A lovely reflection on setting type on a physical letterpress, versus digitally, and what that physicality means. How Kate W. describes aspects of it feels like a love letter at times. Chock full of fun typography words and the craft of setting type, too.
I’ve understood for a long time that pleasing design isn’t so much about what you put on a page, as how you arrange the space around it: the margins, the line-spacing, even the individual gaps between letters.
Setting movable type makes whitespace dramatically visible and palpable. No longer just the negative space in between, magically held open by your chosen font settings: if you want your type to stay where you put it, it needs to be wedged there, lines of text spaced apart with inserted strips of lead if you want to expand the gap by a small amount, or with strips of wood or even a row of blank type slugs (called quads and spacers) if you want a wider gap.
The process of building words out of back-to-front, upside-down little blocks of metal is the trivial part, compared with correctly engineering the space that encloses them.
URL: https://loreandordure.com/2025/03/18/the-spaces-in-between-further-adventures-in-letterpress/