What do some designers do for fun? You know, those activities that are unrelated to the daily list of client requests and work related emails? They design more stuff — and not just any stuff, they design stuff for designers.

Aside from being a purely creative outlet devoid of typical restrictions (such as clients), one of the goals for anything produced under the Ligature, Loop & Stem moniker is that it educates as well as inspires. This piece scratched an itch for us in wanting to have a quick reference for letterform characteristics — in essence, so we can all speak the same language when talking about type.

Although we’d seen similar diagrams in books, we wanted something that felt more modern. To that end, we purposefully selected two type families which balanced that desire while keeping one foot in the past, reflecting the historical content of the piece’s subject matter.

But not all was rosy and perfect in Hobby Land:

There were two challenges we faced during production: extremely tight registration is difficult to achieve with letterpress due to factors such as humidity in the pressroom and in the paper stock itself, along with stretching of the paper as it travels through the press. Also, thin hairlines are difficult to reproduce using polymer plates as the brushes that clean the plates during the platemaking process can easily distort or brush them away entirely.

In the end, it looks like both issues were addressed and solved to their (and our) satisfaction for this poster is gorgeous enough to be completely sold out.