April 26 | Bookbinding 101 (4 Hours)

This workshop focuses on styles of bookbinding that are low-cost yet dynamic, and well suited for poetry chapbooks and portfolio books. Students will learn how to choose materials and create simple book structures that best highlight the content within their book.

The lessons will address the logistics of organizing book forms and explore the book as a vessel for information, and how material choices can inform how the book is read. While the workshop will create blank books, each style of binding will begin with standard 8.5” x 11” paper to allow your content to be easily printed from a common inkjet or laser printer.

May 24 | Design for Print: Designing for the Printed Book

Designing a book digitally can feel linear, spreads seamlessly connect and sequencing is quick and direct. But, a physical book is an object with its own logic. Books make demands that a computer screen never does — it has a spine, a sequence, a physical weight, and a relationship between recto and verso that no amount of scrolling can replicate. For designers, working in the book format means grappling with a set of structural and spatial considerations that are distinct from any other medium: how content is organized across a signature, how imposition shapes what is possible on press, how the rhythm of a layout accumulates across pages rather than resolving on one. 

This workshop, led by Amira Hegazy, approaches the book as a design problem in the fullest sense — one where form and content are inseparable, and where every decision, from margins to binding method, is also an editorial one. This workshop briefly explores the historical development of book form and how physical possibilities of the book have developed with the needs of production and readers.  Whether you are working on a zine, a monograph, an artist book, or a longer publication, the workshop offers both practical grounding and a more expansive framework for thinking about what a book can do.

This is the third workshop in the Design for Print sessions with Amira Hegazy

This workshop series is built for designers and other digital image makers to translate their digital skills to physical making. We will take specific elements of the design process and decode them to print processes. We will highlight historical and theoretical elements that have woven through design practice from days of physical production to our digital workspaces. Expect to leave each workshop feeling more knowledgeable about your day-to-day design workflows and how to realize your designs through hands-on print practices at Spudnik Press. 

• Workshop 1: Thinking Through Color — Understanding Single Color Production with the Risograph (May 10, 12-4pm)
• Workshop 2: Slow Type — Letterforms & Typesetting on the Letterpress (May 17, 12-6pm)
  
• Workshop 3: Designing for the Printed Book (May 24, 12-4pm)
• Workshop 4: Containers — Presenting Your Work Through Box Building (May 31, 12-6pm)

  Note: Each workshop in this series is enrolled individually. You can register for a single workshop or sign up for the full series.

Amira Hegazy is a Chicago-based designer, printer, bookmaker and educator whose work lives at the intersection of print, publication, and community. This four-part workshop series is designed specifically for graphic designers looking to deepen their print knowledge — from file setup to finished object.

May 31 | Design for Print: Containers — Presenting Your Work Through Box Building

Presentation is not packaging — it’s a critical design decision, the one that determines how a body of work is first encountered and held. For printed matter especially, the container is an extension of the object itself: it sets expectation, establishes care, and frames everything inside it. 

This workshop, led by Amira Hegazy, focuses on the design and construction of custom enclosures to explore how structure, material, and proportion work together to create objects worthy of what it holds. Participants will build their own boxes by hand, developing both the technical vocabulary and the design sensibility to think about containment as an intentional act. We will discuss how engineering containers go hand in hand with print design preparation and consider how the design and fabrication process are inseparable. Essential for designers working with product development, book editions, print portfolios, or any work where the experience of receiving matters as much as the work itself.

This is the fourth workshop in the Design for Print sessions with Amira Hegazy

This workshop series is built for designers and other digital image makers to translate their digital skills to physical making. We will take specific elements of the design process and decode them to print processes. We will highlight historical and theoretical elements that have woven through design practice from days of physical production to our digital workspaces. Expect to leave each workshop feeling more knowledgeable about your day-to-day design workflows and how to realize your designs through hands-on print practices at Spudnik Press. 

• Workshop 1: Thinking Through Color — Understanding Single Color Production with the Risograph (May 10, 12-4pm)
• Workshop 2: Slow Type — Letterforms & Typesetting on the Letterpress (May 17, 12-6pm)
  
• Workshop 3: Designing for the Printed Book (May 24, 12-4pm)
• Workshop 4: Containers — Presenting Your Work Through Box Building (May 31, 12-6pm)

  Note: Each workshop in this series is enrolled individually. You can register for a single workshop or sign up for the full series.

Amira Hegazy is a Chicago-based designer, printer, bookmaker and educator whose work lives at the intersection of print, publication, and community. This four-part workshop series is designed specifically for graphic designers looking to deepen their print knowledge — from file setup to finished object.