Berlin Letterpress Experience

As part of our annual study trip to Berlin, we booked the Year One Graphics class on a visit to P98a - Erik Spiekermann's fantastic Letterpress studio located on Potsdamer Strasse in central Berlin.

Spiekermann set up this studio primarily to work on personal projects and exploring how letterpress type  can be redefined and used in the 21st century. The studio is equipped with a number of Korrex letterpress machines and Heidelberg Windmill press as well as a modern Riso printer.

The studio also designs and cuts its own wooden letterpress type.

Director Ferdinand Ulrich  explained how the studio operates, demonstrated setting up the machines, and showed the class samples from Erik Spikermann's collections - including font specimen books from the early 1900s, and more than 500 cases of poster type, mostly made from wood.

Ferdinand's colleague Lunia  D'Ambrosino also explained how she had applied for an internship at P98a having graduated with a Bachelors degree in Visual Communication.


Typesetting a poster on the Korrex.


Editorial piece printed via Letterpress


Erik Spiekermann's signature quote, letterpress A1 posterzine.


Ferdinald Ulrich talking to the class.


Find out more about P98a on their website, and visit if you happen to be in Berlin.

Miles Ahead

Here's an interesting project by NC Graphics student Pavils Vorobjuvos, for his digital project, combining web design, storytelling and art direction.  The brief was to select a title from the Bloomsbury 33 & 1/3 book series about seminal or famous albums, and to design a one page website telling the story of the title.

Pavils chose 'Bitches Brew', the ground-breaking jazz-rock fusion by Miles Davis, released in March 1970.

Pavils' process involved researching the artist, era, music and context for the title, and then thumbnail sketching out the narrative order of the content.  The visuals were then developed as a wireframe and visual mockup using Illustrator and Photoshop.  Pavils also used InVision to assemble an assets board and set up a prototype scrolling page.

The concept cleverly captures the expansive experimental feel of the music and celebrates the awesome typography associated with the album's famous cover art, by painter Mati Klarwein.

The typography on the cover is set in Novel Gothic, a font designed by ATF in the 1920's, for which no faithful digitisation currently exists. Pavils did some tweaking on a freely available substitute and the final results look pretty authentic.

Espresso Loves Colour

Our NC Graphics class kicked off 2019 by presenting their packaging project.  We run this project each year, and some of the Units integrated in this work include Colour, Introduction to Typography, Digital Media, and Sketchbooks.  So a lot of new skills are on display, backed by solid research into the client and the product market. It always makes for an interesting project, and the deliverables need to include one completed physical example of their packaging idea.

For this brief the class looked at Union Coffee's espresso blend range. The aim wasn't to rebrand the company (Union Coffee was rebranded in 2015 by Studio Output), but to look at improving the profile of the espresso range at point-of-sale and in displays, specifically in supermarkets rather than the higher end retail outlets they were more comfortable in.

One standout, and a good yardstick for the quality which this class is showing, came from Bethany Carrick, whose concept merged geographical locations with bold colours, abstract patterns, and some clean, delicate typography to create a vibrant set of boxed products capturing the essence of the four blended flavours on offer.

YOYP Xmas Alphabet

We had Whitespace in a couple of weeks ago to run a guerilla day for their Year of Young People project. Whitespace briefed 60 students (also including a class from Napier University) to each take a letter and create a festive themed alphabet. Chris Brohl and Niamh Curran came in to R310 and  over the course of the day the students put together a set of creative letters.  Everything was top secret, given that the results were goign to be used on real Christmas cards.

The resulting alphabet was used to send out letters to Whitespace's clients, friends and supporters. You can check out the results of the project, and read more about it here.