Design Work Life: Cataloging Inspiration Daily

Image of 3B Letterpress — EDGY Collection by The Type Junkie. $12 for a 5“x7” print on etsy.

As I’ve men­tioned before, I love school. There are so many classes in the area that I’d love to take advan­tage of and lately I have been dying to do some­thing with my hands. So I’m mak­ing it a point to sign up for at least one class this fall and/or win­ter (I may be too late for quite a few of these. To start off the decision-making process, I decided to put together a list of the ones I’m inter­ested in. And of course there are a ton, so I’ll be split­ting them up into cat­e­gories, start­ing with let­ter­press. As I’ve men­tioned before, I have some expe­ri­ence work­ing with pho­topoly­mer plates, but I’ve never printed with wood or metal type, so I’m inter­ested in learn­ing more about all aspects of the artform.

There is actu­ally an abun­dance of let­ter­press classes here in the city, so many of these teach­ing facil­i­ties offer more than one class each sea­son. Check out the links below for more information.

1. The Arm NYC: Offerings include day-long work­shops on the Vandercook Press, as well as “Printing Poetry: a Letterpress Workshop. Classes are held often and also pro­vide you with the skills and knowl­edge to take advan­tage of the presses and other equip­ment in their pub­lic access let­ter­press stu­dio. In addi­tion to classes, you can also rent press time and sign up for one-on-one lessons.
2. Studio on the Square: Classes here focus on let­ter­press and book­bind­ing, but just in terms of let­ter­press, they offer a pretty wide vari­ety of day-long and multi-week classes. Current classes range from a basic intro­duc­tory class to the more spe­cific busi­ness card work­shop. Make sure to sign up for their mail­ing list for more up-to-date information.
3. The Center for Book Arts: The CBA offers classes in let­ter­press — both hand type­set­ting and con­tem­po­rary print­ing — as well as var­i­ous book­bind­ing top­ics on week­days, week­nights and week­ends through­out the fall.
4. School of the Visual Arts: SVA offers an intro­duc­tory let­ter­press class as well as a project-based class (can­celed for this fall unfor­tu­nately). These seem to be a bit pricer than the oth­ers, but they run through a whole semester.
5. Cooper Union: Only one class is offered through their con­tin­u­ing edu­ca­tion pro­gram, Letterpress Printing on the Vandercook Press, but the cur­ricu­lum sounds great. Time to work on self-initiated projects, explor­ing fin­ishes like die cuts and foil stamp­ing, sound espe­cially enticing.
6. Make Workshop: It doesn’t look like Make is offer­ing any let­ter­press classes right now, but in the past they have had sev­eral project-based classes. Given by Sesame Letterpress, last spring’s courses included “mono­grammed note­cards” and “make your own coast­ers”. I’d def­i­nitely sign up for the mail­ing list to keep up with their schedule.

By all means, let me know if I’ve missed any oth­ers that you know of.