This quote by Jean-Luc Godard has always intrigued me. The discussion about style versus content is as old as the profession of graphic design, and he puts it into perspective.
This is a longish quote which uses quite a few characters (eight lower case /e and five /o – all we have in that size), so we couldn’t resort to our larger Akzidenz Grotesk, but had to go to 12 cicero instead. In the end that turned out to be a wise move as the copy wouldn’t have fitted the page at the 16 cicero (i. e. pica or lines in English) size that we normally use for short quotes.
As always, the poster is printed on MetaPaper Rough Warm White 160 gsm in Black and Pantone Warm Red ink. From original wood and metal type on our Korrex Frankfurt, 50×70 cm.
The 50 posters each are numbered and signed by Erik Spiekermann. We ship everywhere and you can pay by PayPal or credit card. This poster as well as a few others is on sale now for half price. Please go to p98a to order.
The human impuls to make something for its own sake, to do it as well as you can.
The craftsman’s realm is far broader than skilled manual labor; the computer programmer, the doctor, the parent, and the citizen need to learn the values of good craftsmanship today. The result of physical work, made from things which have passed through many hands, is imbued with its process. It carries a message beyond the mere practical application.
In English it’s called “coming to grips with something”. In German the word is “begreifen”. Without our hands, our brain does not work properly. At p98a we call our craft Post-Digital Printing or Hacking Gutenberg.
Preservation through production.
Digital pre-press enables us to make productive use of the old equipment which connects us with our industrial and cultural heritage. Apart from looking after old hardware, we need to maintain expert knowledge and professions otherwise threatened by extinction. Quite a few of the old machines and processes are still around; they are in working order and will probably survive all of us, but using them for commercial projects is difficult. Taking part in one of our workshops in Berlin will reconnect you to the basics of the design process; you’ll realize that slowing down is fun, constraints are relaxing and using your hands is a skill you may have forgotten but will quickly appreciate again.
Workshops at p98a can accommodate up to 12 participants.
My typographic workshop hackinggutenberg needs support. After more than one year with hardly any income (no workshops!), I may have to close it down, sell the presses and the type, let everybody go who’s been running this place since 2014, and tear apart a large collection of typographic treasures. We are a non-profit foundation – Erik Spiekermann Foundation gGmbH – any contributions are an immediate write-off. Our workshop is a unique place – we have a collection of historic materials like a printing museum, but no “hands-off” signs: everything is available for hands-on work. We do not stop at collecting, but develop new methods and techniques to bring letterpress printing and physical type into the digital age. We call it postdigital printing. If you’re in publishing, software house, or any other culturally engaged institution, you should be interested in keeping a place like p98a alive. We’re not talking millions, just a reasonable sum to pay the rent and two employees. Get in touch with me to discuss details, solutions, possibilities and to find out more. erik@p98a.com
Our friends at the Hamilton Woodtype Museum asked me to show the audience of their annual Wayzgoose event how we work at p98a. As this year’s event could only happen offline, it was renamed the Awayzgoose and I had to make a video instead of going to Wisconsin. Here it is.
Krautreporter is a news service, run by journalists in Berlin. More than 16,000 subscribers pay a minimum of 5 Euros a month to get daily updates on the news and well-researched long-reads. Just like newspapers used to do.
Printing a digital newspaper on a large Johannisberger press: video on Vimeo.
Once we had finished restoring our Johannisberger stop-cylinder press from 1924, we were looking for projects to test the machine. When I suggested to the friends at Krautreporter that perhaps we could print one special issue, they immediately went for that crazy idea.
We had already built our laser-setter and were able to make metal-backed plates up to 52 by 72 cm (approx 20×28in) directly from data, without going through photographic negatives. These plates fit our Heidelberg Cylinder press where we can print 8-up, i.e. 8 book-size pages on one plate. For the newspaper, however, we wanted to print the classic Nordic format, 44×57cm. In Germany we still have a few daily papers which are printed that size, the FAZ – Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung – being the most prestigious one.
The newspaper folded down for mailing
Making four aluminium bases to get the thin plates to the height of metal type (23.56mm = 0.928in) was an adventure in itself. All the other things we didn’t know about this large press took us five months to figure out, but eventually we started to print. We had enough paper (60gsm newsprint) to print 6000 copies, 8 pages, all on one sheet, back and front, 88×114cm plus some trim. One side black only, the other black and red. 18,000 prints altogether, at a speed of not much more than 300 an hour, with 2 people at the press at all times. We ended up with almost 5000 good copies. The sheet was perforated in half inside the press but not separated. We wanted the readers to get the full effect – the exact opposite of a smartphone screen. For the mailing we folded the large sheet into a narrow strip with a label around it.
The movie shows our own Daniel Klotz at the press. His buddy Sebastian came to help whenever he could. Daniel spent more than half a year figuring out how to make everything work. Now we know why printers used to go through a three-year apprenticeship. That press wasn’t made to print from polymer plates, and it still holds a few secrets. But we have our proof of concept, a full-size newspaper. It is so popular with Krautreporter subscribers that we may have to print more issues.
This quote by Jean-Luc Godard has always intrigued me. The discussion about style versus content is as old as the profession of graphic design, and he puts it into perspective.
