A print house · Tampa, Florida · Est. MMXXVI from forty years prior

The eye is
& the machine.

One drawing table. Forty years of working taste. Letterpress, riso, and a careful program that critiques in red pencil.

1985Year the press first turned
EightPieces in the opening capsule
Hand-signedEvery numbered piece
§ Now on press

A correspondence card, set in three colors.

No. 01 — The Welcome Card. Letterpress on 220lb cotton. Three ink colors: India Ink, Red Pencil, Plate Blue. Numbered edition of one hundred. The press has begun the run; deliveries open Friday, 29 May.

Below: a registered proof, lifted from the bed of the press. The misregistration on the lower corner is the press's signature, not ours.

Stock220lb cotton, Crane's Lettra PressChandler & Price platen, 1923 Edition100, signed
Plate 01 / Sheet 03 First pull · 29.iv.MMXXVI — A NOTE FROM THE STUDIO — Hello. It seems we should have known one another a long time before this — but the world was busy, and so was I, and now here we are. SBD It is the smallest piece of printed matter, and it has done more in this house than the bigger ones ever managed. — the studio — I —

The Opening Hand.
Drop No. 01.

Eight numbered objects to introduce the house. When the plates are retired, that is it. The next drop arrives the last Friday of the month.

No. 01 / 8 letterpress

The Welcome Card

Set of eight letterpress correspondence cards. Three ink colors. Hand-numbered to 100.

Edition of 100 $48
No. 02 / 8 riso

Hierarchy Broadside

Two-color riso print, A3. The first of five Doctrine plates.

Edition of 75 $65
No. 03 / 8 archive

Maas Brothers, 1987

Re-pressed from the founder's archive. Numbered, with a card explaining what it was.

Edition of 50 $95
See all eight Drop No. 01 · ships 29 May 2026
§ The Eye · A service

Your work, under the loupe.

Upload a piece of design. A one-page critique card arrives in under twenty-four hours, marked up in red pencil, signed by the studio.

The model is Anthropic Claude, prompted from the studio's editorial position — what a working print designer notices first, what they kill, what they keep. The position is the founder's; she defined it from a forty-year career. The labor of producing each critique is the model's. One in twenty critiques is held back for studio quality review, and the founder spot-checks at her discretion.

i. Single critiqueOne piece. One card. Under 24 hours. $24
ii. The StudioFour critiques a month. 20% off the Collection. $29 / mo
Send a piece in
Critique № 0417
Subject: landing page
23 April MMXXVI

The hierarchy is fighting itself. The headline wants to be the hero but you've let the bottom-third photograph compete for the same weight. Pick one.

mark · photograph, lower band

If it's the headline, crop or kill the photograph. If it's the photograph, pull the headline back two sizes and move it to the upper-left where the eye enters the page anyway.

The palette is right. The type is right. The problem is that you respected both elements equally, and hierarchy requires disrespect. Something has to lose.

one thing to try · kill the photograph entirely
— the studioMMXXVI · 0417 read & signed

The five rules of the house.

Posted, like an old printer's notice, above the drawing table.

  1. Hierarchy requires disrespect.Something has to lose. If both elements are equally weighted, the eye has nowhere to land first, and the piece does no work.
  2. Three seconds is the budget for any exterior piece.A billboard, a window decal, a poster on a column. If the message hasn't arrived in three seconds, the piece has failed and the words inside it don't matter.
  3. White space has a job.It is not empty. It is not "breathing room." It is the silence around a sentence that lets the sentence be heard. Treat it as you would type — with intention.
  4. Red is earned, not spent.The most expensive ink in any palette is the bright accent. Use it where it has consequence. Never as garnish.
  5. The second round is always better than the first.Plan for it. Estimate against it. Do not deliver round one and stop. Round one is reconnaissance.
§ The Letter · Wednesdays

A weekly letter from the drawing table.

Four hundred words, one opinion, no tracking. Begins Wednesday, 27 May.

No tracking. No partners. Unsubscribe anytime.

— Letter No. 002 · 3 June MMXXVI

Why this billboard is failing.

I drove past it three days in a row and could not tell you what it was selling. That is not the billboard's failure. That is the failure of the person who approved it for production.

The headline is set in a typeface that wants to be looked at. Billboards are not looked at. Billboards are glanced at, at sixty miles an hour, by drivers who are also doing six other things.

A billboard that requires you to read it has not done its job. A billboard that you can identify by silhouette alone has done half of it. The other half is whether the silhouette belongs to anyone.

— from the drawing table