Fast/Good/Cheap

I first came across this quote as 'Coppola's Law' on my film degree. Reportedly, legendary director Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, etc.) had the following quotation displayed on his trailer door during filming:

"Fast, Good, Cheap - Choose Two"

The gist of the idea being (in case it isn't clear):
Something made quickly and on a low budget will be a bit crap.
If you want something cheap and good, you'll have to be patient.
If you want something made fast and high quality, it's gonna cost ya.

So, clearly very relevant to film production, but certainly to many other industries as well.

Alongside Grey Letter Press, I also have a 'day job' at the inimitable children's book publisher, Usborne. I work in the Production department, where this quotation is very relevant indeed!

So, I decided a letterpress print of this quote was exactly what the department needed as a little "farewell (for now)" gift from me as I went off on maternity leave.

A lot of our printing gear is still in semi-storage as a result of all the renovation work we've recently had done on the house, so I had limited typefaces to choose from. We found this rather dusty wooden type in the loft:

Interestingly, we purchased this from Italy, so it comes with some lovely accented letters and a rather unfortunate letter distribution for the English language:

Good old Gill Sans Bold was luckily also to hand:

For the ink, I mixed up a sort of inky blue, and a then a sobering black for the reality check part of the quote:

Ooh, glossy:

I'm pleased to say the print was very well received. Here it is taking pride of place amongst the snacks, until someone gets around to putting it up on the wall:

A Trip to Ditchling

We recently paid a visit to the beautiful village of Ditchling in Sussex. Ditchling has a rather interesting history and for such a small place has hosted more than its fair share of artistic residents. Indeed, it was something of a creative hub in the earlier 20th century and now boasts its own museum, showcasing the work of local artists and craftspeople.

This museum of course was the main reason for our visit to Ditchling, and of chief interest for us were exhibitions on typographic legends Edward Johnston and Eric Gill.  

I assume most people reading this know who Eric Gill is (Gill Sans, guys) and his friend and mentor Edward Johnston was the genius responsible for the London Underground font (Johnston Sans). Johnston has featured on this blog before when we visited the London Transport Museum Depot in Acton. Ooh we do love a good museum.

It was absolutely fascinating to see their work on display, especially that which shows the development of their respective typefaces.

Johnston's original profession was as a calligrapher or hand-letterer, so it was lovely to see some of his work in this area as well.

You'd think this would all be exciting and interesting enough, but Ditchling's delights were only just getting started. Most of the rest of the museum was dedicated to displays on (our very favourite thing)... letterpress! Woohoo!

Their print shop set-up had me green with envy and did a great job of laying out the basic process for those unfamiliar with proper printing.

Just look at the patina on the wooden type... and the massive old type case... and the beasty Stanhope press...! Sigh.

In an absolutely inspired (and slightly bonkers) move, the museum had also been involved with an (ad)venture called the Big Steam Print. This involves printing giant lino-cut designs with a dirty great steam roller. Why not??

Image from artfund.org 

At the museum, they had a huge communal linocutting thing going on, where you could contribute your own little design to a massive linocut sheet that will be printed as part of Big Steam Print at the Ditchling Fair on 18th June (hey, that's not yet! You could totally go and see it!).

Whilst I was running around taking photos of everything in the print shop, Sam Boy and our mate Kathy were doing just that.

All in all, it was an excellent day out. We drove down, but my friend Kathy came on the train, so can confirm it's definitely do-able as a day trip from London. The train station is in Hassocks though, which is a bit of a trek on foot from Ditchling itself, you may want to consider a taxi depending on how much you like walking!

If you fancy getting in a spot of exercise whilst you're there, a stroll up on Ditchling Beacon proved bracing. For lunch, there are plenty of options, we had some lovely sandwiches in the garden at the The Green Welly Cafe, a stone's throw from the museum. The museum shop itself also had some incredibly tempting cakes on display.

Cummings & Eyre

That sounds like it should the name of a publisher or something...

In fact it refers to two lovely quotes we've been printing. These were bespoke pieces for a wedding.

The lovely bride, Cath, had the very sweet idea of gifting her Readers with letterpress prints of the pieces that they read in her ceremony. Nice, huh?

The pieces were relatively long, so we had to use photopolymer plates, and the fonts had to be pretty small to fit into the required frame area (10 x 15cm), but obviously fine detail work like this is where letterpress excels.

Cath selected the font Dakota Handwriting to give a friendly, relaxed vibe to the prints. I think it works really well.

The date and location of the wedding were blind debossed at the bottom right of each print.

For colours, we printed in copper and an inky blue.

I'm pleased to say the final prints were very well received.

Cath was even kind enough to send us photos of the framed copies.

Do drop us a line if you have any of your own bespoke letterpress projects in mind!

Inky Goodness

Came across this marvellous video from The Printing Ink Company about how ink is made. Fascinating stuff.

Does anyone else get an overwhelming urge to just jump into one of those vats?? I think I might have a bit of a problem.

Cat Plate - Balscote Press Visit: Part Two

As promised, here's another post on what we got up to on our trip to Balscote Press last month.

This is about the rather miraculous process of letterpress printing photographs. No really.

Being the massive losers we are, we decided the only photos that would do for this experiment were of our beloved cats, Basil and Saffy (they have their own blog here). First step is to convert the image to half-tone:

This basically means it's made up of a series of dots. The greater the spacing between the dots, the lighter the area will appear when printed, and in turn, the denser the dots, the darker the area will appear. Genius.

This is then printed to film:

Then we realise it needs to be a negative and print it to film again:

To create something from which we can print, we use this magical little device to create a photopolymer plate from the film. This is a UV process. Don't ask me how it works...

The basics are that the printing areas will harden, and then the non-printing areas of the plate need to be washed away using this hi-tech method:

And you're left with this (ta da!):

This was all done in rather a rush as we were running out of time, so in future we definitely need to go at it slower. We weren't particularly confident we'd get something printable this time, but we were pleasantly surprised. We got our black ink ready:

Here's the inked plate on the Arab:

And the resultant print:

Just ignore the rather unfortunate shape across Basil's face, it's most likely due to over-vigorous scrubbing of the plate during the cleaning stage. Ahem.

Here's another photopolymer plate (not made in a rush) where you can see some very handsome fishes:

So there you have it! We're incredibly excited about the potential of this technique, the possibilities are endless really. We're very much looking forward to experimenting once we have the time, and when our Arab is ready to play of course.