Lead Graffiti’s “Teleport” broadside was selected by the jurors of the 2022 New Impressions exhibition being held at the Hamilton Wood Type Museum during the spring of 2022. There will also be a catalog published of the approximately 40 project included in the exhibit.
A curator approached us to produce a broadside to promote a series of temporary public artworks to be shown in Baltimore, Maryland, during the summer of 2021. He provided the visual promotion of the word “TELEPORT” starting with the first line being “T”, the second being “TE” and so on until the whole word showed and then go back in the other direction.
We had been wanting to do a large broadside using our Washington #5 iron hand press which supports a printing size of 25” x 38” (essentially a newspaper spread). We built a wooden chase for the press and set up a registration system that attached to the chase instead of the normal use of the tympan. The printing worked like a dream and achieved the final size of 25” x 38”, the size of the parent sheet of the Fabriano Onyx we were using.
⬆ Above is a close-up of the texture we got from the bubblewrap. The type was inked from bubblewrap and after the type was finished we overprinted additional bubblewrap.
⬆ These show the bubblewrap which has been wrapped around pieces of 3/4” corrugated cardboard after the printing had finish.
Here are a few photos of the setup and printing.
⬆ Manually positioning the type to establish the layout of the whole poster. This was a slightly scary moment as we would likely not know we were wrong until after 2 more complicated runs. You can see with the full poster above (which has no trimming on the sheet size) that we hit it on the money.
⬆ Finishing the lock up of the first run. With the number of “T”s and “E”s retired we could only do 4 of the required 16 lines of text when we were printing the longer lines that fell in the middle of the poster.
The chaos at breakdown..
⬆ After the 7th and final run the studio was in complete chaos. Just for the record this is not a set up photograph.
Printed : May 2021
Client : Joe del Pesco, Director of the Kadist Art Foundation in San Francisco
Size : 26” x 40”
Type : 15 line Gill Sans wood type, 10 line gothic wood type, 18 point Melior metal type
Runs : 7 (only so many Ts and Es)
4 for type (lines
2 for texture (bubblewrap)
1 for URL and credit line
Paper : Fabriano Onyx
Press : Washington #5 iron hand press
Edition : 65