Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/09/10/stunning-letterpress-mockups.html
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So by mockup - I am not seeing a photo of a real embossed object, but a digital image made to look like one?
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Speaking as a bona-fide internet expert at totally being able to tell by the pixels, the folds and grain of each bit of “paper” are identical in the same places, so looks like it’s just photoshop (for now?). Hopefully he gets them printed for real, cos the mockups are still amazing in their own right.
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I agree. …
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INB4 “actually, letterpress prints aren’t supposed to be impressed with such violent force that the image is physically crushed into the paper, as this harms detail and shortens the life of the block”
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Traditionally that was a no-no, but in the modern age people often do it on purpose because it’s one of the qualities that sets letterpress apart from newer (and less labor-intensive) forms of printing.
For a really fancy look it’s hard to beat foil stamping though.
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Oh, I know they do. And it doesn’t really matter, in the sense that letterpress is now only used for short runs, with litho plates, which I think are harder than type metal. I think what distressed my printing teacher was that people just assume this is what letterpress is, and expect the effect even on blocks of text, despite how dumb that looks. Plus, we actually did use movable type, and you really have to pay attention to platen pressure to make that work.
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Whatever his career choices, he’d make it big designing tattoos =o.
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Frontispieces to a library of numinous volumes?
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Yeah, I noticed that. The bite of the letterpress should smooth the inked areas somewhat (depending on the machine’s settings, the type of paper , the thickness of the stock).
And he does get some things printed like that, such as a series of business cards for himself. (I interned one summer at a shop that does premium screen print and letterpress work—saw a few of the cards in our samples drawer).
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Two words: Heidelberger Tiegel.
I love the smell of printers’ ink in the morning. It is the smell of literacy.
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Not to mention the higly imaginative and profuse swearing after dropping and spilling a case of lead types.
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Aaaaaagh!
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