Nashville’s legendary letterpress print shop was founded by the brothers Hatch in 1879 and remains the living heartbeat of classic American poster design. Since the early days of our Quarterly Editions, we knew that to explore the history of American printing, publishing and design, we were going to have to collaborate with Hatch Show Print. We imagined a three-poster public service campaign about effective poster design, which we named Pressing Issues: A Series on Ink, Paper, and Muscle. We wrote some copy and made a couple of really rough sketches and then left it to the crew at Hatch to design and print.

The covers are on Domtar Cougar 100-lb white cover stock with a brute-force application of a variety of hand-mixed Kennedy oil-based inks. The body pages are ruled in light blue on a smooth 60-lb text stock from Finch.