Visit AADL’s Secret Lab to use our 1.25 inch and 2.25 inch button makers to create awesome buttons to pin on bags, coats, and more! Bring your own design, use AADL’s designs, or find images in provided magazines.

Come learn a new artistic technique with AADL’s brand-new gel plate printing material! Drop-in for open craft time and get to know the printing process as you make your own bookmarks to take home. Experiment with different paints, textures, and patterns to make your bookmarks come to life.

This class will introduce you the basic tools and techniques to get started bookbinding. Together we will practice the fundamentals of cutting, folding, sewing, and gluing books.

Does autospacing make your tummy hurt? Does Papyrus make your eyes roll? Once exposed to the art of typography, many individuals never recover. Ellen Lupton will share stories about people who learned to live with type and lead productive, possibly happy lives. Meet Type Mom (Ellen’s beloved alter ego), and learn about Thinking with Type, Third Edition (Ellen’s latest book). This all-new volume includes inclusive design lessons, gorgeous illustrations from the Letterform Archive, and visual essays about diverse writing systems created by expert typographers from around the globe. Pick up a copy of Thinking with Type, Third Edition after the talk. Prizes and giveaways include a unique box of Type Mom cookies. Does bad kerning give you heartburn? You are not alone.

Letterpress is the traditional process of printing by hand using moveable type. This lab will feature a short guided activity to get familiar with assembling and printing a letterpress project. Participants will be able to use wood type, handset lead type and ornaments, and learn how to hand ink and print on a Vandercook cylinder press. If you like, stay longer to work on a more involved project. New to letterpress? Please arrive at the start of the program for a 20-minute demonstration of how to use our equipment.

Learn the basics of how Risograph printing works and how to make a one page mini zine. Zines are self-made little magazines or booklets that can be about absolutely anything! Zines can include writing, comics, collage, art, or anything you can think of. Following the event, we will print your zines on our Risograph duplicator and you will receive copies to share.

During the creation of movies and TV shows, every book cover, receipt, storefront sign, newspaper, or hotel room number that you see was custom-made by a graphic designer. The aim of this work is to create design that unceremoniously melds with its setting, and to achieve this for period productions, type must be in both form and effect of the age.

As technologically-equipped graphic designers, we experience some restrictions when we try to turn back the clock: hand-lettering that was never a typeface, type that was never digitized, and type that was digitized but that looks too clean. Add in the logistical and legal aspects of film and TV production and things can get pretty constrained. But there is a solution: type revival.

Join Leah Spencer for a look into this unique intersection of traditional craft and contemporary tools. See her process as used in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” to reproduce original mid-century type and lettering as digital fonts.

Make your own spiral-bound notebook. You can use a blank cover, bring your own book or LP jacket to use, or reuse the cover of a softcover book discarded from the FAADL bookstore.

Letterpress is the traditional process of printing by hand using moveable type. This lab will feature a short guided activity to get familiar with assembling and printing a letterpress project. Participants will be able to use wood type, handset lead type and ornaments, and learn how to hand ink and print on a Vandercook cylinder press. If you like, stay longer to work on a more involved project. New to letterpress? Please arrive at the start of the program for a 20-minute demonstration of how to use our equipment.

Letterpress is the traditional process of printing by hand using moveable type. This lab will feature a short guided activity to get familiar with assembling and printing a letterpress project. Participants will be able to use wood type, handset lead type and ornaments, and learn how to hand ink and print on a Vandercook cylinder press. If you like, stay longer to work on a more involved project. New to letterpress? Please arrive at the start of the program for a 20-minute demonstration of how to use our equipment.

Build your own small design using LEGO Dots and then pull a print of it using our letterpress printing presses.

Attention all design students! Network with industry leaders and receive valuable feedback in one-on-one portfolio reviews from experts.

Does autospacing make your tummy hurt? Does Papyrus make your eyes roll? Once exposed to the art of typography, many individuals never recover. Ellen Lupton will share stories about people who learned to live with type and lead productive, possibly happy lives. Meet Type Mom (Ellen’s beloved alter ego), and learn about Thinking with Type, Third Edition (Ellen’s latest book). This all-new volume includes inclusive design lessons, gorgeous illustrations from the Letterform Archive, and visual essays about diverse writing systems created by expert typographers from around the globe. Pick up a copy of Thinking with Type, Third Edition after the talk. Prizes and giveaways include a unique box of Type Mom cookies. Does bad kerning give you heartburn? You are not alone.

Using soft blocks, you will carve and then print your own design onto blank note cards or paper. We’ll provide the supplies and tools, you bring the creative ideas! No experience is necessary.

Le Graphisme is visual communication present in all spheres of everyday life. Essentially, it is graphic design. In the case of the French design journal Arts et Métiers Graphiques, design reporting was filtered through a specific Parisian gaze. Charles Peignot, head of the typefoundry Deberny et Peignot, published AMG from 1927 to 1939. It became a top international magazine for bibliophiles, typographers, and designers. Its wonderfully varied content provides a rare holistic view of developments in inter-world-war European graphic arts. This lecture will trace the influence of Arts et Métiers Graphiques through vivid reproductions, drawn from holdings at the RIT Cary Graphic Arts Collection.

Welcome to Letterpress Lab! This week the focus of the lab will be using fabric inks to print on cotton. We will be making patches! Do you have something that needs patching up? Worn out pants, shirt, bag, denim jacket? Or maybe you just want to embellish something with a patch to give it extra flare and make it more personal. Well this is a chance for you to start making it happen!

No art skills, no problem. We'll walk you through how to use analog tools to design a two-color risograph print. Following the event, participants will copies of their design.

Visit AADL’s Secret Lab to use our 1.25 inch and 2.25 inch button makers to create awesome buttons to pin on bags, coats, and more! Bring your own design, use AADL’s designs, or find images in provided magazines.

Get creative with a bewildering array of die cutting and embossing equipment. Make some DIY greeting cards, try your hand at a craft project, or just experiment and have fun!

Use a dip pen and ink to explore making simple patterns on paper. Concentrating on pen strokes is a good way to tune in positively and live in the moment. When you finish, you'll take home a beautiful textured card! Ink can be messy, so bring an apron or wear something you don’t mind getting stained.

Swann Auction Galleries presents “Vintage Posters & Graphic Design.” Lots of Art Nouveau posters on sale.

Ypsilanti Zine Club is a space where you can work on zines together, share techniques and ideas, and make zine making friends. Basic art materials (paper, pens, scissors, markers, rulers, photocopying, collage materials, transfer paper) provided. Find out how you can contribute your own zine to YDL’s growing zine collection!

A quarter of a century ago, the spread of email made the ‘at’ sign an instant icon of digital communication and of modern times. But how did it end up on computer keyboards in the first place? The more evidence has been offered, the more uncertain and controversial its historical origins have become. A short book recently published by Marc Smith assesses the existing theories and their flimsy documentary basis, before adding much new material from ca 1400 to the present. It is now possible to chart the history of the @ sign throughout Europe and across technological shifts, from medieval notaries to Renaissance merchants and calligraphers, from Miguel de Cervantes to 18th-century grammar books and type specimens, and from the murderous accountant John Colt to early keyboards. The fact is that @ signs were used to abbreviate many words at different times and in different languages — but the life story of @ in its current form and function is entirely distinct and goes back to a simple one-letter word meaning both ‘to’ and ‘at.’

This class will introduce you the basic tools and techniques to get started bookbinding. Together we will practice the fundamentals of cutting, folding, sewing, and gluing books.

Letterpress is the traditional process of printing by hand using moveable type. This lab will feature a short guided activity to get familiar with assembling and printing a letterpress project. Participants will be able to use wood type, handset lead type and ornaments, and learn how to hand ink and print on a Vandercook cylinder press. If you like, stay longer to work on a more involved project. New to letterpress? Please arrive at the start of the program for a 20-minute demonstration of how to use our equipment.

Kelli Anderson has found that design — and paper engineering in particular — enables one to find possibility hiding in plain view in our world. Interactions with even the most ubiquitous, low-tech materials can reveal amazing facets of our reality. Anderson’s talk will focus on her paper engineering work, her continued risograph animation experimentation, and using paper as an interface on the physical world.