Hypsometry. Modal Synthesis.

Last week I spent a few days brainstorming the design of our new site. That included a lovely afternoon at Samovar, sketching, rereading Bringhurst, and looking through Typography 28, last year’s edition of the Type Directors Club annual.

The work in it – both the winners and the other selections – is superb, as it should be. The winning poster, for a Wilco show, was created by Hammerpress, a design and letterpress studio in Kansas City, Missouri. It’s a beautiful, subtle, and elegant piece of work.

Hammerpress and Brady Vest, the studio’s founder, have six other posters featured in Typography 28. All of them letter pressed in a style that’s old fashioned in its components – the typefaces, the decorations, the centered text – but contemporary in its execution. You can see more of their poster work in their site’s gallery.

One thing all the pieces have in common are colors that overlap in a dense, bright, but coherent jumble. Each print is built up from layers of ink, whether type or image or decoration, one atop the next.

Coincidentally, I bought a Hammerpress print the other day. Four layers of white ink on a brown stock.

I didn’t buy it directly from the studio, but from the Curiosity Shoppe, which just recently opened up a storefront down the street from me. They sell a variety of beautiful but odd things. Right now they’re showing a series of giant felt handguns by Sarah Moli Newton Applebaum.

But no, sadly, the new site will be neither felted nor letterpressed.