The final day of the week-long letterpress intensive with the Mary was filled with hands-on experience on the letterpress (and made me wish the 4 day intensive was a little bit longer).

Our final project was intense – we needed to design a 3-piece stationary set, using previously made photopolymer plates and run prints of them in one day! I learned that photopolymer plates are primarily used for letterpress and allow you to take digital designs into the analog world. It’s basically a great way to combine the flexibility of digital design with the textured, timeless, classic letterpress look and feel. The plates look a little bit like rubber stamps:

After deciding which of the plates to use (which was no small feat given how many cool plates the SFCB have), I picked a lovely bumblebee that had 2 different sizes so I could do similar layouts on the bigger and smaller pieces of the set. Then I got to work laying out my type (which was delightfully simple since it was just my name and address!).

It took a bit of time to mock up the set, especially for the dual color printing on the envelope, but I’m pretty happy with how it turned out!