I would like to point you to a lovely project on Kickstarter which needs its last tiny push to get funded in a little over 24 hours. The Vista Sans Wood Type Project is a collaborative project involving 21 innovative letterpress artists, designers and studios from all over the world. It was initiated by Tricia Treacy and Ashley John Pigford as a collaborative exploration of the interplay between venerable/archaic and experimental/modern technology in the effort to produce a hybrid form of typographic design where the production process is ingrained in the product.

Tricia Treacy and Ashley John Pigford created letterpress wood type from the typeface Vista Sans™ designed by Xavier Dupré for Emigre with a home-made CNC router. They sent twenty sets spelling "touch" (five letters each in 2 different sizes and in various hardwoods) to letterpress artists and studios around the world to see what they would do with it. Each artist made an edition of their prints so that each artist will receive a set of all prints. Tricia Treacy and Ashley John Pigford were amazed by the results, and they now want to make a book to show their innovative processes and final prints, and share their own words about it. They are looking to fund Touch, a limited edition, hand-bound book with original letterpress wrap-around cover about the Vista Sans Wood Type Project.

Vista Sans Wood Type Project Documentary Teaser from Ashley John Pigford on Vimeo.

Artists involved in the project:

Megan Adie, (Copenhagen)Katie Baldwin, (NY)Baltimore Print Studios / Kyle Van Horn & Kim Bentley, (Baltimore, MD)Inge Bruggeman, (Portland, OR)Macy Chadwick, (Oakland, CA), Angela Driscoll & Yuka Petz, (New Orleans, LA)Firecracker Press, (St. Louis, MO)Rose Gridneff & Alex Cooper, (London, UK)Rick Griffith, (Denver, CO)Bethany Heck, (South Carolina)Dafi Kühne, (Switzerland)Peter Kruty & Sayre Gaydos, (Brooklyn, NY)Josephine McCormick, (Belfast, Northern Ireland)Robin McDowell, (New Hampshire)April Sheridan & Daniel Mellis, (Chicago, IL)Nick Sherman, (Brooklyn, NY), David Shields, (Richmond, VA)Studio on Fire / Ben Levitz & Sam Michaels, (Minneapolis, MN)Tricia Treacy & Ashley John Pigford, (Philadelphia, PA)David Wolske, (Salt Lake City, UT)Karen Zimmermann, (Tuscon, AZ)

CNC cutting of wood type for letterpress printing from Ashley John Pigford on Vimeo.

Discover the prints in the gallery on the Vista Sans Wood Type Project website. A couple of rewards on the Kickstarter page are already gone, but a fair amount of very desirable ones are still available for reasonable pledges. If you want to see this book come to completion, please head over to Kickstarter and help them out.