Corvane Press

Overview

Corvane Press runs an open print studio and hosts an autumn fair where visitors watch posters being made. For this year’s fair, the studio asked for a set of posters it could pull live, in front of a crowd, without misprints.

Approach

I designed for the press, not the screen. Each of the six posters uses one typeface drawn wide and heavy, so the letters survive a slightly uneven pull. No colour sits closer than a few millimetres to another, which gives the printers room when they register by hand.

The palette came from the ink shelf: four colours the studio already mixes every week, yellow, green, red, and a deep blue. Each poster uses two of them, so the inks rotate through the day and no screen sits idle. The words are short, one per poster, each a verb from the printing process, set large enough to read from across the hall.

We tested every design on the studio’s own press a week before the fair, timed each pull, and changed two layouts where the squeegee dragged. On the day, two printers worked side by side, one pulling and one racking prints, while visitors chose which poster came off the press next.

Result

300 hand-pulled posters for an autumn print fair: 50 of each design, all printed live over one weekend. Four of the six designs sold out by Sunday afternoon, and the last prints of the other two now hang in the studio as a pair. Corvane now uses the same typeface and the two-ink rule for its course flyers and studio signs.