At SFCB, I teach primarily beginning letterpress. Students have so much new stuff to learn — locking up a chase, using a pica pole, setting metal type, where everything is in the studio — that there’s no time to do anything fancy with the quotes they print. Only one font face at a time, maybe an in-line dingbat. But when I get to teach an advanced class, as I did this past Sunday, the students have enough experience to play around more with type. Nicole brought several haiku from a contest in honor of the documentary Helvetica and set and printed the one shown above. Below is the one she wanted to do, but unfortunately we don’t have Helvetica in metal at SFCB! (You can see all the haiku here.)
Helevetica sits,
watching you try the new fonts.
It knows you’ll be back.