EXPERIMENTS IN TYPE & COLOR
Dennis Y. Ichiyama
Dennis Y. Ichiyama: EXPERIMENTS IN TYPE & COLOR. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University, January 2011. First edition. Quarto. Letterpress printed wrappers. [58] pp. Color typographic experiments perfect bound in the Japanese style. Author’s gift inscription to half title page. Matching postcard with inked note laid in. Wrappers lightly handled, but a nearly fine copy.
5.25 x 8.5 softcover book featuring “a selection of various experiments using wood type, color and the letterpress printing process.” Printed on a Xerox DocuColor 700 and bound with sheets folded at the for edge. The essay “Art Made of Letters: Dennis Ichiyama’s Decade of Working with Wood Type” by Donald A. Seybold serves an the introduction.
Much of the historic wood type work included in this collection was produced during Ichiyama’s tenure as designer-in-residence at the Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum in Two Rivers, Wisconsin. The Museum was founded in 2000 and is dedicated to the preservation, study, production and printing of wood type used in letterpress printing. The museum has a collection of over 1.5 million pieces in more than 1,000 styles of wood type. The Hamilton Manufacturing Company was started by James Edward Hamilton and began producing wooden type in 1880. Lyman Nash, editor of the Two Rivers Chronicle, asked Hamilton to make letters because he was short on time to order them from Chicago. Hamilton's letters printed so well that he began to take orders from other nearby newspapers. Within 20 years Hamilton became the largest provider of wooden type in the United States.
Dennis Ichiyama is an artist focusing on woodblock prints and former professor of Visual Communications Design at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.
Ichiyama attended the University of Hawaii-Manoa where he obtained his B.F.A., having grown up in Hawaii. He went on to get his M.F.A. in Graphic Design from Yale University in 1968, studying under Paul Rand to learn how to create within limitations. From 1976 to 1978, Ichiyama studied as a post-graduate student at Allegemeine Gewerbeschule in Basel, Switzerland.
During his career he has received several fellowships and study grants,] and many awards in Print, Communication Arts, Creativity, and HO publications' annual design competitions. He has contributed to the book Contemporary Designers. and the book Hamilton Wood Type, A History in Headlines.
Ichiyama's art focuses on woodblock prints. He uses opaque and transparent inks to layer wood block prints of letters on top of one another. By doing this, he creates new shapes and forms within the remaining positive and negative space. His work can be found in many library collections in the US, Zurich, Rome, and Corunda, as well as the National Art Museum and Gallery. Ichiyama has also designed a number of commercial trademarks.