How do you letterpress a large solid area?

Relieve the back of the plate so pressure concentrates at the edges. A flat solid at full depth will cup and print unevenly.

Why one notch instead of teeth?

One notch reads as a cut. Several read as a saw blade, which is a more literal and much more common idea.

What weight does the letterform need?

Heavy enough that the shaped counter contrasts with the stroke. At a lighter weight the counter just looks like a drawing error.

Kerf

Hardwood Joinery

Brand guidelines
Version 1.0
↓ scroll

01 — The idea

The idea is a cut, not a picture of a saw. One shaped counter, one flat notch.

Client

A hardwood joinery

Construction

A very heavy slab O whose counter is shaped as a bandsaw curve, with a single flat tooth-notch interrupting the outer left edge.

02 — Primary lockupStacked · symbol over wordmark

Hardwood Joinery

03 — On light

Hardwood Joinery

Ink on Mill Paper

03 — On dark

Hardwood Joinery

Pale Sage on Ink

04 — One colourFor fax, engraving, foil dies and single-plate letterpress

05 — Clear space

Clear space equals the letter's stroke width on all four sides.
Minimum 10 mm wide. It reduces further than anything else in the set.

06 — Scale

48 MM

24 MM

12 MM

FAVICON

Favicon: the O as drawn. Below 12 mm the wordmark is dropped and the symbol stands alone.

07 — ColourPantone from the Solid Uncoated book

Mill Paper#F0EDE3RGB 240 237 227CMYK 0 0 5 91

Ink#161615RGB 22 22 21CMYK 0 0 5 91

Pale Sage#C9CDBERGB 201 205 190CMYK 2 0 7 20

08 — Typography

Archivo Black · display

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz 0123456789

Work Sans · text

Body copy is set at 16–18 px on screen and 9.5–10.5 pt in print, sentence case, with a maximum measure of 66 characters. Never letter-space lowercase body text.

IBM Plex Mono · labels

Labels · captions · specification lines

09 — Do and do not

✓Keep the letterform heavy enough to contrast the counter

✓Hold the notch as one clean flat cut

✓Relieve the plate behind the solid

✕Never repeat the notch into a serration

✕Never lighten the weight

✕Never letterpress this flat at full depth

10 — In application

A studio identity exercise. Mark, palette, type system and usage rules by the Print Peppermint design team.

Every identity we build ships with the file the press needs: vector mark, one-colour version, favicon set, Pantone Uncoated references and a guide like this one.

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A studio exercise. Kerf, and every brand in this series, is invented — no client commissioned it and none of it was ever sold.