Letterpress

Notes: Heidleberg press can print 2,500-3000 sheets an hour

For Printing: letterheads, business cards, wedding stationary, embossing, labels, handbills, broadsides

Useful websites: https://letterpresscommons.com/ http://thebeautyofletterpress.com/

History of Puca Press: http://thesalvagepress.com/index.php/journal/puca-press/

Designing for Letterpress:

Layouts: • Don’t create your layouts at the trim size of your piece. Instead, if you’re using Illustrator or InDesign or a similar application, include crop marks or black 1 pt. lines to outline the size of the piece. • In Illustrator, if you want crop marks on your plate, create crop marks, not crop areas! If you want crop marks, go to Filter > Create > Crop marks in Illustrator. Crop areas can’t be edited with the select tool; crops marks can be edited. If you have a crop area instead of crop marks, first go under Edit > Crop Area > Release. This will take off the crop area. Then go to Filter > Create > Crop marks.

Width of lines: • Width of lines should be .25 (or .003”) or thicker. No hairlines. • If your plate has a 94 or 95 in the product name, we recommend at least a 0.25 point thickness (or larger). If your plate has 145 or 152 in the product name, we recommend at least a .35 point/.007″ thickness (or larger). Watch out for with swirly curves that thin or have breaks or with fine cross bars. • For dots, we recommend at least a 1 pt diameter if your plate has a 94 or 95 in the product name. Boost that to 1.25pt diameter for plates that are 145 or 152 in thickness. Each of those dots has to stand on it’s own on the plate and that thickness will provide the support at the base of the plate to hold the dot. Watch out for typefaces where the dots on the “I’s or periods are small, as seen in many sans fonts that are decorative, free form or look hand drawn. • Undersize lines and dots may appear on your plate as wavy or be missing completely so checking this is very important for a good file and usable plate

Type/: • No type smaller than 6 points. Letterpress excels at printing type and handles most fonts very well. Still, don’t use type smaller than 6 point. • Use font size of 12 point or larger for reverse type: if reverses are too small, they can clog up on a letterpress.

Outline fonts: • Outline your fonts when submitting files. • In Illustrator, you do this by selecting TYPE>Create Outlines. This will automatically convert your text into vector shapes. Your type will temporarily look bolder and be highlighted in blue. Click on any white area of your file and it will look normal again.

Colour/inks: • letterpress printing traditionally uses 1 or 2 spot colors. • print dark ink on light paper • Large solids (areas larger than ½” thick) and paper show through: letterpress printed solids look somewhat different from offset printed solids. With letterpress, the paper tends to show through large solids, creating a slightly textured look that’s almost suede-like • If printing in one color, use 100% Black (K) only in CMYK mode. If sending two color files, use Pantone uncoated solid spot colors only—don’t use process, RGB, CMYK, LAB, or Indexed colors. Refer to our file prep tips, below, for step by step instructions. • In Illustrator, go to File > Color mode > CMYK. Then select all the black artwork in the document. Make sure the fills and strokes are 100% CMYK black in the color palette. If using Illustrator, outline your fonts. In Illustrator, you do this by Type > Create Outlines!)

Spot Colours • Some printers prefer using or Pantone swatch colors. • It can be applied to objects via the Pantone Swatch Color or Spot color library found in Adobe Illustrator. • IF using more than 1 colour, colours must be separated into different layers and named according to the Pantone reference for example ‘Pantone 513U’, if using a blind embossed i.e. no colour please call this layer ‘Blind’. Dies and scores: • Die cuts should be clearly indicated by a 1 point 100% magenta line; scores should be indicated by a 1 point 100% cyan line. Bleeds: • If you’re using a bleed, extend your artwork at least 1/16” past the trim.

Scanning and Image • scan at least at 600 DPI, though 1200 DPI is even better. Open scan in Photoshop to convert your file to the Image mode of Bitmap via the 50% threshold method and an output of 600 – 1200. If you lose too much detail, you can make adjustments to your image by using Image Adjustments > Levels or Image Adjustments > Brightnesss / Contrast. • If you’d like a , you can use a 300 DPI scan. With , keep the image in the color mode in Photoshop, and let us know the LPI / line screen. • Your scanner will likely save your image as a grayscale.jpg. Many scanners will only allow you to scan up to 300 dpi. If you can scan higher, choose 600 dpi. You have some options now. If looking for the crispest and cleanest impression, you will need to convert the file to black and white only (no grey pixels). You have two methods depending on what computer software you have available. If you only have Photoshop, you will need to convert your file to one that is in image mode of bitmap. If your image dpi is currently 300 dpi, you can choose Image > Image Size and change your dpi to 600 or higher without changing the inches. Your file will temporarily be quite large but you will then save as a .TIF with LZW compression and this will resize it to something smaller and more manageable. A higher DPI can help with preserving your details and smoother pixelation while bitmapping. For exact steps to Image Mode of Bitmap, see our File Prep Tips. If you have both Photoshop and Illustrator, you can convert your image to image mode of bitmap as directed above, then place your TIF into Adobe Illustrator, and convert the file to a vector art file via the Live Trace option. This does not always work with all files to give satisfactory results, so with practice, you will learn to recognize which files will give you a vector result you like. After converting to vector, save the file as a PDF or EPS for upload.

Scale: • files at 100% scale. • When exporting a PDF from Adobe Illustrator or Adobe InDesign, please double check to make sure it is the correct size by either re-opening it in Illustrator or placing it in InDesign to check the actual dimensions of your file. In InDesign you can use the Rectangle Frame tool to draw a box around your images/text to measure. • In Photoshop, use the Image Size tool to check your size. Saving your file as a .TIF locks your image size.

File Prep: • If file has linked images in Illustrator, embed them Before sending your Illustrator files to us, embed all linked images (an option in the Links palette). If linked images aren’t embedded, we can’t output your plates! In a related note, if you’re sending a native Quark or InDesign file, make sure to include the image files when you upload your layout.

Saving Files: • No jpegs! • Check with company. Some prefer Tiff, others EPS, PDF. • Save as a TIFF with LZW compression. This will make file size more manageable when placing into another program like Illustrator • Press quality PDF files, Adobe Illustrator files and EPS files. Make sure fonts are embedded or outlined. (If sending an eps file please also send a pdf for reference.) • Not all PDFs are the same: if possible, make your PDF’s “Press Ready” in Illustrator, InDesign, or Quark (this is a drop down option in your Save as PDF window). • If using Adobe Photoshop: If possible, use Photoshop only for imagery. Save your image as a TIFF and place it into another program (Illustrator or InDesign) where you add your type. For images, refer to our File Prep tip below on changing to image mode of bitmap. If you only have Photoshop, start with a document that is 600-1200 dpi (maximum). This will be a large file however to start, but when you save your file later as a TIFF, use LZW compression to make this file smaller and more easily managed.

Tips for Designing for Letterpress:

1) See everything in black and white. (No grey.)Yes, you will be able to print it in color, but the artwork that you will be making into a printing plate must be in black and white. You can create the artwork the old fashioned way with black paint or ink on a piece of white paper or you can create it all in Photoshop or Illustrator. Either way, you can’t have any blended gradations. If you want to include shading, think of how artists would create light and dark through cross hatched lines in old (like on a dollar bill) or with dots (like the halftone dots in old photos).

2) Think in layers. Letterpress (and other traditional printing techniques) aren’t capable of printing all the colors at once. They’re not digital printers. Each color you want to use will have to have its own black and white layer which will be turned into a printing plate. Then, the paper will need to be run through the press separately for each color (layer) you are printing. This is why crop marks are really helpful. It’s also why going from one color to two colors in letterpress almost doubles the amount of printing labor, which means that printing many colors/layers gets expensive FAST.Letterpress designers have to be clever at using very few colors to great effect. For example, you could overlap two transparent colors to create a third color.

3) Dark on light. Letterpress ink, as a rule, is pretty transparent. If you try to print a pale color on top of a darker color, it probably won’t show up. (One exception: silver ink on dark paper can work pretty well.)

4) Size is limited. Most letterpress printers these days use presses (the kind that open and shut like a clamshell) and can’t print an area larger than about 5 x 7″. Some have standard flatbed presses (in which the paper rolls across the printing plate) and can print up to about 12×18″. That’s usually about as large as you can go. There are a handful of print shops in the country who still have some larger scale letterpresses and can go quite a bit larger, but they are few and far between.

5) Not too thick.If you want to print large solid areas of color, letterpress is probably not the way to go. (I’d go with screen printing.) It’s extremely difficult to get even pressure and ink over a large surface with letterpress, and if you try, the end result will most often look splotchy. Sometimes this can be the “vintage” and “handmade” look you are going for, though. Just be aware.

6) Not too thin. On the other hand, if the lines or type you are using are too thin, the line can easily get lost and disappear in the platemaking process. Even if it doesn’t, it is extremely difficult to print extra thin lines with the pressure and impression you are probably looking for while maintaining a neat, precise line. Because there is so little surface to cling to, the ink often gets pushed out, creating a messy halo effect.

7) Be consistent. For crisp and even printing, it’s best if all the lines & shapes on a particular color/layer/plate are approximately the same size/thickness. If, for example, you were to have some big blocky type next to some really thin type, either the fat type will look uneven and under inked, or the small type will look messy and over inked. You can try and split the difference, just know that neither extreme will look great this way.

8) Try combining methods. In spite of all its beauty, letterpress does have its limitations. Why not combine it with another method to get the best of both worlds? For example, metallic inks don’t look very shiny in letterpress. (They just have very faint shimmer.) For maximum impact, we’ve been combining letterpress with foil stamping here at Sycamore Street Press and are loving the effect! (In foil stamping, an actual piece of metal foil is stamped right into the paper in the shape of your design.)

9)If you want to print a light ink on a darker paper, plan to use silver or gold ink. These are really the only letterpress inks that are opaque enough to give ample contrast for legibility. If you are going for a subtle effect with a pattern or something that does not need to be legible, then you might opt for white ink. If you are looking for a very bright, legible white ink on a dark sheet, consider white foil stamping or rather than letterpress.

10) As with , metallic inks do not look very “metallic” on uncoated white papers. The paper tends to absorb the metallic nature of the ink, and lessens the light reflection of the metallic, making it appear like more of a flat color. If you are going for a high-metallic effect, Gilah recommends either a foil stamp or offset printing on a coated sheet.

11) For a subtle effect on patterns, decorative elements or large type, a blind deboss (letterpress printing without any ink) can add an amazing tactile quality to your project. Depending on what the project is, it can be printed without any ink, or use a tint base (clear ink) to further enhance the image. We do not recommend using a blind deboss for any small type or things that would need to be legible. A toothy, cotton stock yields the best results for this process, smooth stocks do not work as well.