The Changing Face of Letterpress

Suitable to the topic of my studies this week, as well as the intenseness, I went to a talk on letterpress (true Gutenberg style) and typography on Thursday night with Edward and Frida from my course. David Dabner and Alex Cooper, two lecturers and tutors from London College of Communications, basically talked a bit about the history of letterpress and type and showed a few of their own and students work. It is quite amazing to see what exciting stuff you can do, just with a couple of letters and an ancient press! The thing I love about letterpress, is that every printed page, even every individual letter, really has character. Due to the non-automatic mechanics of a letter press and the fact that you are manually applying the ink, it is very hard to produce two identical prints. It is a very long process (you have to set every single letter by hand), which means you spend much longer on a poster for example, than if you would design it on the computer. Most of the time using letterpress means you spend more time, and (hopefully) more thought on a project, which generally speaking produces a better result. Of course letterpress has its limitations, eg printing photos is pretty much impossible. Sooner or later it will disappear. However, letterpress is able to produce results, which are nearly impossible to adapt on the computer, and therefore, as well as nostalgic reasons, I hope letterpress will never completely die.