I dig the old-school-lovin’ idea of LetterMpress “a virtual letterpress environment—released first on the iPad—that will allow anyone to create authentic-looking letterpress designs and prints.” According to the project site,
The design process is the same as the letterpress process—you place and arrange type and cuts on a press bed, lock the type, ink the type, and print. You will be able to create unlimited designs, with multiple colors, using authentic vintage wood type and art cuts. And you can print your design directly from LetterMpress or save it as an image for import it into other applications.
[Via]
“The famous flutings on the famous columns—what are they there for? To hide the joints in wood—when columns were made of wood, only these aren’t, they’re marble. The triglyphs, what are they? Wood. Wooden beams, the way they had to be laid when people began to build wooden shacks. Your Greeks took marble and they made copies of their wooden structures out of it, because others had done it that way. Then your masters of the Renaissance came along and made copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Now here we are, making copies in steel and concrete of copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Why?”
It’s Howard Roark standing alone against the yuppies!
Computers emulating tube amps, computers emulating letterpress…
This must be the weepy sad part of real life when Howard is off working in the quarry busting rocks.
Read it, signed up on kickstarter.com, pledged. I don’t believe I’ll ever use this app productively, but it’s exactly the insanely great (and silly, and pretty) sh*t I love and want to have on my iPad.
As to Mark’s comment… ah, well… I had the good fortune to study at an art school that still had actual, physical printing presses (late nineties)… woodblock, letterpress, you name it. Great fun, but also a pain in the *ss to operate. If you really want to you’ll still find shops that keep this tradition alive. A good woodblock-printing is something to behold, indeed. But it’s also just a “look”, a style, a fancy. Up to you how deep into the letterpress rabbit hole you really want to go.
As for me, I’ve had enough ink on my fingers (for the time being at least). Go “LetterMPress” — and maybe it’ll inspire me to play around with the actual, physical wood blocks again.
I love letterforms as much as the next guy, probably more. Stuff like this is so much fun and so much easier to do in Illustrator/Photoshop that if those two programs hadn’t become giant behemoths overloaded with nine billion features trying to be everything to everyone (thanks Adobe MBAs) and consequently scaring off casual users from just having fun with the programs, “silly” programs like letterpress simulations would not be necessary or even occur to people because they could do this and so much more with design software like Illustrator/Photoshop.
[What *specifically* would you do differently in PS/AI? –J.]
John–
[laughs] Well, in “Jurassic Park” when Hammond wanted Grant and Ellie to come down to make suggestions about his park for the weekend he offered them his standard (weekend) consulting rate of $12,000 a day for each of them (plus he provided transportation and meals).
We give you comments ars gratia artis. When you ask for specifics are you offering weekend rates, ars gratia pecunia, or do we have to cut that down to $6,000 a day during the week?