![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() “He was so excited that I wanted to learn about printing,” she reflects fondly. Meanwhile, Alischa started teaching graphic design full time at Shillington College and continued for the next 12 months while she delved deeper into her research into letterpress printing.īy a stroke of fate, she encountered an old letterpress printer nearing his eighties, named Bob. The letterpress sat quietly downstairs, continuing the solitude it had been keeping for the past two decades. ![]() The couple found a house just a few blocks away from the beach at Scarborough and set about renovating it into their new abode. Alischa seized the opportunity to start a new chapter in her life. “How do you make this thing that’s 120 years old actually work?” In 2007, around that same time, Alischa’s husband Hayden, a pilot for Virgin, received word that he was being transferred to Brisbane. So we went down there with an old ute and picked it up – it was about 800 kg – and took it back to Sydney.”īut while she now had the press she had been seeking so dearly, she realised that she had no idea what to do with it. “It had just been sitting there for about 20 years, going rusty. “He had an old 1893 letterpress sitting in his shed,” Alischa says, reliving her glee. Things finally began to fall into place after three years of searching, when Alischa got a call from a gentleman in Canberra who had heard of her quest to find an old letterpress. But it was to no avail – most had been condemned to become scrap metal years ago. As if compelled by the hand of fate, she began to keep her eye out for an old printing press she could acquire, talking to people from old museums and printing presses to see if they could help. At the same time, the more she worked in her corporate job, the more she felt increasingly burnt out and creatively stifled. The more she researched letterpress, the more she fell in love with it. It’s like what we do as designers but taking it back a century.” “Instantly I was just in awe of it, because graphic design originally comes from letterpress printing. “It was years ago, before letterpress had become popular – I didn’t even know what it was,” Alischa recalls. Then, one night during a fortuitous session surfing the internet, she stumbled across the concept of the letterpress. Her mind began to wander through career alternatives. But at what some may have considered to be the zenith of her career, she soon began to realise that it wasn’t quite the right fit. After receiving a scholarship to study graphic design in Sydney, Alischa Herrmann had successfully worked her way up the ranks from graphic designer to art director in the corporate world. Life’s turning points often materialise when we are feeling somewhat lost. Almost five years on since she made the decision to follow her heart rather than her head, her home-based studio Bespoke Letterpress is delighting people worldwide with its menagerie of carefully created paperie. These are all simple pleasures that compose the daily toils of Alischa Herrmann, the graphic designer who left a successful career as a corporate art director to explore her passion for the art of letterpress. The rhythmic whirl of the printing wheel, the overwhelming smell of fresh ink, the tactile pleasure of running your fingertips over thick, cotton paper. Share Alischa Hermann, Owner, Bespoke Letterpress ![]()
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