“Mind your p’s from your q’s!”

To learn more about type and its history I decided to watch a film called Typeface. Typeface is centered around Hamilton Type Museum in Wisconsin and tells the history about American wood Type (letterpress).

I am familiar with letterpress but never actually knew what was involved with it or how it technically worked. This film goes through the whole process of letterpress from beginning to end; from cutting and carefully carving and measuring the blocks to actually storing them and filing each alphabet of blocks away carefully to how the letterpress actually works in the machines. It reminds me a lot of screenprinting. The machines have rollers which paint is squeezed onto; very simialr to a squeegee in screen print. Every piece done by a letterpress is unique and different and has “flaws”. One of the designers on the film states that you can try and get a scratched effect on Illustrator or Photoshop but it just isn’t as good as the actual flaws and scratches created by a letterpress.

I learned an interesting fact though; The saying “Mind your p’s and q’s” originates from letterpress! On the letter plates the P and Q are on opposite sides and very often people would get them confused with one another!

There was a university lecturer who featured on this film, he was a massive fan of letterpress and believed that all his students should see how old type was made to fully appreciate type now in modern times. He showed some of his work on this film and it was basically him using very vibrant neon colours and him just layering up type. The overall finish was very effective and it made me think that I could trial something similar maybe in a future assignment. Even just to create something letterpress to then import into Illustrator and Photoshop would still show different skills.