From handmade hair accessories to artisanal pickles, there’s a metaphorical back-to-the-land movement for every profession. For graphic design, it’s letterpress, a labor-intensive printing process that creative types are taking up as an antidote to days spent staring at their iMacs. Produced on antique presses and characterized by heavily impressed lettering on thick paper, letterpress cards and stationery — if you’ve received a wedding invitation from an even vaguely arty couple in the past few years, chances are it was letterpress printed — are the graphic design equivalent of slow food. For designers who want to unplug, literally, letterpress is a chance to spend time refining their craft using a method that was considered old-fashioned long before the days of Photoshop. “People miss the hands-on experience of printing,” says Daniel Gardiner Morris, a fourth-generation letterpress printer and the founder of the Arm, the Williamsburg studio where many local printers have learned the basics of handling Industrial Revolution-era machinery. “Even if you don’t know anything about the process, when you pick up something that was printed on a letterpress, you know there’s something different about it. It was touched by human hands.”for the full article, read on here
