Letterpress is not dead

As you can imagine, the last few weeks before leaving are pretty much spent working with a hectic pace, meeting and waving goodbye to friends and relatives, and generally having loads of good food before… the English treatment.

I was around with friends in Modena a couple of days ago, then we went to see Claudio’s workplace. His work is basically in quality control for mechanical parts. He checks that the pieces he’s given from various factories match the expected sizes up to several degrees of precision. One of the things he has to do is to properly label each piece, and I found out he does this by literally striking a punch inside the metal of the mechanic piece with a hammer. Lovely:

Over the weekend I was back in Varese to hold two more days of workshop on layout and typography. I’ll probably post the slides and some writeup of the whole experience over at the studio blog before the end of the week.

As it happens I started doodling with yet another new idea for a typeface. I tried to keep it neat and clean on paper and sketched a lot, then digitized my drawing by eye. I don’t have the whole lowercase worked out yet; instead of my usual rush to complete the alphabet I’m trying to take it more slowly this time. I also thought I might be better off not showing anything about it until I’ve made up my mind on how the lowercase and uppercase are supposed to look like.

I must now be off renewing my driving license – it’s my first expiration after I got it, in 1998.