Letterpress printing creates pieces that have a fascinating tactile relief quality setting it apart from offset or digital print processes. Over time it has evolved into an art form. Letterpress originated in the 1400s and was the primary form of printing and communication for more than 500 years. Huge thanks to Ashley Town, who’s the owner of Bay View Printing Company ( Facebook / Instagram) and who taught me all this stuff in a two-part class.Īnd of course, if you want to learn more about SVG in general, I got a book for you.I have an interesting project in the works using the letterpress printing process that I am excited to share. Then once you get the rollers going, it turns into a gradient: As long as I’m morphing the shape, might as well morph the color, right? Turns out that’s called “Rainbow Rolling”, where you ink up half the roller one color and half another color (or really, any number/combination of colors). I had the idea to fade the color from left to right, like a gradient. With the plate in hand, and mounted on the base, I was ready to print. Just wait a few days for the plate to arrive. It’s best if you force black-only, so when you upload to Boxcar it doesn’t try to make multiple plates for this single color thing.Ī couple of clicks later and you’re good to go. Default black in Illustrator is a deep mixture of CMYK, not just 0 0 0 100%. You drag and drop upload them right to the website. Their website accepts files in PDF, EPS, AI formats, which is fine, as I was already in Illustrator. Now I have just what I need in Illustrator: To Boxcar Greensock MorphSVG can handle the knockouts in the CodePen logo fine, but I did those manually and separately as I wanted them to kinda visually collapse. Paste into a new file and save it as an `.svg` file.Stop the animation at the desired point.Now all I have to do is extract the data: See the Pen Heart To CP Badge by Chris Coyier ( on CodePen. The timeline was important because I wanted to stop the animation at certain points and extract the vector path data. In this case I used Greensock for another reason: you can add a timeline pretty easily. It’s cross browser (and old browser) friendly.It can handle just about any shape you throw at it, regardless of number of “points”.There are other JavaScript libraries that do morphing, SMIL can do it, and even CSS is starting to be able to do it now. I set up a little shape morphing action using the Greensock add-on for it. Here’s a sketch that I drew afterwards to make it seem like this was a cohesive chronilogical thought process. But obviously there is no animation on paper, so I’d lay out a series of images showing the transition happen in steps. My idea was to morph the CodePen logo into a heart. It’s just such a fun thing that SVG can do. I’m still pretty obsessed with the whole idea of shape morphing. You stick the plates onto the base and use that in the press: A polymer plate adhered to a Boxcar Base The Idea In order to print on a letterpress press, the design needs to be “type high” (0.918 inches) and the polymer plates they make are (efficiently) thin. They make this product called the Boxcar Base which is essentially a big ass chunk of metal with a grid on it. The company that makes the polymer plates is called Boxcar Press out of Syracuse, New York. MembershipsĮven though I’d say most work done by members at Bay View Printing Company is done using the wood and metal type in the shop, the whole point of this polymer plate business is that it allows you to print anything you can design. is home to 300+ different lead and wood typefaces, a community gallery space, a membership program and a range of educational and social workshops. But I was interested in learning how to letterpress with designs I made in a modern way. You get them made! They can be anything! Sometimes it’s fun to stick with the old school setting of type. The shop is absolutely full with wood and metal type, and all the accoutrements around that, but polymer plates are not that. I took a class at Bay View Printing Company, the local community letterpress shop I belong to, all about printing with polymer plates.
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