In Conversation with a Letterpress Printer

Her shop smells of ink and machine oil, and every drawer is labelled by hand. We talked for three hours and barely covered the first decade.

Deadlines help, but only when they are real. A deadline that everyone knows will slip is just a date on a calendar.

Feedback lands better when it describes the effect rather than the fix. “I lost track here” is more useful than “move this paragraph”.

What we changed

We schedule unstructured time on purpose. Some of our best ideas started as an afternoon with no plan and a stack of old magazines.

Every studio accumulates habits it never chose. Once a year we list them and ask whether each one still earns its place.

The finished piece rarely looks like the plan. That is fine; the plan was only there to get us started.

Small improvements compound. A page that loads a little faster, a heading that reads a little clearer, and a form with one fewer field all add up.

• A notebook that fits in a coat pocket
• A pencil that is already sharp
• An hour with the door closed
• A reader you trust

Omit needless words.

William Strunk Jr., The Elements of Style

Every studio accumulates habits it never chose. Once a year we list them and ask whether each one still earns its place.

Most of the improvement in a draft comes from cutting. We aim to remove a fifth of every piece on the second pass, and the reader never misses it.

We keep a running document of things that went wrong on past projects. It is not a list of failures so much as a list of warnings, and we read it before every kickoff.

The first version of anything is a question, not an answer. Treating it that way makes feedback easier to give and much easier to hear.