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A little while ago I was lucky to get invited on a trip to the Hamilton Wood Type Museum for a printing workshop with a great group of Chicago designers. At the end of the day, it was probably one of the most design-nerdy, exhaustingly fun times of my life.

Hamilton is inherently cool: producing type since 1880 in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, it quickly became the largest type provider in the U.S. Chances are if you ever see a wooden letter floating around in a second hand shop or your grandpa’s basement, it’s from Hamilton. Currently it is the only museum in the world that is dedicated to preserving, studying and printing with wood type, and boasts more than 1,000 different styles. Want more? They’re still carving letters. The best part? The museum lets groups of people come in and print using those beautiful letterforms.

After touring the museum side of Hamilton, complete with a demonstration of how to use a pantograph to cut the type, our great host Jim led us into where he knew we wanted to be: the printing area. A quick how-to on the use of the machines and ink and we were off to pick our wood type out of the thousands of options. Pretty soon we were all covered in ink, whipping out posters of giant letters, exploring what one color would look like printed over another – barely stopping to grab a slice of pizza before going back in. It was like an addiction to printing – we couldn’t be away for too long.

Our group was full of designers, but this trip was about learning more than creating a perfect piece of design. Experiencing pulling the roller over those individual letters and the rush of excitement of peeling back the paper to see the results was such a welcome change to sitting in front of the computer all day. Sure, the act of cleaning each letter, resetting the layout, rolling on new ink and printing to see a new color takes a lot longer than the click of a swatch in Illustrator, but you get a sense of satisfaction from doing it the old fashioned way. The workshop leader Jim put it perfectly: “When I see an ad that is supposed to look like it’s wood type, but there isn’t a difference between two Ms used – no variety – I know that what I’m doing here isn’t replaceable.”

I think we all came away with some wall-worthy pieces, a great amount of fun and promise to be back.

If you want to learn more about Hamilton, check out their site here. Or if you happen to find yourself in Two Rivers, stop in – tours are free and they are right next to a shop that adamantly claims to be the home of the “world’s first ice cream sundae” – the perfect treat to end a day of printing.

Starting November means saying goodbye to one of my favorite holidays: Halloween. I have never been a fan of anything scary, but have always been a fan of free candy. As I have grown older – and realizing that a 24 year old begging for treats at a doorstep can be a bit awkward – I have found love for Halloween in other ways.

The Bond Group brings new identities to many of our clients – a new logo, a new look, sometimes a whole new personality. And if we are lucky we get a client that lets us run free with our imagination to find the perfect look. They let us do the proper amount of research into what they need and putting in the time to place those exact details that put it over the edge of greatness.

So what does this have to do with Halloween? Well, when Halloween comes along I get to be that imaginative client to myself. My fear of scary things evens out with extreme love for creating my own costume. Anyone can run to Party City and pick up a costume in a bag; but I find it much more fun to avoid the pre-made, sexy “insert anything here” costumes and do all the researching and putting in the time to place the exact details to put a costume over the edge of greatness. My free time in October is spent using my creativity to make a new identity for myself – not in the form of a logo but as a costume – a new identity for a night.

Normally I’m one to go to my computer or a sketchbook as a base for my creativity. But when I start seeing Halloween decorations going up my hands want to grab fabric and thread – tapping into a creative nook of my brain that doesn’t normally get looked to.

Creativity is creativity – no matter what inspires it or what form that inspiration takes once it starts rolling. The burst of desire to design a costume makes me excited to design anything – especially new identities for others – with new vigor.