St. Bride Library Event

Letterpress: Forward thinking

Friday 19 November 2010

One-day letterpress conference

Join us for a day packed with talks, demonstrations and discussion celebrating new ideas and practice in handset typography.

Letterpress, we were once told, was a thing of the past. Yet, now letterpress is very clearly the focus of renewed enthusiasm. Interest in setting types by hand continues to grow, with an increase in letterpress activity further fuelled by an ongoing concern with visual authenticity. For many, letterpress offers something beyond straightforward graphic reproduction. It offers the means to create hand-made objects of worth.

But to what extent are we still looking backwards rather than forwards when we consider our expectations of letterpress? Much contemporary practice certainly seems to have settled into something of a retro-groove. In the midst of all the nostalgia though, there are people who offer alternatives to this potential dead-end, reinventing their practices and working in more exploratory ways.

Our speakers will share with us their excitement at the possibilities before us. Together we can discover what is genuinely new in letterpress thinking across areas such as education, design, printing practice and mechanical futures. Having begun to find out what innovation in letterpress might mean, the challenge will be for each of us to then consider how we might creatively respond.

For more details click here