Syllabus Day

Today was the first day of my summer letterpress class, taught at MICA by Kyle Van Horn. After a brief discussion of the course objectives and an overview of the equipment, we got right to work. Kyle had set up three of the presses with type and a plate the night before so that we could print our own syllabus covers. We mixed three colors, and each of us ran our cover through the three presses. After lunch we explored the many cases of type in the room and chose a case to work from. We each set a few lines of type, 25 picas wide, using quads and spacers. I chose 24pt Baskerville and wrote out two lines from a knitting pattern I've been working with because I couldn't think of anything else to write that didn't sound cliche. Kyle helped us to place all of our type on the press, using furnitures to hold the type in place. We used the leftover silver-black ink from the cover and each of us ran off our own copy of the class composition. Next we'll be working on an edition of mail-ready postcards.