Tom Monahan creative thinking workshop - Before & After

We want to write a lot more about this experience when we get the chance.

Tom Monahan

Founder / Leader in Applied Creativity

A leader in creativity in business, Tom has trained over 200,000 people on four continents. His unorthodox approach to training has had toy designers doing origami, engineers playing mental leapfrog and media executives throwing rotten tomatoes.

During his former career as one of the top creative directors in advertising, Tom was a founder of Leonard/Monahan, an agency that served major marketers, was one of the most highly awarded ad agencies in America and was a launching pad for many of today‘s top advertising talents. Tom was featured in The Wall Street Journal’s creative leaders series.

He was honored as one of the top 10 copywriters in the country, published in many periodicals and web sites, authored The Do-it-yourself Lobotomy, published by John Wiley & Sons, was the regular ad columnist for CA and has won an Emmy for television editorial writing.

Star Wars trading cards flag book

Each fall, Upper Chesapeake Book Arts (UCBA) sponsors a book exchange for those who want to contribute. Each contributor brings a book to trade with another member. The rules are that the book must contain content (image or text) and fit in a 5” x 8” lunch bag. Each person marks their bag with a secret indicator so they don’t get their own bag. Numbers are drawn to establish order, and everyone, in turn, picks a bag.

This is the flag book Ray did for the 2025 exchange.

Ray’s son Tray is a member of The 501st Legion, a Star Wars costuming group with some 14,000 members. Since 1997, the 501st Legion has been an international costuming organization dedicated to celebrating Star Wars through the creation and use of quality costumes that portray the villainous, morally ambiguous, or non-partisan characters from the Star Wars universe. Tray has several costumes, including the standard Stormtrooper, a Snowy Stormtrooper, and a Truscan Warrior in his closet. They regularly contribute to movie openings, parades, and other generous offerings of their time and effort.

For the past several years, they have been producing a series of 501 trading cards, and after a boatload of work, they have reached the final 50 cards. Tray has always been the distributor of these cards to 501 members scattered across the globe, and is in charge of getting the cards printed (ZooPrinting.com, if you are interested). I thought it would be a good subject for a flag book.

Below is another interesting view of the book.

Gearing up for “No Kings.” Or maybe texting up.

I cut the poster type (20” x 26”) on our laser cutter. I’ll show it cleaner in the 2nd image so you can read it. Jill’s idea to use alliteration in the text is quite fun. Just trying it out digitally on some black ink pulls. The ink pulls are all different, in lots of colors, but I really like the loss of readability in the 1st image.

We have a video on our YouTube site which shows Ray printing the poster below. The 3rd image is a frame from that video.

We’ve noticed you don’t often enough get to print works like demagogues, pandering perverts, and usurpers. Need to find a few new projects to throw a few more of those.

Steps to making "Bernie Books"

Several years ago, we made dozens of these 3.875” x 5.875” notebooks at the request of an important friend and teaching colleague, Bernie Herman. Bernie bought a couple of dozen. After that, we started calling them “Bernie Books.” He scribbled in them about all kinds of subjects, from Southern food recipes to raising oysters. Bernie passed away in December 2024. We’ve decided to reintroduce them with a few updates.

The general configuration is: they will have “ink pull” covers, a fly-sheet of various paper types, 40 inside pages of various paper stocks, and be bound with a “string-of-pearls” stitch.

They look simple. They aren’t. Here are the 28 steps required.

Cut paper from various sources for an ink pull.

Interrupt the press cleaning process to make ink pulls.

Make the ink pull (sometimes 2 layers at 2 different times).

Crop out the desired area of the ink pull for the covers.

Trim the ink pull covers to the accurate height size (final trim size).

Trim the ink pull covers to an accurate width size (they will be recut later).

Hand roll printing plate in multiple colors and print “Take Courage” for the covers.

Handroll to create at least a slightly distressed “Courage” probably in black for the collage element to overlay “Take Courage.”.

Tear the collage element along our plastic tearing jig.

Run the collage element through the Xyron adhesive machine.

Trim the collage element on 2 sides.

Run the collage element through our Xyron machine to add adhesive to the back.

Align the collage element to the printed cover and adhere.

Retrim the top edge of the collage element to the top edge of the book.

Print the logo & book description on the inside of the cover.

Cut the inside text paper for the book.

Separately cut a flyleaf out of various options.

Fold and gather the flyleaf & 10 folios for each book.

Capacity score & soft fold the cover for the book.

Punch 11 holes in the text block’s spine (separately to center accurately).

Punch 11 holes in the cover.

Measure thread and thread two needles.

Using the “String-of-Pearls” stitch, bind the textblock to the cover / 15 minutes each.

Trim the fore-edges of a couple of books at a time.

Round the fore-edge corners.

Photograph, crop, & adjust a digital image of each book for the website. Critically important as the buyer is purchasing a specific copy with a specific look to the ink pulls.

Add a book-number label to each book.

Insert the book & number into a clearbag.

Crop & add an entry for each to show its exact look on LeadGraffiti.com website.

Letterpress jigsaw puzzles of our letterpress

We had done a project for the Contemporary Museum in Wilmington, DE.

More to come.

Unum’s 250th collaborative

A good friend, Tony Guadanolo, proposed a letterpress celebration for the 250th anniversary goings-on. Ray has a black history poster he has been working on which requires a white & black sheet which gets glued together that pops into his mind every so often. So gluing red & blue sheets together wasn’t much of a stretch.

The focus was to be on UNUM.

Ray is always mindful of trying the mess around with readability. The interesting aspect was going to AI and asking for 7-letter words that had U, N, or M as the middle letter. Not sure what the issue was with 7, but AI came up with about 1,500. Going through them, erasing any that were boring, or not at least a bit politically charged, he finally narrowed it down to 4 with Us, and 2 with Ms & Ns.

Both sides have the exact same explanatory text.

Pretty good fun and his poster didn’t look anything like any of the other 3 dozen that made up “The UNUM Project.”

Perhaps, Trump should have used the poster when trying to make the Reflecting Pond blue. If Ray was doing the poster now, he might have used a green paper for the stock.

Half of writing history? Hiding the truth.

We like to do broadsides, and often the text is simply something we find that’s interesting. This quote is from a favorite movie, “Serenity”. As creative people who work in 2026 using a technology from the 1400s, this quote connected to history, science fiction, and maybe politics, jumped out of the movie. We recommend a Prime scavenger hunt to find the quote.

We subscribe to a rule we call “S.O.I.” that defines most of the conceptually creative work we do. “S” for “surprising.” The work should actively grab for attention. “O” for “original.” It should attempt to avoid being similar to the work of others. “I” for “inevitable.” This is the hard one in that once someone has seen it and is approached by a similiar problem to solve, can’t avoid wanting to to solve it the same way.

Recently, we’ve begun printing on paper we call an “ink pulls,” technically a sheet of paper pulled through our cylinder press while the rollers are engaged and covered with ink thinned with solvent forming a random layer of textures. It allows for a randomness, when overlayed by the type, an effect we often like, combining elements whose interaction is quite uncontrollable.

The typography for the piece is a font that was designed at Lead Graffiti The merger of the typography, and you need to imagine the effect spread over a dozen ink pull textures, colors, and tonal densities with the ink pull

Banners for Frederick Book Arts Center exhibition

We ended up using an ink wash (ink + mineral spirits) to print our 16” Onyx (cut from Linoleum) on brown wrapping paper. It took us nearly four hours. We plan to hang these in the middle of the gallery at the Frederick Book Arts Center.

To see a short video of us making the banners see the second image.

Werkman workshop at FBAC

On May 3, 2025, Lead Graffiti took its H.N. Werkman letterpress workshop on the road, celebrating National Print Day at the Frederick Book Art Center in Frederick, MD. The local newspaper included a nice article on the workshop. You can read the article here.

Here are a couple of our favorite photos we took during the workshop. Check out that 3rd one. She could see over the edge of the press about 3/4”. Seriously, it doesn’t get much cuter than that.