Broadside templates

Dribbble: the community for graphic design Back to home page. Explore Design Work. Weekly Warm-up. Job Board. Want freelance design projects? Personalize your profile with video. Certified Product Design Course. Live Workshops. Add Ons. Open a Shop. Designer Search. List my Job Opening. Post a Freelance Project. Popular Popular Latest. Reijo Palmiste Pro. Broadside Trading Co. Darren Pollock. Hard Work and Persistence. Jessica Cunningham. Stephen Crowe. Broadside of the book of children's poems about teeth.

Broadside Valda Friends. Caio Rocha. Poster Ciclo de Cine. Daniela Chavez Ackermann. Early broadsides were quickly and crudely produced in large quantities and distributed freely in town squares, taverns, and churches. Some were sold by itinerate salesman, or chapmen, for a nominal charge. Broadsides were intended to have an immediate impact and then to be discarded.

Items printed for short term consumption are referred to as printed ephemera. Posters grew more sophisticated as printing technologies and artistic movements evolved. Illustrators and graphic designers were afforded a medium for public artistic expression while promoting the products of their client. Many type faces, specifically drawn to compliment illustrations, inspired new metal type. Immensely popular and affordable, posters were made available to the general public who purchased them to display in their homes.

While in the 18th and 19th centuries most urban areas had public spaces allotted for posters, today there is increasingly less space available for posting broadsides. Broadsides were meant to be read from a distance and therefore required large type. Metal type could not be cast much larger than an inch and still retain the flat surface required for letterpress relief printing.

Twelve line pica explained here was the largest size feasible in metal type but in actual practice wood type was used for larger sizes. The image above is a sample from the Bruce's New York Foundry specimen book of available for on-line viewing at this link. I highly recommended looking at this or other specimen books of that era to appreciate the variety of type available to designers. There were a number of negative factors of large metal type, it was expensive, required a large amount of storage space, and was extremely heavy—just try lifting a case of this type!

If a printer did have a collection of large metal type, it was likely that they didn't have enough letters in the same face to set many words so type styles were mixed and matched depending on what was in the shop collection. As illustrated on the Lincoln poster, above right and images below wooden type was often mixed with metal type in a conglomeration of styles. Commercial pressure for large type was answered with the invention of a system for wood type production.

In Darius Wells invented a special wood drill, the lateral router, capable of cutting letters on type-high end-cut wood blocks. The router was used in combination with William Leavenworth's pantograph to create decorative wooden letters of all sizes and shapes. In James Hamilton developed a method of adhering a veneer made of holly wood onto a pine base.