Our Approach to
Letterpress Education
Courses built around understanding, not just technique. We teach the why behind every step so students can adapt and create independently.
The Principles That Shape Every Course
Letterpress printing has been practiced for over five centuries. The presses, inks, and papers have evolved, but the fundamental relationship between type and surface remains the same. Our courses honor that continuity while making the craft accessible to people who have never held a composing stick.
Heritage Without Gatekeeping
Letterpress is not owned by the professionally credentialed. The craft belongs to anyone willing to learn it carefully. No prior design background is assumed. No certification is required to enroll. The only prerequisite is genuine curiosity about the process.
Learning Through Making
Watching a video about letterpress is interesting. Setting type, locking a chase, and pulling a print is transformative. Every lesson includes a practical exercise that produces a tangible result. Knowledge builds through physical repetition, not passive observation.
Understanding Over Mimicry
Step-by-step instructions get you through one project. Understanding the reasoning behind each decision lets you troubleshoot, experiment, and develop a personal practice. Our lessons explain principles so students can adapt them to their own equipment and materials.
Patience as Practice
Letterpress is slow work. A greeting card that takes seconds to design on screen might require an hour of careful typesetting and makeready. We frame this slowness not as inefficiency but as one of the craft's central rewards.
Meet Our Instructors
Our instructors are working printers and typography educators who bring active studio practice to every lesson they teach.
Margaret Osei
Lead Instructor, Typesetting & Press Operation
Margaret has operated a small-batch letterpress studio in Cincinnati for over a decade, producing limited-edition art prints and bespoke stationery for clients across the country. Her formal background is in fine art printmaking, where she developed a deep understanding of impression, registration, and ink behavior on different paper surfaces.
She began teaching letterpress informally through local workshops before developing the structured online curriculum that became Dohuxo Tatema's foundational course series. Her teaching method prioritizes mechanical understanding over rote procedure — she wants students to know why the press behaves the way it does, not just how to operate it safely.
Margaret's own work focuses on wood type display printing and multi-color reduction prints. She collects antique type specimens and maintains an active correspondence with other working printers through the American Printing History Association.
Daniel Ferreira
Instructor, Typography & Print Design
Daniel's entry into letterpress came through typography. After years working as a book designer, he became increasingly interested in how type decisions that work in digital layouts need to be reconsidered for the physical press. He began acquiring type and setting it by hand as a way to understand letterform proportions at a tactile level.
His courses focus specifically on the design side of letterpress — how to compose layouts that work within the constraints and possibilities of physical type, how to use negative space differently when you cannot simply drag and scale, and how to develop an eye for type-only compositions that have personality and clarity.
Daniel is also a bookbinder and hand-papermaker, skills that inform his approach to the complete printed object. He teaches paper selection modules and a specialized course on designing for unusual surface materials including handmade and textured papers.
Priya Nambiar
Instructor, Ink & Color Theory
Priya approaches ink mixing with the rigor of a chemist and the eye of a colorist. Her background spans commercial print production and fine art printmaking, giving her an unusually broad perspective on how ink behaves across different press types, paper surfaces, and environmental conditions.
Her courses demystify ink for students who find it intimidating. She explains viscosity, tack, and transparency in plain language and shows how to build a reliable personal mixing system without expensive equipment. Her signature approach involves teaching students to build a small reference library of their own mixed colors tested across multiple paper stocks.
Outside of teaching, Priya consults for small letterpress studios on color consistency issues and has contributed to several publications on printmaking materials. She is particularly interested in natural and historically-sourced pigments and their behavior in modern oil-based ink vehicles.
Before You Enroll
Many students begin without a press and use the early modules to inform their equipment decisions. Courses that require press access are clearly labeled. For those modules, we provide guidance on sourcing affordable tabletop presses and what to look for when buying used equipment.
Introductory courses assume no prior printing experience. Intermediate and advanced modules do build on earlier concepts. Each workshop page clearly states what background knowledge is useful, so you can plan your learning path sensibly.
No. Letterpress printing and typography have their own internal logic that we teach from the ground up. Students with design backgrounds often find they need to unlearn some habits. Students with no design background sometimes have an advantage — they approach the process without preconceptions.
Individual video lessons range from eight to twenty-five minutes. Full course modules typically involve four to eight lessons plus a project session. Most students complete a module over two to four weeks working at a relaxed pace of a few hours per week.
Dohuxo Tatema does not issue professional design certifications. The courses are designed for personal enrichment, creative exploration, and skill development. Students receive a course completion acknowledgment for each module they finish.