If you’re a follower of this column, you know that I write a lot about apps for the iPhone and iPad. It’s not just because I’m an Apple fan. It’s also because these revolutionary touchscreen-based devices are attracting some of today’s most creative developers, who are writing software unlike anything we’ve ever seen on other platforms.
One of the most stunning examples to date is a program called LetterMPress.
Released last week by Champaign, IL-based Bonadies Creative, LetterMPress is a $5.99 graphics app for the iPad that lets you create digital posters and cards that look as if they were made using wood type on an old-fashioned letterpress printing machine. But while that’s an accurate description of the app’s output, it’s a woefully insufficient summary. After all, if you just want to make graphics that have an antique look, there are dozens of desktop and tablet apps to choose from. What makes LetterMPress unusual is that it’s also a wonderfully faithful re-creation of an actual letterpress—a 1964 Vandercook SP-15 cylinder proofing press, to be exact.
To make a finished print with LetterMPress, you have to go through all the same steps a journeyman printer would: arranging type on the press bed, locking it in place, choosing ink and paper, cranking the carriage handle to roll the impression cylinder across the press. The app even has sound effects. Only in the final step, when you share your finished graphic, do you depart from the traditional letterpress process—at least, I’m pretty sure Gutenberg didn’t post his prints to Facebook.
Why go to all this trouble when you could just use a graphics program like Photoshop? Haven’t Adobe, Apple, and other companies spent the last two decades perfecting graphics software specifically to free us from all the old constraints of analog printing technology? Those are legitimate questions—and they go to the heart of what makes LetterMPress so interesting. If you ask me why this app isn’t just for typography geeks, but in fact represents a major milestone in mobile app design, I’ll give you three reasons.
1) LetterMPress’s graphical effects are rooted in the physical world of type, ink, and paper, which means you can make genuinely unique art with it—stuff that isn’t possible in other graphics programs.
To create the app, graphic designer John Bonadies started by collecting old wood-block type and art in a variety of fonts. (Donations collected through the Kickstarter crowdfunding platform helped that process along. Full disclosure: I pledged $10 to the Kickstarter campaign back in March, and received a free download of the finished app as a thank-you gift.) Bonadies and his collaborator on the project, Jeff Adams, scanned the type to create digital images. Creating a layout in the app involves dragging these images onto the press bed, then arranging or resizing them as you see fit. It’s all illustrated in the video on page 2.
Bonadies also made real impressions using the type, under varying degrees of pressure. Scans of those impressions serve as the patterns for the finished prints you make in the app. You can also choose from 21 different varieties of paper, all scanned from real sheets to ensure a realistic texture. The end result: prints produced using LetterMPress bear all the idiosyncrasies of the physical type and paper that Bonadies used, pockmarks and all.
Thanks in part to the vintage, handcrafted feel of letterpress prints, there’s a mini-Renaissance underway in real letterpress design. “Call it a reaction to the ‘perfect’ look of laser printing,” Bonadies wrote at the LetterMPress Kickstarter page. Thanks to the app, you don’t have to own a letterpress to match this look yourself.
2) The app powerfully highlights the strengths of the touchscreen interface.
It’s hard to imagine another scenario where direct manipulation of digital objects, without a mouse or cursor in the way, would be more natural and useful. In LetterMPress you move type and furniture—the spacers, locks, and magnets that hold type in place—by dragging with your fingers. If you want to make a particular letter smaller or bigger, you simply
