Tammy and Adam Winn
www.thereddoorpress.com

The Red Door Press is a letterpress shop and design studio located in Des Moines, Iowa. It was started in August of 2012 with a single press and a small handful of type. Owners and operators are Tammy and Adam Winn, a husband/wife team with a lot of big ideas. Our studio got its name from a particular red door, which we visit every year to take family photos. The idea of remembering who we were in the past is the foundation we built our studio on. Today we find ourselves several presses later and an ever-growing type collection and the urge to learn more. 

We were drawn to letterpress because of the process: from composing type, mixing your own ink, feeding each piece of paper into the press all the way to finding the right color envelope to match. We love mixing the old traditions of letterpress with modern methods and seeing where printing can take us. We love how each piece of work is unique with every sheet we feed into the press. We love the imperfections created by using old worn-type and learning about its past. Letterpress has a beautiful history and we're so excited to be part of it and to share it with others. 

We find that printing in the studio engages our sense of play more than our sense of work. We enjoy trying new things - printing on unusual or reclaimed mediums, using transparency and overlap to create new shades and tones, and using hand-set type in unexpected ways to create shapes and patterns. The various impressions possible in letterpress engage not only our sense of sight, but of touch as well.

We are truly excited to be able to share our artwork with the community. We are so happy to be able to keep the traditional printing methods alive for years to come. 

Rick von Holdt

I have been letterpress printing using my own private press for the past 39 years. I have been steadily collecting antique and vintage letterpress type, engravings and presses during this time. I now have one of the largest collections of handset type in private hands in the United States. To print my pieces, I set, ink and impress each color by hand. Everything is printed directly from the original type and engravings in my collection.