Betterpress is the name of our studio of traditional printing with movable type in Rome. It’s also the name of the research project that we carry out through the recovery of tools and knowledge of the art of printing with movable type, a manual technique of direct print that today is no more used for the production, but it still has charm and powers of expression that should not be lost or forgotten. Reinventing a tradition, innovate, transform its potential to create something new, real as the matter of wood types, touchable with hands while composing a typographic form, a message which contains in itself and retransmits the history and stories experienced by "types" and typographers of the past, reinterpreting artisanal techniques for a new visual communication. In our experimentations, we have combined new technologies with traditional instruments. This is the project we want to present at Maker Faire 2015 edition: showing how the dialog between old fashioned printing press rescued from the past and 3D printers (but also other tools such as pantographs and lasercut) of today, is not only possible, but is a meeting full of possibilities. With 3D printers and pantographs, alphabets of types recovered in poor condition (broken or very worn or incomplete) can be reconstructed. As well we can invent, design and create new ones, as always happens in the creative process of digital foundries. Other possibilities come out for draws and images that have always accompanied texts, making cliché from drawings or images and combine them into a composition that puts in dialogue the past, present and future.
During the event, we will show this, presenting our reinterpretation of the tradition of printing with moveable types, telling about an art that is disappearing and that we want to preserve and promote. We will directly involve adults and children who will do by their selves prints and live the experience of a "know how to do "of craftsmanship that has shaken off the dust of an antiquated definition to return the value and the merit of an art (typography) and a research dealt and carried on with study, care, passion and imagination.
Traditional and modern techniques can dialogue and will open to communication and creative possibilities full of high human value.