I recently did an internship at a letterpress design studio, Dingbat Press, and just fell in love with all things letterpress. I had always loved the look and feel of letterpress, so I was just thrilled by the idea of actually being able to print it myself. During my internship I was able to learn a lot about the craft of letterpress printing by registering plates on the press and printing different letterpress designs for wedding suites and graduation announcements.
Letterpress isn't a very popular way of printing today because of its expensive, but every letterpress print is unique and has character that you can't get out of an average desktop printer. Most small letterpress shops survive by printing fine editions of books or by printing upscale invitations and stationery, often using presses that require the person operating the press to feed paper by hand one sheet at a time. So whenever you receive a piece of letterpress art, know that it was handled with care and printed with purpose.
I have had previous experience with graphic design but before this class, I had never touched the art of web design, besides dabbling with it here and there on my blog. So when we began to learn web design it scared me! I was so used to designing things by literally moving objects around within a document that I found the indirect ways of designing websites with CSS to be frustrating and tedious. However, once I was able to learn how to apply my creativity and eye for design in the form of a webpage, I was able to see the organization and benefits of CSS a lot better.
In fact, I found these last two projects we were given that incorporated web design, to be quite fun. It was also cool to see how fellow classmates interpreted the projects and made them their own. I hope to continue learning about CSS because I know I am still a beginner in this field, but I'm glad I was able to start learning this skill in this class.
