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BROWSE
Fielding Family History Book
Production Method
Die-cut
Digital
Letterpress
Lithography
Design
Jennifer Fielding
Photography: Jonathan Johnson
Hand carved lithography stamps: Cherilyn Kynaston
Engineer: Troy Fielding
Curation: Shawn Fielding
Editor: Cathy Fielding
Printing
PrintMailPro.com
Not only did Jennifer Fielding gain over 700 pages of information about her family history through the course of this project, she also learned quite the list of production lessons.
Dimensions (Width × Height × Depth)
11 × 8.5 × 1.8
Page Count
756
Paper Stock
Neenah Environment / Desert Storm / 130 DTC
French Speckletone / Kraft / 70# Text
20# Color Copy
Number of Colors
4
Varnishes
–
Binding
Perfect
Typography
Adobe Garamond
Helvetica Neue LT
Satisfaction
Project Description
In March of 2013 The New York Times published an article entitled "The Stories that Bind Us". In it the article quoted several landmark studies asserting that "the single most important thing you can do for your family may be the simplest of all: develop a strong family narrative" The more children knew about their family's history, the stronger their sense of control over their lives, the higher their self-esteem and the more successfully they believed their families functioned. This article blew me away; it was so simple. The next day I asked my family to write their life stories with the promise that they would be compiled and designed into a book.What began as a hope for 40+ pages exploded into a 756-page book full of rich family history with a total of 550 stories (ranging from the silly, to the sad, to the miraculous) and finished off with a bio page for each person, a family tree, an age guide and a birthday list.
Keeping the books affordable was paramount. The book is oriented landscape, normally forcing the covers to be printed on a press. To sidestep this expense each cover was die-cut and letter-pressed by hand, using 2 hand-carved lithography stamps.
Production Lesson(s)
Lesson 1: Stamp ink is water soluble, making it smear when wet. Luckily this was caught before production and replaced with letterpress ink.Lesson 2: Learn how thick your binder can go before starting. Only after the book was ready to print did I learn that it was .25â too thick, forcing me to scramble to remove 50 pages.
Lesson 3: Content management is key! I did not plan a clear way of managing story versions and it came back to bite me. Next time I will only have one channel to submit stories.
Lesson 4: I was introduced to Trello halfway through the project and its a Godsend! It helped me manage what had been approved, edits and changes to make, checklists to complete and best of all, it's accessible anywhere. I could put a task on there and come back a month later and not miss anything. Managing these through email proved to be impossible.
Lesson 5: When hand carving a stamp, be sure to invert it first. The stamps had to be made 3 times because of this.
Lesson 6: A drill press makes a great letterpress if you need one.
Post Author
Kelly Cree
Writer for UnderConsideration LLC.
More: Online / On Twitter
Date Published
September 22, 2015
Filed Under
Books
Die-cut
Digital
Letterpress
Lithography
Tagged with
die-cut
family tree
perfect bound
About
FPO (For Print Only), is a division of UnderConsideration, celebrating the reality that print is not dead by showcasing the most compelling printed projects.
FPO uses Fonts.com to render Siseriff and Avenir Next.
FPO is run with Six Apart’s MovableType
All comments, ideas and thoughts on FPO are property of their authors; reproduction without the author’s or FPO’s permission is strictly prohibited
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About UnderConsideration
UnderConsideration is a graphic design firm generating its own projects, initiatives, and content while taking on limited client work. Run by Bryony Gomez-Palacio and Armin Vit in Bloomington, IN. More…
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