Letterpress Archive: Creative type setting – Before and After

Having a simple proofing press is not great at precision printing, particularly if you want to typeset 13pt Dorchester script or do a large print run. It is very good however at allowing you creative license to do things differently. Here are a few pieces I have done over the last couple of years with the help of a lot of furniture and a few magnets. I have put in some images of before and after. I started to document this after a friend asked me if I had actually photoshopped the exclamation marks in place. Here’s the proof!

I don’t have a picture of this before the ink went on but believe me it was not easy setting type in an arc.

This was a piece done with the Thomas.Matthews team creating phrases that began with T and M to launch our new website http://www.thomasmatthews.com. It used every single bit of furniture I had and because of the mix of type sizes it was impossible to straighten. It took 5 hours to lock in! Results were nice though and if you are on the TM mailing list you may be lucky to get a piece in the post…