When we started our letterpress studio, greeting cards was one of the first things we did like most others who began to work in letterpress.
We love messing and meddling with the English language in our creative letterpress work. One of the elements we most like to play with is punctuation. The idea of our Not cards was to take any word that ended in “nt” and add an “apostrophe” in between the letters, turning it into a negative of the original word. We did the following 4 cards.
Ailmen’t as in no longer sick or I Hope you get past your ailment.
Ancien’t as in “I don’t think you seem as old as you probably are. Close maybe.
Distan’t as in “I wish you weren’t so far away.”
Expectan’t as in “The kid came. The kid came. The kid came.”
Additionally, it might be interesting for readers to know that we created the typeface for the cards to match our favorite BOOK dictionary. We scanned enough letters to produce medium and bold weights and italics of the book weight. That took a month—kind of like buying individual packages of baseball cards and trying to get the last dozen cards.
Recently we have seen a couple of interesting ideas using the same idea that we thought we would call out.
We don’t quite know how to read this one from an Internet article.
And this one by a VERY ITALIAN bass player.
Well, there you go.