Artist Biography
Frank Baseman is a letterpress printer, visual artist, graphic designer, and design educator. Frank Baseman is the proprietor and printer at Base Press, a letterpress design and print studio. He is also the Creative Director and Principal of Baseman Design Associates, and a Professor in the Visual Communication Design program at Thomas Jefferson University, where he has taught since 1998. The work of Base Press has received recognition from national and international design exhibitions and publications, and is in the permanent collections of the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum, Two Rivers, WI; the Harrisburg Area Community College, Harrisburg, PA; the Free Library of Philadelphia; and Tipoteca Italiana Fondazione, Cornuda, Italy.

Description of Process
Ornamental Condensed is a 12-line complete typeface design made with 18-point metal ornaments. Beginning with sketching, I then set out to design a full typeface design in lowercase; added figures and punctuation; and then moved on to all caps, all made with a variety of 18-point metal ornaments that I had in the collection. Initially, I made Type Specimen prints of the lowercase alone, and the caps alone. But along the way, I proofed the two type specimen sheets together (as a kind of make-ready)—et voila! Ornamental Condensed Type Specimen (Mixed Tape) version was created. Happy accident.