards.

The final step is collating the months and assembling them with padding compound at the top. Then they are attached to the calendar and are set to go! If you're feeling like an early bird this year, we've got them for sale on our etsy site now: here for The Stars All Lead Me Home and here for 2014. And cheers to a new year!

City of Wind

If you want to get an idea of what's going on in gig posters, urban prints and street art, head straight to Logan Square and Galerie F. I was pleased to be invited to contribute to their collection of exclusive prints, and the poster is now available on their site. Here it is:

Chicago is always a popular theme and one I love. For this one, I wanted to create a large cityscape to represent downtown, but also something that was indicative of the smaller skylines of the neighborhoods. The first two layers were printed with wood type (and the back side of wood type), and linoleum blocks in very pale dirty gray to give depth and texture to the image. The wind image is a pressure print, which is created by adding a shape or cutout to the makeready of the press which affects how evenly the paper will roll over type.

Here's a shot of the wood type as well as the linoleum blocks.

You can see the texture created by multiple layers, as well as the hints that came through the pressure print to keep the wind shapes subtle and soft.

After those two runs, it was time for the type and the small cityscape. To create the type with a larger first and last letter, you actually have to have two separate fonts of the same thing. This also features the Chicago wood stars we commissioned from Moore Wood Type. There's a small representation of a CTA train car, as well as an ash tree, in defiance of the emerald ash borers that are destroying the ash trees of the city.

You can get a copy of the print directly from Galerie F for the next month, as well as a number of our other prints if you pop by the gallery. It's definitely worth a stop if you're in the neighborhood... so much great stuff to look at and take home with you!

City in a Garden... and in How Magazine

I'm pleased to share that our poster, Urbs in Horto, was just selected as one of the Outstanding winners in How's International Design Awards issue, which is out now.

Last February, I built the form for this poster and printed it over the course of 4 days, to be included in the city's show, The Flag and Seal Revisited, which featured different takes on Chicago's flag and seal by local artists and printmakers.

When starting the print, I wasn't sure if it would be successful or not, as I explored the idea of building a city of ornaments (which we do a lot in the studio) in multiple colors and in a circular shape. The type was set solid, meaning there was very little spacing in it, making it that much harder to take out the individual colors while maintaining the overall integrity of the print. Here's the initial shot of pulling ornaments and designing it before moving to press; I can't help but liken it to building the Death Star:

Here are a few other close ups of some of the colors once I moved the form to press:

And here is the final print. I wanted it to have a specimen-like feel, and labeled the bottom accordingly with mini pins.

The print plays off of the idea of City in a Garden, the Latin motto of the city. There are flower and plant ornaments cropping up between all of the buildings represented, as well as little 'trees' that follow the line of the water meant to represent Lake Michigan. Many popular features of the city are included, like the Sears Tower, Buckingham Fountain and Harold Washington Library.

The other side of the print ends in the more stereotypical bungalows that make up many of the city's neighborhoods. And would it have been complete without a cow?

The 'kissing kids' in the lake is a small cut originally produced by Chicago's own Barnhart Bros. & Spindler type foundry.

The print (which sold out quickly) was a crowning achievement in my typesetting career, and I'm glad it turned out to be successful on many levels. We'll be celebrating at the lovely Atwood Cafe in the historic Reliance Building downtown.

And as if the recognition of this piece wasn't enough, How also selected one of our invitations to be included in the Merit category:

Also a city, but this time San Francisco. Apart from the difficulty of setting the Golden Gate Bridge with curved rules, the other fantastic and challenging aspect of this project was setting it in both english and french, which required the use of accents and a little 'type surgery'. Here are a few close ups:

Notice here the addition of accents, and the trimmed Copperplate E's (to make room for the accents).

Why does it look like this picture was taken late at night? Because it was... it took about 4 hours just to get it to stay together and straight given the bent rule, let alone getting it on press. Is it worth it to spend this amount of time typesetting? Yes, given that the mission of Starshaped is to preserve the typesetting techniques of the past and make them relevant to commercial work today.