Triple Threat Press
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About The People

Triple Threat Press is a letterpress and graphic design company based in Lakewood, Ohio.

Meet LAURA, the owner

Laura Drapac’s printing career began in Athens, Ohio, where she studied both graphic design and printmaking at Ohio University. Upon graduating with her BFA in 2008, she worked for Apple Inc. full-time as a Creative Genius while applying for graduate school. After one year away from academia, Laura returned to school as a graduate student in printmaking at the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas, where she was able to explore the graphic and tactile qualities of letterpress in her own work. She received her MFA in May of 2012 and now works as the primary designer and letterpress printer at Triple Threat Press.

 
 
 

Our Story

Triple Threat Press started in a spare bedroom in Denton, Texas in 2012. Laura had just finished grad school and was looking to acquire a small press to continue making art after she no longer had access to the University’s print shop. One morning, before heading to work, she saw an ad online for a Kelsey 5x8 letterpress that had been stored in a barn in Sanger, Texas. She contacted the owner and the press was hers before lunch. It wasn’t in working condition, so she spent the entire summer disassembling and restoring it. To help pay for the its restoration, she printed and sold greeting cards that holiday season… and just never stopped. In 2016, Laura packed up the presses and moved back home to northeast Ohio.

 
 
 
 
 
 

Our Process

All of our print work is done on antique, restored, letterpresses. The basic techniques we employ have been in use for hundreds of years and traditionally would include individual pieces of lead type and hand-carved wooden blocks. While we do have a small collection of fonts, we also love helping bring letterpress into the 21st century.

We do a lot of our design work in Adobe Illustrator and are able to turn those designs into photopolymer plates that we print on our letterpress. This allows us to us to easily use multiple typefaces and custom artwork in a way that the letterpress printers of yesteryear could only dream of.

 
 

Press & Interviews