03 February 2012

More letterpress

The paragraph of text is now all set - with a small problem, running out of As and Es - for the moment I've used italic -
That proof will help me find them to replace them, as they are now upside down -
I'm having difficulty keeping the lines in place ... in future I shall be paying more attention to getting it right in the composing stick, before transferring it to the galley. With one print, the paper had too much packing and the force needed to print actually dislodged the (powerful!) magnets holding the type in place -
Great effect - barcodes having a party?? - but not something you actually want to repeat - putting the lines of type back together took a surpisingly long time.

Why show the "I"? That just kinda happened with the first few lines of type - I was finding the punctuation and spaces weren't interesting enough, and knew that more Is would appear in the rest of the text. In speech, "I" is much used and little heard, so foregrounding it seemed a reasonable thing to do. However, next time I'll turn the Is upside down and see how that works ... it will change the look/importance of the row of dots through the black ... after all, rows of dots ... are so appealing ... and so useful ...

Eventually, and gradually, the black squares will be replaced by the text - simply a matter of turning each letter over.

I was hoping the punctuation would be more visible ...  this was the most punctuation-rich bit of text I had available at the moment it was needed, but the next phase of this project could be to use another bit of text with commas, quote marks, etc all over the place. And ampersands. Such variety in ampersands.....

2 comments:

Jane Housham said...

Very interesting insights into the process. Thank you!

Ms Scarlet said...

On the tiny screen on my phone this looks like genetic code.... which is very clever... kind of like genetic code for type fonts.
Sx