Project Description

Ryan and I responded to a call for artist by Em-Space.org who was in search of artists for their Design Week Portland event called 'Print Make Share Challenge". There would only be a total of 15 teams / individuals selected to participate and the participants were to be live printing during the letterpress fair at ADX in Portland during Design Week Portland. Ryan and I put our names in and coined ourselves "Coffee Shop Creatives" due to the many hours we spent at Starbucks across from the Portland State University Art Building.

We ended up getting accepted to be apart of the show and paid our entry fee of 25.00 dollars to cover the cost of the linoleum, as well as paper and ink at the show. The next step we had to figure out what we wanted to do, we both knew we wanted to do something type related and we both knew we wanted a little more of a challenge. We landed on the phrase FUCK NOW WHAT and started to look at typefaces, doodling our own designs and we also looked at photolettering.com. Which finally landed us on using the House typeface Quinlet which we slightly modified to fit our needs.

Our last thought in the design phase was to add in a coffee cup to pull it back into our team's name sake but later thinking about the phase we realized that these two things go hand in hand on a day when you don't have much going on and your trying to figure out what you will do while sipping your first cup in the mornings.

All in all the project was a lot of fun, we learned a lot. We were only able to print three prints of the poster, one was to be auctioned off at the close of the letterpress show, one print to be in another Em-Space show with any proceeds to go to help build their letterpress library. And one print for Ryan and I. We are planning on doing a few more prints, so if you are interested in a copy of the print please let us know.