Making FacesMy experience of that talk was more of an enlightenment, in terms of understanding how type was made, the documentary that was shown was about Jim Rimmer who had dedicated his life in designing typeface.

For me personally designing font style on a piece of paper takes very long in getting all the letter size to match and all of them dead straight. As I find great difficulties in doing curve letters. So seeing Jim free handily draw out letters in matters of seconds is amazing, and you could see it has taken many centuries of practice to become so confident in drawing free handed.

But it’s the freedom in Jim’s creation that is fascinating, how he is able to decide oh this looks good and I will refine that letters point to curve and that g’s tail to sweep higher or lower to match the other letters. He is very direct on letters styles and getting it to work as a word.

‘Making Faces’ is a legacy of Jim Rimmer’s work, not many people use traditional method anymore as advance technology has made things so much faster and easier to produce, but seeing metal and digital being worked together is amazing.

DocumentaryWhist watching the documentary, my understanding of typeface had deepened, as we use type so often we tend to forget it actually took time for someone to create the type. And I think this documentary reminded me of the people out there who create text styles and fonts, but what was even more interesting is that there are people who still like creating things by hand and traditional tools, the tools which he heavy rely on and had invested in.

Many may view this documentary as a ‘how to’ design guide in creating typeface but in reality we are viewing only an aspect of Jim’s lifestyle and why he has such passion for type face making.

Looking at the extent of the process of this project, a person who is designing type face must be very patience considering there are 26 letters in an alphabet and Jim has been creating ‘RTF Stern’ typeface in capitals and lower case letters. Each letter could take as long to make as a day to create, from drawing, to scanning, to precisely make an outline on the computer, then print it out to cut around on a piece of card then transfer to cut into a piece of silver steel then into a block steel on machines. To repeat this process over 52 times for one typeface font style that really would take up a lot of time in his life, this documentary was completed after Jim passed away.

Karen Pang

HistoryTransplanting a Pie Tree to the OkanaganJanuary 2010 marked the passing of a Canadian master in the world of type design and letterpress. Jim Rimmer, proprietor of the Pie Tree Press and Type foundry in New Westminster, BC, was one of the last practitioners creating custom typefaces in metal for hand-set and composition casting. In his basement shop, Jim drew, cut, engraved and cast original designs used in the printing of his fine press editions, including his magnum opus and final work, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, for which Jim also did the linocuts (many in up to 10 colours) and the binding. Far more than his considerable achievements at the Pie Tree, however, Jim was also a vital and important member of the letterpress community, and one of the most gracious and generous men one could ever meet.

http://www.greenboathouse.com/news.html

His creation