WE'VE MOVED; now at 1691 Dundas St. West

I'm at the new location right now. It looks great. By great I mean, it's a complete disaster in this space. Boxes all over the places, everything crammed floor to ceiling and tiny alley ways to walk in. That's just temporary. I'm working on the set up, and soon the store front is going to look incredibly amazing. The press is set up to be directly in front of the window, the type cases line the walls and our digital design lab is facing the front, off the back wall. The middle pace is currently jammed with... well yeah. You get the idea.

I was in the space as the heavy movers brought in the cabinets and the press last thursday. It was quite the momentous move and everything was incredibly fast paced once it left 263 Wellesley.

IN OTHER NEWS;

Get Your Ass to Mars opens October 14th at Function 13!

See you there.

Illustration by Andy McNeil.

FOSTER CHILD PLAY

I printed this in July for a theatre company presenting as part of the Summerworks Festival; my first commission from the ad posters I printed! It's been a while since I last posted, I know; I don't do the best job cataloging and making sure I have something up. I'll be busy for the next few weeks moving the Press, helping with the Someone move and getting my show material ready for Get Your Ass to Mars in October.

Also; It's Nuit-Blanche next week! Are you super excited? I am. It's going to be a great way to celebrate the move and having a store front.

Tomorrow I get to go to my first client meeting; Manulife Financial wants us to produce a flash based video or ad piece. We're not sure what the project is, but it's the first time I get to be briefed directly by a client for a commercial job. My current role as a junior is really take notes and make sure to ask all the right questions later on when the project starts. I'm looking forward to it. Anyways; more tomorrow! I've been busy with the press, now it's all digital for the next little bit.

First Print, Part 9; MARK MAKING & Being five again

Continued from "First Print, Part 8; A Single Piece of Copper"

MARK MAKING and being five again

In the world of illustration, students are taught that the most complicated function of our work is condensed in the simple art of mark making. A pen, a pencil, a brush, a nail, a piece of cloth stitched on another fabric or even the impression of little paws as a pet accidentally spills ink and walks onto unfinished work is a mark that makes a statement about the illustration. The illustrator must make every mark serve a function. The goal is to get the viewer to fully understand your idea, this requires some mix of talent, genius and methodical hard work.

As I type this a little girl next door is screaming to “Dancing Queen” at the top of her lungs. She leaves an impression on every ear. Despite how

off key she is, her sheer enthusiasm enhances the message of joy and freedom Abba crafted in their lyrics. Her voice is a mark. She is now discovering how to use that mark. For a long time she might not care. Then in a year or two, her friends who would readily sing along with her might not be so interested in always singing. She’ll keep going. This is how artists are born.

When I was around the age to not be embarrassed at singing terribly off-key without the aid of some liquid courage, someone gave me a tool and let me make a mark on a surface. The first time I discovered I could produce an image in my mind on a piece of paper I knew that this same feeling is what I wanted to always hold deep inside. It was freedom on a white sheet of 8 x 11 brought to you by a pencil.

Everything since then has been an extension of that white sheet and pencil. Everything since then has essentially been an exercise in freedom, in what the narrow minded five year old inside of me called ‘art’.

Now words are included in this new first moment.

First Print, Part 8; A Single Piece of Copper

continued from "First Print, Part 7; SPACING; COPPERS, KERNING and JUSTIFICATION"

A Single Piece of Copper

Proofs approved. Finally did a run!

Here's how it went down;

On the second night of the run, we cleaned the type, and one of the antique, 130 year old pieces of wood type broke. It didn’t completely ruin the legibility. It was a variant of French Antique, the downstroke of the lowercase Y. We ran the final regardless of this event, and our final product came out with just as much moxy and character as we had hoped to achieve through the use of the wood type.

I cleaned off the cylinders from their ink, I grabbed the stack of finished product ready to present them to people who might be interested, I cleaned off the type and we began disassembling the words from the bed of the press.

In that moment I realized what I had done wrong; a single piece of copper, one point in width, the smallest possible variation short of using a piece of paper, lay beneath the wood type and the bed of the press, causing the already delicate antique to become even more vulnerable.

A single error in precision and care, of seemingly minute proportions.

This is the constant fear that drives the precise, pristine and meticulous nature of the type setter. Any fraction of an error can completely break apart all the labourious efforts.

It was a bad way to be taught precision, but it’s that hard way of learning that actually stays with you.

to be continued...

First Print, Part 7; SPACING; COPPERS, KERNING and JUSTIFICATION

continued from "First Print, Part 6; PROOFING"

Spacing and Copper

Copper is amazing. Copper conducts heat and electricity quite well, and has the additional advantage of being quite ductile and malleable, providing for a multitude of applications; electroplating, piping, roofing, coinage, dinnerware, instruments, ammunitions, copper wire and what typesetters call, copper.

It is used as the smallest measure of spacing possible between pieces of lead type, and is spaced to be a single point in width. A perfectly set word has even distribution of weight and spacing between it’s letter forms. Copper comes in handy.

Sometimes however, a single piece of copper is not the answer. What happens when the body of a glyph is too great, and the spacing between letters needs to be reduced further?

Kerning

Kerning was the most laborious process possible for the smallest return on my investment. It’s incredibly slow, but once you fail to kern properly once, I’m told it doesn’t happen again. The experience is slow enough to be painful.

When two characters sit side by side and need to be closer, kerning is the process of filing down the side of the body of one of the characters, such that the face is unharmed and can actually hang over the shoulder of the other body. Lead type is amazing for this because lead is so soft and weak relative other metals. Kerning is still slow and tedious. My first attempt at kerning was the space between N and V on "invitation".

Read that word again. I’ll make it bigger;

invitation

This word has very slim spacing between all it’s characters, to the exception of the N to the V, and the I to the O. We resolved the issue by tracking out the word to match the spacing on IO, and kerning the left shoulder off the V completely. This wasn’t the only line of type I had to modify after proofing.

Kerning, being the laborious process that it is, tends to make you want to solve spacing issues without kerning. Traditionally though, lower case type was never adjusted for spacing, as it was considered an afront against the typeface designer's implementation of the letters.

The entire achievement of all the spacing was to have the whole poster justified in full.

Justification

The poster was created to look like a solid rectangle. What this meant is that I had to space out and track out the letters to create a visual effect that read all the lines of type in all their different type faces into a rectangle. When the human eye reads the sides of letters, at small sizes we see a straight edge along one side regardless of wether or not this was taken into consideration. This block of type you're reading now for instance is considered left justified.

This block of type on the other hand is considered right justified, now referred to as "align right" on modern word processors and formatting tools, including this blog data entry format.

I justified left and right, on large type. The visual weight of different letter forms meant that I had to account for how each starting and finishing letter, and therefore every letter in between, filled out, lined up or overhung on the imaginary straight line of the rectangle.

to be continued...

First Print, Part 6; PROOFING

continued from "First Print, Part 5; TYPESETTING"

Proofing

The first time I ran a proof I learned the anatomy of the press. It constitutes a rather large, height adjustable bed, on which the type is set. Along the sides of this bed are rails on which sit the printing apparatus. The apparatus consists of two ink rollers that will make contact with the type it rolls over, each touching a smaller metal cylinder above the rollers and a single large, motorized cylinder beneath the apparatus. The smaller cylinders in turn make contact with a single mental cylinder located above them. Together, these four metal cylinders serve to feed the ink onto the press, and spread the ink evenly onto the rollers. The rollers have a crank to engage or disengage.

As part of the same tracked apparatus, located behind the ink rollers is the main cylinder, where paper is fed. This cylinder is covered with a large plastic sheet, beneath it is some blotting paper used to create a deep impression onto the final product, this preparation to the steel cylinder is called the make-ready. The cylinder comes equipped with grippers to hold a single sheet in place as it runs through the press. The cylinder also has tiny individually adjustable clips between the grippers to fine-tune the angle the paper is fed through the machine.

Behind this apparatus is the feed board, established at the same height as the grippers and the feed of the cylinder, the feed board is empty save for the stack of clean paper about to be printed on, and the feed guide. The feed guide is an adjustable block that runs along the length of the feed, affecting how the paper is positioned width wise to the bed of the press and subsequently how the paper relates to the type on the bed of the press. The feed guide is sectioned off into picas,

There’s multiple reasons to proof; to ensure that the design and type setting is flawless; to ensure that the paper if fed into the rollers correctly each time and adjust for any deviation, to ensure that the lines of type are perfectly straight on the page.

If it’s crooked, maybe I fed the paper wrong, maybe the paper is cut wrong, perhaps I have to adjust the clips at the gripper, maybe a line of spacing is causing the actual line of type to lock up wrong, maybe there’s a spacing error somewhere causing a disturbance. A lot can go wrong, printing teaches you to be patient, troubleshoot well, and become observant.

A printer friend of mine told me "the press is a machine, Abe. So anything that goes wrong means you have to ask yourself, through the mechanical process, what am I doing wrong now, or what did I do wrong before." He also taught me that taking a break is important, because this process can be very frustrating.

to be continued...

First Print, Part 5; TYPESETTING

continued from "First Print, Part 4; 123's"

Typesetting

Type is retrieved from its case and placed on a composing stick, fed in the reverse order of how the type will appear on the final output. The composing stick has a ruler imbedded into it, with a moveable latch on one end, allowing you to decide how wide a single line of type will be, and duplicating that same width for the subsequent lines of type.

While on the composing stick, spacing can be applied between each of the letters until the line has the desired look and feel. This spacing has to be deliberate. The final output will judge you by how you treated the type. Line after line is set on a galley, where the printer will check that the setting follows a structure, and that every line has the same width to allow for a lock-up when placed on the bed of the press.

Once all the type is on the bed of the press and locked-up, a proof is run. This proof allows the printer to view errors and make adjustments.

to be continued...