On this episode, Taylor Cox, a letter press designer and book artist, talks about not being afraid to veer away from what your peers are doing, going all in when learning a new technique and what not to do when climbing inside a giant Heidelberg Press.

JP:

Taylor Cox, thank you for being on This is Design School. We are excited to have you here.

TAYLOR:

Cool… (laugh) I don’t know what to say to that.

JP:

That’s fine. So, I wanted to bring you in and talk to you a bit about how you have decided to get into the field of letterpress work. And, your interest in all things cool like that.

TAYLOR:

All things cool. And, could potentially kill you with lead poisoning.

JP:

Oh really? I had…well actually I kind of knew the lead issue. But, what other things can kill you?

TAYLOR:

Oh, well the guillotine, which is a little self explanatory. But, it’s the paper cutter. And, it’s terrifying the first time you use it.

JP:

Why so?

TAYLOR:

It’s a giant two-and-a-half foot blade of death, basically.

JP:

What else. I mean give me some…

TAYLOR:

I don’t know. I feel like in most art situations there are lots of things that, if you don’t use them correctly, they’re not going to go well for you. All of the solvents and chemicals that you use to clean. The presses. If you use them wrong, you’re going to lose fingers or hands or other appendages.

JP:

Do you have any war wounds from using the letterpress?…As you look at your hands, counting all fingers.

TAYLOR:

Not really. Yeah, I’ve still got ten fingers, so that’s good. I lost a nail once.

JP:

Oh. A whole nail, or just part of a nail?

TAYLOR:

Part…Part of a nail. It got smashed in the press. It was nice, purple and blue for a little while. Then, it eventually, kind of, fell off.

CHAD:

What were you making at the time?

TAYLOR:

Umm…I think I was actually printing my senior thesis project at Jessica Spring’s press, Springtide Press. And, I was printing on the Vandercook. It basically works off of the idea of a cylinder. And, the paper rotates around the cylinder. If you leave your hand on the paper too long, then the press starts to eat it. Luckily it’s not motorized, so it’s all hand-cranked. So, once you realize your finger is starting to get smashed you can stop it. But, I mean, the body’s reflexes aren’t as fast as you’d like them to be. So, the finger got a little smushed.

JP:

Oh, ouch. So, what started your interest in things like the letterpress studio?

TAYLOR:

Well, my sophomore year at PLU, I took Graphic Design II, which is in the letterpress printing studio, the Elliott Press. And, before that, I kind of had this idea that I wanted to solely work on the computer and do just digital design. But then, I got into the letterpress printing studio and realized how cool it was and how much I enjoyed actually working with my hands and being able to immediately connect with whatever you’re making. I tend to find working on the computer—in InDesign—I feel a little bit disconnected from it. I just felt much more connected to lead type and handset type and mixing your own ink. It gave me more control, in a sense, even though you have more constraints that you’re working around.

JP:

So you like the creative constraint of it?

TAYLOR:

Yeah.

CHAD:

Do you have less constraints when working in analog formats? Or is it just a longer process to do certain things?

TAYLOR:

Well, there’s only so much you can do with lead type. You can do a lot. But, if you’re in the shop and you really like this typeface and it works perfectly for what you’re working on, except for when it’s 12 point type and you need 72 point type. You can’t just click a button and make it bigger or change the size. That’s just not how it works. So…

CHAD:

I suppose that’s true.

TAYLOR:

Figuring out what you have in the shop and what resources you have available to you and how those are going to work together…it’s not just the click of a button. Which I like. It actually makes my designs better because I have to think about it more.

CHAD:

Yeah. Do you feel like, when you work, especially with analog typefaces like that, that you get to know them better or in a different way?

TAYLOR:

Oh yeah. Especially old type. I mean, most type nowadays is going to be a couple decades old, at least, and has been used a lot. So, when you’re doing a big project, and especially once you start printing something, you can see like, “Oh, that face of that piece of type has a little nick in it.” Or, “The foot has been smashed off, I need to go get another one.” So, it kind of dials you in to the shape of the letterforms and how they look and how they should look. And then, how they’re printing, so you can find the flaws.

And, it makes my leading and kerning a billion times better, mainly because you’re physically putting in each little piece of spacing between your letters, or not putting spacing in-between your letters. It’s not automatic. I mean, it takes you a millisecond to type a six letter word. It’s going to take you thirty seconds to set a six letter word.

CHAD:

If you’re really fast.

TAYLOR:

If you’re really fast.

CHAD:

Do you feel when you do work digitally now, you understand type so much better? Because I mean, I feel like I know photography very differently because I spent a lot of time in a dark room in school, both in black-and-white and in color. And so now, when I work in Photoshop, I feel like I understand a lot of things differently. And, I use Photoshop a lot differently because of that.

I was just curious if that, for you, translated to type, maybe InDesign or…

TAYLOR:

I think so. I definitely…I mean when you’re working with a large body of text it’s a little different. But, with headers and short pieces of text, I start looking at the kerning that’s automatically built into the system and seeing if I like it, if I want to space it out, if these two letters—in my opinion—are too close together.

I don’t know if it was the fact that, as a designer, I’ve just gotten more attuned to that, or if it was the letterpress printing and doing handset type that has tuned me into that. I’m not sure because it’s been a while since I’ve just solely been…

CHAD:

You forgot what it was like not to know.

TAYLOR:

Exactly. So, yeah I don’t know.

JP:

So, what are some of the late things that you’ve been doing in letterpress?

TAYLOR:

Well, this past week, slash, the week before that. Our Heidelberg Cylinder Press, which is a giant beast of a press from the 1950s, didn’t break. But, it was really, really dirty. And, the dirt, grime and oil was starting to get onto our prints at the shop. And so, I literally crawled into the press and spent two hours cleaning congealed oil, that has probably been there for the last 60 years, off of gears and all of the surfaces. And, it was a little cramped.

JP:

So, what I’m hearing is that a letterpress interest has also taught you to be a mechanic.

TAYLOR:

Yeah, a little bit.

CHAD:

Sounds like a good scene in a horror movie that maybe hasn’t been filmed yet. Is that some innocent person is climbing into the letterpress to clean it…

TAYLOR:

And, it turning on!

CHAD:

…And, the evil person comes and turns it on.

TAYLOR:

Oh yeah. That thought crossed my mind many times while I was in it.

CHAD:

Do you have any safety signals with other people working in there? Is there like, “Hey! There’s a person in here!” Or, do people just know?

TAYLOR:

There are only two of us in the shop, so… But, there were times when I was alone in the shop super paranoid about being in the press. So, I turned off the power to the press. Just because my mind was like, “Oh, I don’t know. What if…”

JP:

What if it was actually possessed by the original owner who created it and was into an occult situation.

TAYLOR:

Yes. Exactly. I probably didn’t need to turn it off, but it made me feel a little bit safer, so…

JP:

Whatever floats your boat.

TAYLOR:

I did find some cool paper stuck in the bottom of it. It was just this little one-and-a-half inch by one-and-a-half-inch sheet of paper that had a cut of a Canadian Mountie and his horse. And, it was printed on both sides. I think the paper was normal card stock when it was actually printed. But, it had been sitting in oil for, I don’t know how many years, and the paper had kind of sucked up all of the oil and had become sort of translucent.

JP:

I was just going to say, it’s sort of a gelatinous goo. With a little mylar feel to it.

TAYLOR:

Yeah, it’s really interesting,.

JP:

Vellum. It looks like vellum.

TAYLOR:

Yeah, it looks like a vellum. But, I’m pretty sure it was just normal card stock when…

JP:

Wow.

CHAD:

So, earlier when you were talking about your senior capstone—that’s when you took your nail off—I was curious about what you did for your senior capstone? You graduated relatively recently, just this past year. What did your capstone look like?

TAYLOR:

That’s a big question.

CHAD:

Or, what was the project you did?

TAYLOR:

So, the project ended up being an artist’s book that is based on the idea of memory loss and what happens in the brain when memories are created and lost, and stuff like that. And, it started when I got a thirty-or-so page document from my mother that my grandmother had written before she had passed away. It detailed her entire life, everything that she could remember. And then, it also had the marriages and kind of little bits of information where people were born for as far back in her lineage as far back as she could remember.

And, I took a couple months to transcribe it and figure out what all it said. I knew I wanted to do something with it because it was really special. It had really great content, but I couldn’t figure it out.

And then, I ended up thinking about why she was writing it. Her memory was starting to go and she, I think… The very first line of it is something about trying to get it all down before she passes and writing down everything she had learned about her mother before she had passed away.

It kind of just came into this crazy conglomerate of her writing and, kind of, scientific information about the neurons in the brain and how memories are created and the fact that you are born with a limited number of neurons, and that’s what creates memory. And, when they’re gone they don’t regenerate. So, then you start to lose your memory. And then, all of the sudden it’s gone.

So, that’s the basis, or the kind of idea or concept. It came together in the form of a multi-layer embroidered artist book that took a really long time. It’s the biggest thing I’ve ever done. And, I think the one project I’ve put the most thought into. It was exciting to finish.

CHAD:

I think that’s a really interesting story, and well, project. But, as you were talking about it, I couldn’t help thinking about what we were just talking about before which was this idea of capturing these things about ourselves as we live our life. And, I think that’s probably one of the big differentiations between younger generations and older is that we’ve constantly had all of this data being collected and stored. We have yet to know how that data will live throughout our whole lives and whether it will last.

But, I guess, how do you think that experience will be different for you as you get older than it would have been for your grandma, having this big repository of data that has followed you?

TAYLOR:

In terms of trying to keep my memories and remembering my life?

CHAD:

Yeah, because you’re saying your grandma, when she got to a point and wanted to write it all down, it was what, like 30 pages long? Right? But, just think of like everything that if you sat down and tried to collect it, that you have on yourself now. And, just imagine that if it keeps collecting and probably only grows until you were your grandma’s age. How does that change things?

TAYLOR:

That’s going to be a lot longer than 30 pages, I can tell you that.

CHAD:

And, what does it mean, right?

JP:

And, it’s already being collected. Whereas your grandmother, she was…

TAYLOR:

She was in her 80’s.

JP:

…in her 80s. And, you are in your 20’s and it’s already accumulating. So, by the time you’re 80, there is no having to go back and tell the story. The story is already out there. It’s just commenting on the story.

TAYLOR:

Yeah. And, I think that’s interesting. I wrote an article recently, for the book club of Washington’s annual journal, or semi-annual journal, about my thesis project and my process going through it. And, at one point I was talking about, “This is what she was writing down. These are her memories. But, this is what she chose to write down, not necessarily thirty pages was all she could remember.” That was what she wanted to remember. And, I think that’s the difference.

That generation, because they didn’t have everything stored digitally that they had posted, was more selective I guess. Whereas, our generation, today’s generation—the kids that are eight and already posting on Instagram with their iPhones—they’re going to have this version of their life that is different. It’s more current and in the moment. You can save that thought that you had when you were 16 that you posted. Whereas, I guess it’s less warped than when you’re 80 and you’re trying to remember something that happened however many years ago.

JP:

I remember doing a similar project when I was in grad school about memory, but relating it to quantum physics. It was very fascinating to do the research and dive into the area, well any area, that you’re not comfortable with. You know, myself being an artist, not a scientist whatsoever, and doing research and seeing these a-ha moments i can make connections, too. Do either of you ever have that kind of epiphany outside of the arts? Taylor, you had that connected synapses to your grandmothers story…

TAYLOR:

Well, I think one of the reasons I’m drawn to letterpress printing, and book arts in general, is it gives me the ability to take everything I love about design—figuring out the type and the layout and all of that goodness—and then separate from that, taking a different topic that maybe has nothing to do with design, like memory, and figuring out how to express it through graphic design and how to combine those different ideas. So, it’s not so much like, “Here’s problem A. You have to figure out how to fix it.” It’s more open ended.

JP:

Is this what you thought you’d be doing?

TAYLOR:

No. I thought when I started school, or when I decided to be a graphic designer that I was going to graduate and work for a design firm and sit in front of a computer.

JP:

A dream job?

TAYLOR:

A dream job. That was the dream job. Then, I spent a summer doing that. And, I hated sitting in front of a screen for an entire summer. I realized that was not for me.

CHAD:

So, what exactly do you do now?

TAYLOR:

Well, currently I work for the Arts and Crafts Press in Tacoma, pretty much as a press operator. So, taking the designs that Yoshiko, my boss, has designed and printing the cards with the giant Heidelberg. And then, on the side of that, continuing my work as a book artist and eventually trying to get to that point where I can do that full time. Or, at least be a full-time letterpress printer. That’s a lot of equipment to collect and a lot of space that I currently do not have.

CHAD:

Did you ever have any hesitation about going into that field after you realized you didn’t want to go into the more trendy route?

TAYLOR:

Trendy?

CHAD:

Well, you know…

TAYLOR:

I think you could argue that right now the trendy route is letterpress printing.

CHAD:

Okay. Well, trendy in a certain way, yeah. But, I mean, I guess maybe the more mainstream route would be a better way to say it.

TAYLOR:

I don’t think I had any second thoughts. I was kind of lucky enough to figure out the general direction and what I wanted to do when it came to figuring it out. Which, I’m still figuring out how to actually get there. That’s a whole other monster of, “Alright, how do I one: as a 22 year old, this is the city and the house I’m going to stay in. Because once you start collecting equipment that’s several hundred pounds.” It’s a pain to move. So, I don’t know.

JP:

Hundred pounds of what?

TAYLOR:

Metal and lead and equipment and…

CHAD:

Paper.

TAYLOR:

And, paper. Oh my god. That’s what I’ve started to collect. I don’t have a lot of equipment. But, I have a lot of paper.

JP:

You do have something that I have wanted. And, I would like to take this time to say that you stole from me. Wanda.

TAYLOR:

I didn’t steal it! You had a missed opportunity on Craig’s List that I took advantage of.

CHAD:

What is Wanda?

TAYLOR:

Wanda is my little three-by-five tabletop Adana Press. I don’t know who it was, but someone found it on Craig’s List and sent it to Jp and he shared it with the class. It was this guy in Parkland, like fifteen minutes away, who was selling it. And, Jp didn’t go for it. So, I bought it.

CHAD:

Worth it.

TAYLOR:

Worth it. It needs new rollers. So, it hasn’t been used. But, it’s really stinkin’ cute. It’s red. And, Jp named it Wanda.

CHAD:

Can you get new rollers for that?

TAYLOR:

Yeah. It’s just a matter of buying them.

JP:

Oh yeah. She’s ready to roll. She just needs roll-ers.

CHAD:

Wow.

TAYLOR:

I so often unintentionally use the pun of like, “pressing on,” or “pressing something.” Oh god. Puns are following me.

JP:

So Taylor, what’s next? What’s the future for you?

TAYLOR:

Well, recently I’ve been thinking more about grad school. I’m trying to figure out what that looks like. I had a conversation with Jessica Spring, the other day, about what I wanted to get out of grad school. There are really only four schools, in the U.S., that have specifically letterpress—or not letterpress printing—but four schools in the U.S. that have a book arts master’s program. Which doesn’t give me a lot of options.

I mean they’re very good schools, but it’s then figuring out what I want to do after that. How do I want to pursue, if I want to pursue, just solely making books and artist books or more commercial work. And, I haven’t quite figured that out. I’ve kind of made it up in my mind that I’d need the dedicated time that grad school allows to kind of figure that out and push myself further. But, where that’s going to lead, I’m not sure.

JP:

Well, this is a great opportunity since you have someone who’s in grad school right now!

CHAD:

Grad school just confuses you more.

TAYLOR:

Oh good. That’s great to hear! (laugh)

CHAD:

Yeah. I mean that’s part of the reason I went back to grad school. I had an idea of what I wanted to do when I went in. But, I think the best thing about grad school is making you realize how much you don’t know. I mean, you learn so much, but then you also learn how much you don’t know. Sometimes that’s daunting (in a good way).

One other thing you mentioned was also that you felt like grad school would give you the time to sort of work through those things. That’s definitely dependent on how your program is structured as to whether thats… I mean, not that I dislike it, because that’s something I’ll get to do a lot more this year, but last year there was no time to do anything.

TAYLOR:

Do you think that’s a product of the specific program that you’re in? Or…

CHAD:

Yeah, the first year is pretty structured. They kind of do that on purpose. Our faculty advisor would always like to tell us when we came in that they wanted to take away our super powers when we got into the program. And, they wouldn’t give us our super powers back until the end of our first year.

TAYLOR:

Wow. There’s some solid analogies there.

CHAD:

And so, that was a huge struggle. You know…

JP:

Do you remember when you were going into grad school and I was talking with you about how to prepare for grad school?

CHAD:

I don’t know. I mean, I remember when I was saying that like, “What do I need?” Or, “Should I do this?” And, I remember what you told me is, “Well, if you go back to grad school, you need to know what you want to accomplish while you there. You need to go back for something in particular.”

JP:

I don’t remember that part. But, I do remember telling you, “You need to go to grad school knowing who you are. And, everything else you have to let go of.”

For me at least, it was a struggle. I love that analogy from your faculty, “We’re going to get rid of your super powers and we’re not going to give them back until later.” I felt like that too, in grad school. They get rid of the ego, then they break you, and then they mold you back into something even better. But, as long as you have the foundation, the base of who you are, it will work.

Does that sound familiar?

CHAD:

Vaguely. But, I definitely forgot who I was last year. It got to the point where I forgot what my super powers even were. And, I’m still trying to figure out what those were. Because I’m just now getting them back…maybe…hopefully. I don’t know.

What do you think your super powers are?

TAYLOR:

I don’t know.

CHAD:

Well, what differentiates you from your peers? Or, who your peers were?

TAYLOR:

I mean, in terms of who my peers were, I was the only one doing letterpress printing or book arts or traditional graphic design, I guess.

CHAD:

What advantage did that give you?

TAYLOR:

Well, it gave me a different perspective in terms of the senior thesis. Which, for us, was pretty open-ended. You could do pretty much anything. I mean, I kind of veered off more towards the fine arts track of things. I don’t really know how to answer that question.

JP:

I think your super power, if I had to guess based off of last year, would be that you are very curious, but you’re also very dedicated. It was not about doing the easy thing or revising a project until it was manageable and completed. It was the expectation, and, “I will meet that expectation even if I bleed.”

TAYLOR:

Or, don’t sleep for two days, or…

JP:

Well, bleed was in quotes.

TAYLOR:

I guess that is true, if I were to pick one.

JP:

Do you feel that is still you?

TAYLOR:

Yeah. Once I get connected to something, I… Craig, the printmaking professor always used to joke that I always found the harder way to do things. Like, there was one of the projects in Printmaking I, was to do a woodcut. And, it was the first woodcut we’d ever done for that class and we were learning how to do it. And, I went and decided to do a seven color reduction cut the first time off. Why? I don’t know. I just got it in my head that was what I was going to do. And, then I spent three weeks on it and way too much time for an introductory project. But, that’s me.

JP:

And, I would say that has been a lot of my students over the years. Which is the, “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing the hard way.”

TAYLOR:

Yeah.

CHAD:

As Frank Chimero says, “The long, hard, stupid way.”

TAYLOR:

Oh, that’s so true. I always pick the long, hard, stupid way.

JP:

I like that.

CHAD:

Have I never sent you that talk? Oh, I’m going to have to send you that talk.

TAYLOR:

I want that, as well.

JP:

I think we’ll post it with your podcast.

TAYLOR:

The long, hard, stupid way.

CHAD:

Yeah, I just watched it again earlier this week. It’s just as good as ever. But, you know, I swoon over his writing, so…

TAYLOR:

Was there a deciding factor in picking a grad school for you and, I guess, deciding to go, for either of you? Or, did you know a program, and that’s sort of what you went with?

CHAD:

Well, I think one thing I was really thinking about—because I knew I really wanted to go back to grad school—one thing I was really thinking about was how to make it so I left school in a much better financial situation than I did when I left undergrad.

TAYLOR:

That is important.

CHAD:

Yeah. Because I was a lot less smart about that the first time. So, I mean, I looked at programs locally. And, UW is close by. But, they also have a really good program. So, I was like, “Well, I’ll try and see if I can get into that.” I tried. Didn’t get in.

So, the following year, I was like, “Well, maybe I’m too young.” I’d gone to their thesis exhibit and seen that most of the people in the program were in their mid-thirties. So, I was just like, “Maybe I’m too young and they want people with more experience.” I didn’t know what the competition was.

So, then the next year I was just, “Maybe I’ll build up my portfolio for another year and apply again next year.” Then somebody was just like, “Well, you already have most of everything together. Just freshen it up, contact the people that recommended you again and have them refresh that. There’s no harm in that.” And, so I kind of applied the second time not thinking I was going to get in that year. And, then I had made a plan for my third year. If I didn’t get in this year, I was going to start applying to more programs. And, I had a couple other ones picked out. But, they were all very different from each other.

Then, I got in and I was like, “Oh! Decision made. This is happening!” And, you know, kind of rolled with the punches. And, it’s been fantastic. But now, I have to figure out what I’m going to do next year after I graduate. So…

JP:

So, for me, Chicago had two really good programs. One which was in the number one grad school, at the time, for a VisCom program which was SAIC. Yeah, SAIC! And, so I applied there. I decided after doing an interview there and seeing some people, and knowing some people that were in the program, I was like, “Oh yeah. I’m coming here.” And, I had an opportunity to sit down and talk with the chair at the time, Frank Debose. And, oh my gosh did I hit it off really well. And, I could see myself there.

What I didn’t know, was what I was really getting myself into. The pieces of advice that I got early on, even before I finished undergraduate, was, “If you’re going to grad school, know who you are.” We had this professor who had replaced our tenured professor, who was on sabbatical. And, he was in grad school at the time. I want to say he had taken a year off, or two years off. And when he did, that he really needed to know who he was.

And, that was the thing he said was really difficult for him. “Why am I doing this? Why am I here? Why?” And, so for us that we’re talking about it [grad school], or that were thinking about entertaining the idea, he said, “Whatever you do, don’t do it right away. Don’t do it just because you think you have to do it. Do it because you know you want to do it. Do it because it’s in your bones for doing it.”

And, I’ve said it before on different podcasts, one of the things that I really wanted to do in grad school was to be much more methodical, much more critical about it. And, that’s what I missed about being in the workforce; as that there was not that heavy criticism that you had in classroom settings. So, I really went back for more of that. I missed the camaraderie, really.

TAYLOR:

And then you never left academia.

JP:

And, I never left. I just stayed on. And, I continue to make the rest y’all lives as wonderful as mine.

TAYLOR:

Too much power!

JP:

I know.

CHAD:

I think her comment of too much power was spot on.

JP:

You mean, what she said about me?

CHAD:

No. About me.

All:

(laugh)

CHAD:

Thanks for being on the show with us today. It was really great talking to you. I think you really brought a unique perspective that we haven’t had on the show, yet.

TAYLOR:

Thanks for having me.