About Face with David Wolske
This is our first article in a series of interviews, where we’ll discuss the letterform, and the love of all things serif and sans serif. We hope you’ll enjoy hearing from some of our local, and not so local faces!
David Wolske is an artist, designer and typographer currently working as a Project Coordinator for the Book Arts Program at the J. Willard Marriott Library, The University of Utah. In 2005 David earned an MFA in Graphic Design from Indiana University, Bloomington. Since then he has taught design, typography and letterpress printing at Indiana University, Bloomington, Herron School of Art and Design, Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts, The Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum and The University of Utah.
2007 saw the inclusion of David's work in New Vintage Type by Gail Anderson and Steven Heller, and he was honored to be selected to jury the Chicago Design Archive. He has received awards from the American Institute of Graphic Arts, Type Director's Club, and the Society of Typographic Arts, Chicago.
Q: What have you been up to the past year?
A: I moved from Chicago to Salt Lake City in January 2008 (I don't recommend making that drive during the winter) to start work at the Book Arts Program at the J. Willard Marriott Library, The University of Utah. My title is Project Coordinator, which is a rather generic way of saying I do little of everything: print and web design, studio maintenance, letterpress printing, workshops, event coordination, etc. We're currently in production on a Red Butte Press edition of Wallace Stegner's essay, "To A Young Writer." The edition is being letterpress printed on an 1846 Columbian hand press, which also requires hand-inking—it's an extremely labor intensive undertaking, but also very rewarding.
While I was in Chicago I was teaching Letterpress 1 at Columbia College Chicago, Center for Book and Paper Arts, and I had the pleasure of doing freelance design for the Center for Book and Paper Arts as well as some truly outstanding studios: Brainforest, Joslin Lake Design, Kitemath, Peepwire.
Q: What are your thoughts on the (ongoing) revival of the
hand printed page?
There's been a tremendous resurgence of interest in letterpress printing—all manual processes, really—in the last 5 or 6 years. I attribute this to a strong desire on the part of many designers to return to the roots of our craft. There's a satisfaction and sense of accomplishment that one gets from composing using metal and wood type, the texture of the paper, choosing and mixing a perfect match color, the smell of the ink, the sound of the press clicking and clacking as it works, personally pulling a print off the press—the process appeals to the senses in a way that working on a computer never has for me.
Q: What trends have you noticed?
Most of what is being called "contemporary letterpress" is printed from photopolymer plates. And while I completely understand their use for commercial purposes—they take up less space, they reproduce digital type and images well, and most importantly they are readily available and relatively affordable—I prefer to print from wood and metal type. I do incorporate imagery into my work, but more often than not I use found magnesium or zinc plates, or "cuts", from the 40s, 50s and 60s.
Q: What would you like to see?
I'd like to see the prices for wood and metal type come down!
Q: What fonts would you have in your essential fonts folder?
I use a lot of classic faces, for a couple of reasons. First, I admire and respect the time, energy and skill required to design a typeface and I prefer to avoid using fonts for which I have not paid for the license. Second, I enjoy the creative challenge of working within limitations. I get excited when I can manage to make a face like Times New Roman look fresh. Learning to make Caslon sing requires practice and a fundamental understanding of its strengths and weaknesses.
I do like a lot of the contemporary typefaces being crafted by the likes of Peter Bilak, Matthew Carter, Joshua Darden, Lucas de Groot, Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones, Eric Olsen, Christian Schwartz, etc., but being a letterpress type junkie often means choosing between spending money on digital type, or wood or metal type—sometimes the choice is type or food—so far the wood type has been winning ;)
Some typefaces that I find myself using on a pretty regular basis:
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Find out more:
The STA would like to thank David for generously taking the time to share some of his thoughts with us.If you have any questions you would like to share, or have suggestions for future “About Face” articles, please write to us at: aboutface@sta-chicago.org.
All photography by Lauren Huber and David Wolske.
