Letterpress in a Clamshell: Designing for Tabletop Printing

Not all presses are created equal!

Tabletop presses especially. With a smaller footprint than some of their cousins, tabletop presses are perfect for small studios or in-home use. However, most of these presses use a bottom hinged or 'clamshell' platen design to generate impressions. This mechanism is not capable of high impression pressures and is better suited for compact and lightweight printing forms.

For this reason, we must pay special attention to the way we design when printing on a tabletop press. Keeping this limitation in mind and knowing how to effectively work around it to achieve a good impression is what this class is all about.

• Preview
• Introduction
• Why Design for a Tabletop Press
• Discussing Our Project
• Area: The Main Concern
• Key Element: Paper
• Key Element: Placement
• Key Element: Form Size
• Key Element: Color
• Our Project: Designing a Greeting Card
• Finalizing Files
• Final Thoughts