Founded in 1957, the Wynkyn de Worde Society is ‘dedicated to excellence in all forms of printing’. It’s a rather fantastic society which gets together regularly to eat, drink, talk about design and printing, and drink some more. The membership is made up of talented and frankly fascinating folk from right across the graphic arts spectrum – printers, graphic designers, calligraphers, publishers, typographers – all sorts. Each year they ask a different member to be their Honorary Designer, and this year they asked me to take on that role.

The society holds a series of wonderful lunchtime and evening events across the year, and one of the Honorary Designer’s jobs is to create the booking forms for those events. I designed each leaflet to respond to the theme of the respective event. I thought we’d share a few of them here.

In March, Daniel Mason gave a wonderful talk about recreating the packaging for Joy Division’s albums. Having found a copy of the original image used to create the Unknown Pleasures cover art, I created a Factory-style booking form. This was printed onto Colorplan Pristine White. I also created a memento for the event.

In July, the Society held its annual Members’ Garden Party. For this I created a botanic pattern based on a Gunnera leaf.

The leaflet was printed onto Colorplan Pistachio with a leaf-like embossed texture.

In September, Professor Lawrence Zeegen gave a fascinating talk about the history of Ladybird Books. For that I designed a leaflet that matched the exact size of the Ladybird books, and reworked type from one of the original books to create a text page inside it.

Later this month, Nick Newman will be giving a talk about The Wipers Times, the newspaper written, printed and published by British soldiers in the trenches in the First World War. I carefully replicated the typographic style of the newspaper for the booking leaflet, and reworked some text from the newspaper too, making it specific to the event. (I”ve also worked with Matt Mackenzie at Paekakariki Press to recreate a letterpress printed edition of the newspaper – I’ll tell you all about that next month.) The leaflet was printed onto Colorplan Stone.

And finally, for the Christmas party, which is held at the Garrick Club, I designed a leaflet that looked like an old theatre playbill, playing with some of the lyrics from the ‘Deck the Halls’ Christmas carol.

If that's whetted your appetite, take a look at the Wynkyn de Worde Members’ Handbook too.