Join us for this year's event November 4-6, 2022 in Two Rivers, Wisconsin. The Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum annual Wayzgoose conference hosts designers, printers, typographers and letter geeks of all stripes from across the globe. It is a weekend filled with type talk, great speakers, and lots of letterpress.
Times below are stated in Central. Schedule Subject to Change
Five engaging hands-on workshops! Must be pre-purchased, separately before the event.
Boxed lunches served by Heirloom Kitchens. Must be pre-purchased before the event.
Learn about the history of the Hamilton Manufacturing Company and the exciting things the museum is doing today.
See wood type being produced on the museum's pantographs. Learn about the entire process of making wood type, from half round to finished piece.
You Are Here
In 2019, Jennifer’s Starshaped Press celebrated its 20th year alongside that of the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum. It was also the beginning of her 4 year engagement as Visiting Artist at the Museum, which kicked off with the collaborative posters series, Ham at 20. We’ll be revisiting some of the fantastic prints from this project which sold to benefit Hamilton, as well as the many talented faces behind them. Jennifer will also discuss some of the critical concepts of connection that unite printers with their ultimate purpose of visual communication and seeking personal meaning through the work of their hands. This was especially crucial throughout the pandemic and continues to be so while navigating the spaces that follow.
Understanding that wood type and the printers who use it are both altered by individual experiences, her gallery installation, You Are Here, combines the rich visual textures of the first and the verbal of the latter. It breaks down wood type prints into repeat patterns that form a recognizable built environment that reflects a similar human experience, one that is shaped by a diversity of physical locations, realities and struggles. We’ll be viewing an entertaining summary of how this large work came to life.
Senses and Sensibility (or Why Reality Still Has a Place in the Future)
Nothing is inevitable if you’re willing to consider what is happening. Traditional analog technologies, mediums, and processes to many feel like the past, but as the world continues to drift into an ever-increasing digital reality, these changes may instead be their greatest opportunity. In this talk, we’ll look at reasons why the future could be different than those driving this digital revolution might have you believe.
Scott Boms is a cross-disciplinary graphic designer, printmaker, and occasional sign painter from Toronto, Canada. He currently curates and manages Meta's global environmental design and internal poster program from the heart of Silicon Valley where his work has been described as “the cultural heartbeat of the company.” Scott’s work has been exhibited internationally at the Hammer Museum in LA, the London Design Museum, Designmuseo, Helsinki, Design Museum Den Bosch, the Type Directors Club in New York, and has appeared in HOW, Mohawk’s Maker Quarterly, Fast Co, Wired, Offscreen, Tech Crunch, Inc, Ad Week and more. He also appears in the documentary film An Impossible Project and in 2020 began setting up an experimental Risograph studio and press called Risolute.
Join us for a delighful evening of type talk and fine refreshments.
Museum only open to those with reserved tables.
The Wayzgoose Swap & Sale is unlike any other conference event.
The Sale Portion: There are 30+ vendor tables to puruse for purchasing prints and print related goods.
The Swap Portion: Anyone can bring prints to swap.
Before you arrive at Wayzgoose create something that you would like to share with the Wayzgoose community.
Then be prepared on Saturday morning to swap with other attendees that also brought prints that they would like to trade.
Ethel Reed: I Am My Own Property
Learn about this pioneering graphic designer, one of a handful of American women to make a name for herself in the field at the turn of the 19th century. Delve deeper to explore the dark and oftentimes defiant thread that ran just beneath the surface of her otherwise cheerful compositions, and get familiar with how this edgy artist’s complicated biography influenced her work.
Writing about Rob Roy Kelly's collecting and collection; or, a working proposal to demystify history through physical engagement with typographic realia
The Rob Roy Kelly Wood Type Collection, a study collection held at the University of Texas at Austin is comprised of wood type manufactured and used for printing in the United States during the nineteenth century, gathered from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s by the noted design educator, collector, and historian Rob Roy Kelly (1925–2004). During the 1960s and 1970s, Kelly’s published research — including _American Wood Type 1828–1900_ (1969) — helped fuel a revival of interest in nineteenth-century American printing types. His work continues to be an important starting point for current scholarly inquiry.
The University of Texas Press published a monograph I researched, wrote, and designed _The Rob Roy Kelly American Wood Type Collection: A History and Catalog_ which functions as a ‘close’ reading of the collection. I’ve approached the collection as more than simply the 18,000+ pieces of wood type acquired by Kelly and dynamically define it in broader terms as a range of objects, publications, research papers, and attendant activities in a number of archives around the United States. Viewing the collection broadly has provided the opportunity to look past Kelly as the sole instigator and investigator and perceive him as a link in the broader network of relationships that led to the success of his research project.
World’s Largest* California Job Case
During a summer Experimental Letterpress Printing course at East Carolina University, Dan Elliott led a group of 11 students in creating the “World's Largest* California Job Case".
The proposed presentation will follow the class's several-week process of learning to print which led to a series of technical prompts and their pursuit to control the outcomes. These ranged from printing legos, chipboard, and bubble-wrap, to making their own veneer type using a laser and the school's woodshop. Through these prompts and experiments, students engage in problem-solving, continually trying to push themselves, their abilities, and conceptual development.
After gaining experience printing and a final prompt, the class devised a plan to collaboratively print a 20' x 11' California Job Case to show off their new letterpress printing skills and recently diagnosed typophilia. We divided the design of the case into 196 individual sheets and divvied up equally among the 12 printers (14 sheets each). After printing for 9 days, the class laid out the completed prints on the floor, taped everything together, and mounted them on three 2x4s for hanging in East Carolina University's School of Art & Design's front atrium.
*has not been even remotely verified, but who else would be crazy enough to do this?
Faces of ‘Janna’: The Chromatic Kannada
This presentation is about the making of Janna, a typeface made for both wood and screen. Janna, the chromatic Kannada, evolved initially from the street of Bangalore, India.
The idea was born in the absence of letterpress chromatic Indian scripts. As type casting and printing technologies became more abundant globally, during mid-19th to 20th century, India flourished with metal and wood types primarily for book publication and newspaper mastheads. India also saw a wave of hand-painted signs designed locally by the sign painters for businesses and entertainment. In contrast to letterpress, decorative conventions such as outlining, shading/shadowing, extruding letterforms, and beveling fused with India's calligraphic traditions to create a rich and robust culture of custom sign-painting.
This tradition continues today, but like many hand-made traditions, increased use of digital production methods has negatively impacted the industry. The last decade has seen several efforts to preserve global typographic heritage, but while type design and letterpress have seen a resurgence, there has been little development of scripts outside of Western scripts for letterpress.
This project by Zenab Bastawala and Ryan Molloy seeks to serve as a means to preserve India's sign-painting heritage by paying homage to the forms of the tradition while also simultaneously seeking what may be the first of its kind, a chromatic Kannada typeface.
The Angle Chase: Turning Type Into Art
The Challenge Machinery angle chase was invented so type could be set and then printed on an angle. Angle chases are hard to find, but both Ingrid and Lynne were fortunate to rescue theirs from the inevitable print shop liquidation scrap heap and bring them to their respective studios.
After working with the angle chases for some time (Ingrid wanted to scale up the printing area, Lynne's chase was damaged and working with it was frustrating), Ingrid found a colleague to fabricate a larger chase. Along with the wider line width (50 pc instead of 35 pc), the design has been improved as well. There are still four corner pieces, but the rotating circular element is now a single piece of metal.
The artists will each share current work created with their respective angle chases.
An Inquiry into The Enquirer Collection: Re-examining the Messages of Mid-century Advertising Blockst
Hamilton's historic Enquirer Collection consists of carved wood blocks that letterpress printers used to make large poster and billboard sized prints. Many of the posters were printed to advertise circuses and other similar kinds of entertainment. The content in the collection provides us with a raw, uncensored view of our past. Key questions raised by the Visiting Artist program center on the voices, language and mechanisms of storytelling around cultural differences and context.
Four artists were chosen for this Grant. Each one was given a topic based on images within our Enquirer Collection that the Museum deemed critical to re-examine. The artists and their topics are:
Through their artwork and interpretation, we hoped to do specific things:
Get an update on all things Hamilton from Administrative Executive Director, Peter Crabbe, and Museum Board President, Tracy Honn.
Named “one of the most creative people in business by Fast Company” and “one of the most influential designers working today” by Graphic Design USA, Debbie Millman is an author, educator, strategist and host of the podcast Design Matters. Design Matters is the first and longest running podcast about design and Debbie has interviewed 300 design luminaries and cultural commentators. The show has over 5 million downloads per year, a Cooper Hewitt National Design Award and iTunes designated it one of the best podcasts of 2015.
Debbie’s visual essays have appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, Print and Fast Company. Her artwork has been exhibited in the Boston Biennale, Chicago Design Museum, Anderson University, SVA, LIU, Wolfsonion Museum and Czong Institute for Contemporary Art. She has been artist-in-residence at Cranbrook University, Old Dominion University and Notre Dame University. She has designed wrapping paper and beach towels for One Kings Lane, greeting cards for Mohawk, MOO and Card-To-Art, playing cards for DeckStarter, notebooks for Shutterstock and Baron Fig and T-shirts for Within The Fold.
Debbie was President, Design and Chief Marketing Officer at Sterling Brands for over 20 years where she worked with over 200 of the world’s largest brands, including the redesign of Burger King, merchandising for Star Wars, and positioning and branding the No More movement. She is a frequent speaker and has moderated Design Yatra in India, presented keynote lectures at Rotman School of Management, Princeton University, Hong Kong Design Association, TypoBerlin, Melbourne Writers Festival, Festival of Art + Design in Barcelona and more.
Debbie is the Editorial/Creative Director of Print and a board member of the Joyful Heart Foundation, Performance Space 122 and the Type Directors Club. She is President Emeritus of AIGA, author of six books and co-founder of the world’s first graduate program in branding at the School of Visual Arts in NYC.
Typography and Technology: Making this history tangible
Why do we label some things craft and others tech? I’ve made paper computers, record players, and planetariums through my design practice. These objects lack all perceptible "technology," but still work. Rather than being black box, like most modern tech, craft tends to reveal the mechanisms behind this function.
As in Bruno Munari's ‘Air Made Visible,’ as in the philosophy of Kenya Hara, as in the tradition of origami: lo-fi materials like paper can act as a finely-tuned interface between our senses and the invisible forces undergirding our world. It has the capability to make our world legible to us: In its delicacy, it can awaken and cultivate a great sensitivity toward our own perception. Thus, for the last several years, I’ve been using paper to create interactive books—taking the black box dimensions of tech and making them tangible. By opening these concepts up to the poetics and playfulness of the senses, I aim to both: broaden the diversity of voices at the table and to treat the space of the book anew, as an experimental venue.
Recently, I have been creating an interactive book about typography and technology. With the Letterform Archive, I have been researching, writing, designing and paper-engineering with the intent of better understanding how technology influences the aesthetics of type. How entire technological milleus become embedded into our memories through a vocabulary of tiny typographic shapes.
Wood Type Twofers: An Ongoing Study in Procrastination
What is a wood type twofer? A piece of wood type that sometime during the course of its lifetime has wound up with two faces, its original manufacturer-cut face and on the reverse, something carved after the piece of type left the manufacturer.
Why on earth would someone cut into a perfectly good piece of type? How many wood type twofers are there in the wood type world? What was cut into the reverse side of the type? Are there other types of twofers? (pun intended) Who cares?
Celene Aubry and Jason Wedekind have spent some time pondering these very questions, and have some answers, plus more questions, including where other specimens of these rare pieces of letterpress printing history might be, and whether they can print with them.
Join us for a brief introduction to their particular fascination with wood type twofers, see examples of the type as well as prints made from them, and join in the hunt for more of these wood type wonders!
A free chap book containing examples of recent discoveries from the collections of various institutions, including Hatch Show Print, and private citizens will be made available to all attendees.
It’s Just a Piece of Paper
Paper has been around a long time. Almost 2000 years in fact. We come in contact with it in some form every day. Sometimes mundane, sometimes life changing. It can carry a message, instruct us, and guide us (remember paper maps). Paper can convey an idea, preserve an image, or package a product. And, when used properly, can last centuries.
A lot of us make a living “using” it, for our own or our clients’ communications. However, without understanding the inner-workings [structure] of a piece of paper – Formation, Shade, Smoothness, Opacity, Brightness, Texture and more – great design ideas can go terribly wrong in final production.
Like most things in life, choosing the “right” paper for a project involves compromise. While there is no such thing as “The Perfect Paper,” you will learn how to make the best possible decisions about the papers you choose going forward.
This presentation includes a sample kit of 30+ papers (yours to keep). We will see samples and discuss the impact of paper textures and colors on Letterpress printing.
Finally, you will be able to hold and examine printed samples going back hundreds of years.
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End of Wayzgoose! :)