Author Archives: cynthia

Boxcar Press an EPA Green Power Partner

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Always on the hunt for new ways to improve our eco practices and to build great new partnerships, Boxcar Press recently teamed up with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as an EPA Green Power Partner. The Green Power Partnership is designed to encourage organizations to seek out renewable energy sources and to reduce carbon emissions. Boxcar is 100% wind powered through NativeEnergy

, an awesome organization that allows businesses and individuals to purchase carbon offsets and renewable energy credits. NativeEnergy actively works to promote Native American, family farm, and community-based renewable energy projects to help make renewable energy more accessible. It’s a pleasure for us to be working with the EPA and NativeEnergy to help promote renewable energy and we look forward to seeing an increasing number of businesses getting involved in the future.

Questions about how to get your letterpress shop powered by wind? Drop us an email at
info@boxcarpress.com and we’d be happy to tell you about how we became wind powered.

Letterpress + Boxcar Press Customers Showcased in Forbes Article

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It is always a good day around here when we learn of letterpress printers getting cool press, so it was fun to see letterpress mentioned last week by Forbes! Congratulations to everyone in the article (which you can read here), including Ben Levitz of Studio on Fire, Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina, and The Arm in Brooklyn – all Boxcar platemaking/supply customers! We were also excited that Forbes did a shout out about our Boxcar platemaking services….go letterpress!

On a side note – we also happen to love Studio on Fire’s sweet blog, Beast Pieces and seeing how all that photopolymer translates into mind-blowing prints. You can read more of Ben’s inspiring take on the
letterpress renaissance and the benefits of using photopolymer plates here.

Where will letterpress pop up next?

Awesome Cloudy Collection Prints, Letterpressed by Boxcar Press

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The opportunity to print these bold limited edition letterpress prints, the first release from the Cloudy Collection, was a really cool experience. Boxcar’s relationship with David Huyck, the self-proclaimed instigator of the Cloudy Collection, dates back to the college years and recently took shape in the form of this really fun collaboration between David, a collection of highly inspired artists, and us.

Keeping the Cloudy Collection prints affordable was a central focus for David in developing the project. Ultimately, each of the seven prints was letterpressed onto one large sheet of paper and then carefully trimmed to the finished 4×6 size. As they were letterpressed together, the ink colors needed to be the same for each print so color became a major unifying factor in the designs. David used that as an opportunity to suggest a theme as a way of keeping the prints conceptually linked as well so the prints would truly feel like a cohesive set, despite having been dreamed up by different artists. With clouds on the brain, the theme was in place and the Cloudy Collection was born.

Each Cloudy Collection set will feature an offbeat seven prints, with an eighth bonus print. At times the bonus print will be offered as a free addition to the collection of seven, but there are also plans in the works to offer annual collections of just the bonus prints from each print set, intended to be released quarterly. The bonus prints will also be available for sale individually.

 

For the upcoming second set of prints, due to be released late next month, David is moving away from the orange and black palette and adopting the classic ice cream sandwich color combination of pink and brown. Each new set of prints will feature varying colors, themes and artists to keep the collection fresh and to help draw a broader audience to this unique series of ongoing collaborations. It is David’s hope that with each new contributing artist, their following of fans will visit the site, become intrigued and ultimately get introduced to new artists and new perspectives.

With Boxcar’s own eco practices as inspiration, David made sure to keep an environmental perspective in mind when working on the project. David says, “Boxcar was an inspiration here – running on 100% windpower and using vegetable-based inks made me feel like I could add an eco-friendly layer on top of the idea of having great art for sale.” A portion of proceeds of the print sales will be dedicated to The Nature Conservancy, an organization David’s wife has worked with extensively over the years, and a special Earth Day promotion also helped to raise additional funds.

Thank you, David, for the opportunity to work with you on this great project and for allowing us to share it with everyone! You can purchase the first set of prints from the Cloudy Collection on the official website for just $35, but you better move quick as we were excited to learn there are only 5 sets of the 100 limited edition sets remaining!

Boxcar Press Plates Spotted: Jessica Hische’s Business Cards on FPO

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We loved seeing Jessica Hische’s awesome business cards featured on FPO this week. Jessica is a designer based in Brooklyn and we are huge fans of her work. Her sweet letterpress business cards were printed using a standard Boxcar Base and 94FL plates at The Arm – check out that cool shot of her Boxcar plates!


[Photos by Jessica Hische]

Boxcar Base and Plates in Action: Officina Briani in Raleigh, North Carolina

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Receiving awesome letterpress samples from our platemaking customers never stops being fun for us. These come from Officiana Briani in Raleigh, North Carolina where Brian Allen brings over 30 years of work in the field of typography to his love for letterpress. Brian tells us that his primary press is a Swiss-made Gietz, approximately 12×18 inches, unknown model, unknown date of manufacture, likely from the late 1950s or early 1960s – a sweet press, with adjustable roller height, considered one of the best hand-fed platen press ever made. He uses a Boxcar Base and KF152 photopolymer plates, except for those occasions where he turns to handset and wood type.

In addition to past work as a typesetter, calligrapher, digital typeface production worker and letterpress printer, Brian loves to teach the letterpress craft. “Teaching letterpress is a very important part of my mission, sharing my love of letterforms, etc. Most students are young women, but all are people seeking balance and to regain a sense of touch in their lives. Fewer than half of the students have thoughts of printing themselves, the rest just want to see what it’s all about and get their hands inky! I share my 30 years of knowledge of type and letterforms, let students look through my large library and soak in the camaraderie with other students who have felt alone in their passion for handcraft but have found a home at my studio. I love to emphasize finding the extraordinary (lovely letterforms) in the ordinary (a lowly trade). Words and their expression still matter in my world.”

Brian also has a really cool Albion handpress that he eventually plans to use to print posters, but currently uses for demonstrations when visitors come by the studio so they can print their own copy of a keepsake to remember their visit to Officiana Briani. Brian says, “It entrances and seduces people into the magic of communicating with letterpress! The press is an Improved Albion 18×24 from the 1850s, made in London. It’s a crude/elemental machine, but symbolizes much – the arguments over who we were to be as a country were printed on a wooden handpress, one lever pull at a time, just as our single vote makes a difference in the aggregate. The most refined thoughts of the Enlightenment were given physical form with a handpress, and I use mine to emphasize to young people that an individual’s thoughts and actions matter, can be given form. Truly the power of the press!”

Brian’s career has been a true evolution that has led him through three decades of work with typography and even led to his personal handwriting being developed into the Microsoft font Segoe Script, for which he is listed as co-inventor on the patent. He tells us that he found his path “accidentally, but inevitably by working first as a typesetter in Boston and New York in 1975-79, taking calligraphy classes and reading the history of printing and typography. In 1982 Sumner Stone hired me at Autologic, Inc. in Southern California, to work in the pre-desktop world of digital type. Autologic made 700 dpi typesetting machines for the newspaper industry. We used the German IKARUS software to digitize outlines of alphabets, which were converted to run-length encoded bitmaps.”

After a time, Brian found himself at Imagen Corp. making type in a proprietary digital format for before moving to IBM to make fonts in the Folio F3 format, then PostScript Type 1 followed by TrueType formats. During this time, he opened his first letterpress shop as a part time venture, before leaving IBM to make letterpress his full time career. Eventually he closed his shop and returned to font production before finally returning to letterpress in 2005 when he moved to Raleigh and set up shop with Officiana Briani.

According to Brian, “The 1980s/early ‘90s was a very exciting time to be involved with fonts as the desktop revolution happened…It is quite amazing to see how many “civilians” know what a font is now. I was a part of the “font wars” in the late 1980s – the format competition between Apple, Adobe, and Microsoft, with Type 1 and True Type. Now of course, we have the blend of Open Type. The font wars are over. What comes next?”