Yee-Haw Industries

Yee-Haw industries is a letterpress shop that started out in Corbin, Kentucky in 1996 by kevin bradley and julie belcher. The have since moved and are now located in Knoxville, Tennessee. A good majority of there work is like hammerpress work, highly specialized design like letterpress. They make lots of what they describe as art like products, they are makeing promotional posters, greeting cards, and stationery. They have done prints for such big names as Ralph Lauren, the wall street journal, MTV2, cartoon network and jack daniels. They are current members of the AIGA.

Yee-Haw Industries
Hammerpress

experimental type paper

Overly experimental letterpress work is not really something you see too much in the artist world. The letterpress was created as a tool to produce print in a quicker format then writing the same thing over and over by hand. Once we discovered quicker and more productive ways to do the same work the letterpress was somewhat abandoned. Once we had moved on some people looked back and said what else can we do with it. So now we moved from traditional setting newspapers and books to customization, you start to see more design like qualities in the letterpress work and custom images and type as apposed to the standard led fonts that were made for the press. Then it has moved also into using the letters as form, so using letters or symbols combined to make a poster or for aesthetic qualities. People have also started to layer type and using multiple colors to use a mass of type to create crazy posters.
I think this type of experimentation in older processes are important because as we move on to new technologies and processes we loose some of the aesthetic qualities. In experimenting in older methods we can push them in newer ways with newer types of thinking that weren’t thought of at the time that processes was used. We can create new things in old ways with new styles and new outcomes. There is something about a letterpress print you just can’t get with a computer, if it’s the layering or the uneven distribution of ink or even the embossing of the paper it just creates a nice aesthetic that you can’t achieve in any other way. In using this method you are also working within certain restrictions, you can only do so much with it but it’s all about pushing what is possible and what you can create within the abilities of the press.