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Letterpress is a fundamental part of the history of the London College of Communication (formerly known as the London College of Printing), which still holds one of the UK’s largest collections of lead and wood type. The letterpress workshop, now, is still a key resource for designers and students from a broad range of courses and I strongly believe that it has to be preserved as an essential element of our learning process as designers since it enhances our understanding of the primary principles of typography and their relevance in design practice. 

How can the workshop be better integrated into the design curriculum at LCC? How can the university promote its usage in a more effective way?

My investigation involved different fields such as pedagogy, design education, history of print, service design and typography. 

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Letterpress is a fundamental part of the history of the London College of Communication (formerly known as the London College of Printing), which still holds one of the UK’s largest collections of lead and wood type. The letterpress workshop, now, is still a key resource for designers and students from a broad range of courses and I strongly believe that it has to be preserved as an essential element of our learning process as designers since it enhances our understanding of the primary principles of typography and their relevance in design practice. 

How can the workshop be better integrated into the design curriculum at LCC? How can the university promote its usage in a more effective way?

My investigation involved different fields such as pedagogy, design education, history of print, service design and typography. 

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Letterpress is a fundamental part of the history of the London College of Communication (formerly known as the London College of Printing), which still holds one of the UK’s largest collections of lead and wood type. The letterpress workshop, now, is still a key resource for designers and students from a broad range of courses and I strongly believe that it has to be preserved as an essential element of our learning process as designers since it enhances our understanding of the primary principles of typography and their relevance in design practice. 

How can the workshop be better integrated into the design curriculum at LCC? How can the university promote its usage in a more effective way?

My investigation involved different fields such as pedagogy, design education, history of print, service design and typography. 

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(Report and Visual Research Summary)

Letterpress is a fundamental part of the history of the London College of Communication (formerly known as the London College of Printing), which still holds one of the UK’s largest collections of lead and wood type. The letterpress workshop, now, is still a key resource for designers and students from a broad range of courses and I strongly believe that it has to be preserved as an essential element of our learning process as designers since it enhances our understanding of the primary principles of typography and their relevance in design practice. 

How can the workshop be better integrated into the design curriculum at LCC? How can the university promote its usage in a more effective way?

My investigation involved different fields such as pedagogy, design education, history of print, service design and typography. 

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The term type colour refers to the overall balance of type to white space, regardless of the shade of the text. It is related to the inherent blackness of a letter, which is affected by factors such as the width of strokes relative to its width and the orientation of strokes when present. This blackness may vary across different letter-shapes of the same weight of a typeface as much as across different typefaces. For this reason it defines the letter itself. This principle is very well abridge in this famous quote by Adrian Frutiger: “Type is either black or white”. At the same time the blackness of a letter influences the flow of a page since it has a huge impact on the visual tone of a mass of text on a page. The blacker the letters of a typeface are, the stronger is its type colour and its predominance in comparison with other typefaces. Taking a modular typeface (in this case the one designed for the Stedelijk Museum by Wim Crouwel in 1968) we can say that the blackness of a letter depends on how many black units are used to construct it. Following this principle I turned the letters and the typeface into a mass of black blocks for which I decided to print two specimen posters in the letterpress workshop. The connection with ink, metal lead and letterpress was ineluctable. Since the number of square dingbats was not sufficient I had to set and print one line of text at the time and redesign the grid I was using twice in order to adapt it to the needs of both posters. Due to time limitations, I could not print this booklet in letterpress too as planned. The very same Wim Crouwel once said: “You cannot do better design with a computer, but you can speed up your work enormously”.

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According to W. Kunz each letter has a distinctive structure defined by the intersection of its stroke and not by its attributes (bold, roman, italic, sans serif, serif, etc). Our Latin alphabet is code based on human conventions in which the relationship between letters is fundamental, as the intrinsic visual quality of each character depends on the context where it is placed.

Taking in consideration Kunt’s analysis I designed a new series of symbols (upper-case only), which differs from Kunt’s ones for the structure of the letters C, I, G, O, Q, R, S and Y. Afterwards I set different variables to alter the relationship between the component of each sign and generate new alphabets. In the end I analysed different ways to visually represent the transition from the first alphabet to the last one. 

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