A Conversation with Kay Lyle of Manicule Studio
- Sienna Broglie
- Mar 24
- 13 min read
Updated: Mar 25
Interview on March 22, 2025 with Sienna
Kay is a graphic designer, print maker, lover of old tools and community advocate. Her work is informed by an initial career in social science, where she became interested in graphic design as a tool for communication. Using a combination of digital and handmade techniques including letterpress, relief and intaligo printing and historic photographic processes, Kay makes work that is graphic, text-based and straightforward with elements of social commentary and satire. She incorporates engaging ideas with creative composition to form something beautiful and give people hope. In our conversation Kay made reference to a quote that embodies the ethos of her work,
“The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.” - Nelson Henderson
Kay Lyle of Manicule Studio is The Making Place's April Maker of the Month.
Learn more about her Intro to Letterpress Workshop here.
For me, letterpress is about the ease with which it is possible to put ink on paper and put down your thought process.
Please tell me about letterpress printing. What is it and why do you love it?
So letterpress, in many ways is the ancient practice of putting ink on paper. It's been around for a long, long time. In Western History and Art History, we frequently take it back to Gutenberg. But even before Gutenberg put together the printing press as we know it now, block printing of characters and type was done in China where they had movable type cut in wood. There are a lot of reasons why that did not become disseminated more globally having to do with Chinese characters and complexity and so on. All to say that printing text had already been in place in many different cultures. Gutenberg just took existing technologies as people often do, and combined them in a way that was more efficient and effective at the time. He was a jeweler so that's where we get the metal type from, he had the technology to create movable type in metal. So that's where Gutenberg comes in and we get the printing press as we know it and the dissemination of information.
For me, letterpress is about the ease with which it is possible to put ink on paper and put down your thought process. My background is in graphic design and that's what informs my art practice. I literally just like the letter forms themselves. I find them interesting and engaging. With letterpress, it’s the physicalization of everything. The graphic design that we do on the computer now in Illustrator is informed by that physical process in lots of ways that people don't even think about or understand anymore. I love the design process on the computer, but I also really love working with my hands. I like having a physical process and then having something concrete to show when I'm done with that physical process. Letterpress just really scratches that itch for me and for a lot of other people too. That's the itch that is scratched when people make their first print and are so excited when they pull that piece of paper up for the first time.
The physical process of setting the type, especially when you're working with wood type, in a lot of ways it feels very reminiscent of putting Legos together. You get to put blocks together, decide how to compose them, ink them up, put down a piece of paper and run a heavy thing over top to press it. Then you've got a print; you've got a little poster or you've got a little postcard, it's done. There's fun in the setup and then it's very rewarding when you pull the first print.
I love teaching letterpress and doing workshops with people because it is a very accessible way to enter both printmaking and graphic design. Usually, in two to three hours people can leave with a small stack of their own posters. People leave with something concrete and it's really inspiring. And it's a way for people to express themselves not just symbolically, but actually in the words they want to put down. So for people who don't necessarily identify as artists it feels very approachable. I’m not asking you to draw anything. Sometimes there will be image cuts people can use, but the composition process is itself the artistic process. It's fun, it's engaging, it's approachable and you can get people fired up to make stuff that they maybe didn't think they could do.
Letterpress informs everything that we still do now. Graphics are becoming more and more a part of our life. It's all digital now, but graphics have always been a part of human life through text and illustration. I'm fascinated by that history and I love letterpress because it lets me engage with that history in a fun and hands-on way.
I'm also a nerd for the historical equipment. That's just a personal attraction to this cool historical stuff and these machines that are not affected by planned obsolescence. I restore old presses and if you restore a hundred-year-old press, well, you can run for another hundred years.
I’m thinking about how I can incorporate ideas in an engaging way and create something beautiful to give people some hope.
You touched on your experience as a graphic designer and I'm curious to know what kind of work you make both for your clients and personally. What inspires you to make personal work?
I'm definitely at a place where I want to get back to my own personal work. Having just moved to the Valley recently, my life's been in a bit of upheaval the past year so I haven't been making a lot of my own work. But, my graphic design practice is influenced by my social work and social services background. I've been out of graphic design school for about five or six years now. A lot of my work has just focused on graphic elements and I want to start bringing illustration back into it. So that's where my mind is as I'm setting up my print area again and thinking about what I want to do with it.
I like to bring physically printed elements into my graphic design work. My own logo is a scan and vectorization of a physical print that I made. Being able to do that physical print work, capture it and bring it back into a digital space that can be used in any format digitally, is a process that I enjoy. Sometimes I work back and forth from the computer to the physical and then back to the computer again. So my own graphic design work incorporates a lot of handmade elements that have been digitized, a lot of illustrations that've been digitized or vectorized. And I do like a lot of natural elements, that’s one of the things I enjoy the most.
I did a workshop last spring with a lithography printmaker and that was the first time I had tried that process and I fell in love. Lithography is even more difficult to access than letterpress because you've got to have the stones which are a particular kind of limestone that there are only so many of. These folks are awesome because they're trying to make that available to people. The litho print I made was of a big tree with a sort of space to add text. The composition, I guess, is good enough that someone was interested in it without the text. So I left the space open for it and there should be a round two of printing here once I get the presses spinning up again.
That's a good example of where I'm interested in going with my work right now. And I think just being informed too by local areas, conversations that are happening about community building, keeping things local, literally local native plants. There's something there.
The quote that I'm interested in for that tree poster design is “The meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.” That incorporates my philosophy from a social services/ social sciences background. Plant seeds where you are, plant roots where you are, even if where you are is only there for a little bit of time, invest in your communities. I’m thinking about how I can incorporate those ideas in an engaging way and create something beautiful to give people some hope.
The more I learned and grew in graphic design, I began to realize that it’s about psychology and human interaction and communication and all of the things that were important to me about social services and social work. It can absolutely be a tool for uniting or dividing people
Can you speak about your background in social services? I'm curious to know what you've done and what triggered you to come into the field of graphic design.
Yeah, absolutely. You know, standard story, I've always been an artist. I've always drawn. My minor in college was drawing, fine arts. My major was in psychology and then I went for a master's in social work.
I started out oriented toward clinical therapy, but then got inspired by the political and policy side of the field. So I ended up specializing in policy work and nonprofit administration which is that meta level, or we would call it ‘grass tops,’ work. I've worked with Planned Parenthood, Susan G Komen and local queer centers in central Missouri doing advocacy work, grassroots organizing, that kind of thing. In Missouri, we were working on medical health care for all in 2010. It took us more than 10 years to get there and now they're trying to dismantle it, even though it passed a vote last year. I can go down a rabbit hole with all the political stuff. That’s something I'm still very passionate about that definitely informs my work. I do a lot of protest poster printing.
As most social workers would tell you, it's a difficult field. You're not paid well, you're not given a lot of time off, it's very stressful and it's heavy to watch all of the stuff going on in the world. I didn't even quite make it 10 years before I had burnout pretty bad. It felt like ‘I don't think I can keep doing this in the same way that I'm doing it.’ Some of that too was just personal and financial. I graduated right into the 2008 crash so I was competing for jobs with people who had 10-plus years of experience and had lost their positions. It became really difficult, even with a master's degree, to pay bills. It got to a point where I thought I might actually do better working as an artist and I’d be in a better place mentally. And sure enough, that's where I'm at now.
I went back to school for graphic design initially because, although I love art and illustration, I need to be able to pay the bills. So, I can pay the bills with graphic design. Then once I really got into graphic design and web design I was like, ‘Oh yeah, no, oops. I'm in love with this, I'm here for this as its own thing, not just as a sure that'll pay the bills kind of thing.’ And graphic design is where I found the letterpress.
The more I learned and grew in graphic design, I began to realize that it’s about psychology and human interaction and communication and all of the things that were important to me about social services and social work. It can absolutely be a tool for uniting or dividing people. “Words have meaning, type has spirit,” is a quote from Paula Scher. And we see that all around us. Everything now is through the lens of our social media and there's so much crap that gets created to influence us one way or another. That's the deep dive theoretical work piece of what draws me into graphic design. I found that it is a very similar skill set, but it's a much healthier way for me to approach having these conversations about our larger social issues and how we connect with each other; how we build community, how we talk about social issues. There's a long history there, especially in the United States. We talk a lot about Ben Franklin and his printing press and the influence that had on our country as it was being formed- for good and for ill. There's a long history of using printing to influence things in our country and I'm interested in that.
The action of setting and printing things is sort of a magical action and a substantial action. Psychologically, we have this idea that if you see something in print, it's more real somehow or more correct.
How do you approach creating a text-based piece? Are there considerations that you take into account as you're choosing the words or creating the composition that come from your social science background?
What comes to mind are a couple of posters I made for a poster exchange initiated by Partners in Print, a Seattle-based print collective. The prompt was ‘Hope is an action;’ the idea being that hope is not just something we think about, it's something we do.
The poster, “Hope is an Action II,” came out of that prompt. If the idea is that hope is an action then take one, take an action. I set the print up to be like those posters with pull tabs which was partly influenced by the machinery itself. I had just restored this really beautiful perforator at the print shop and I just wanted to perforate something. So it's a combination of the prompt and wanting to play with that tool. Again, the vintage equipment inspires me.
I don't think of myself as much of a writer, but I do think a lot about word choices and the historical context of the word choices. I enjoy plays on words and can be a bit of a dad joke kind of guy sometimes. Double meanings get my brain churning.
The poster, “Be Gay Do Crime,” was a follow-up to “Hope is an Action II.” It’s very relevant to everything that's going on right now. The phrase itself is a reference to a meme but the point is that those crimes are essentially existing. It’s cynical and a bit bitter but, in reference to the history of the queer community, the fact is that these things have been crimes until very recently and they're trying to make them crimes once again. This is where we are at the moment and I’m using a bit of dark humor to highlight that. All of us need that, a little bit of a laugh, but also a little bit of a f*ck you.
Writing doesn't come easily to me. I will sit there and churn on words and particular word choices, which word I am actually going to set to print. The action of setting and printing things is sort of a magical action and a substantial action. Psychologically, we have this idea that if you see something in print, it's more real somehow or more correct. We think, ‘They wouldn't print that if it wasn't true.’ But they do all the time actually. That’s true of photography history too. We think, “Oh, it's a photograph. It can't be faked.” But photographs are faked all the time and have been faked from the very beginning. People have been Photoshopping things forever. I love the idea that even with these historical processes like photography and printmaking, we still make up our own narratives. I think about what narrative I’m choosing to make by setting specific words on paper.
In many ways you can't extract place from the art that people are making but whether or not it's conscious is always the question.
What artists or artist movements are you inspired by?
The ones I often reference in my artist statement are Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger and Glenn Ligon. You've probably seen each of their work somewhere in the world, whether you know it or not. Jenny Holzer is largely just text, Barbara Kruger and Glenn Ligon do bring imagery into their work as well. They have a very graphic design-based, text-based, straightforward kind of style with heavy elements of social commentary and satire. That's definitely where I like to live with my work as well.
There's a long history of caricature and illustration and woodcutting from around the Enlightenment period and even going back to old medieval manuscripts. The term manicule, manicule for Manicule Studio, comes from the pointing hand used in Victorian posters which originated in illuminated medieval manuscripts. There's a lot of weird marginalia, weird little illustrations and stuff, in medieval manuscripts that I really love. That little pointing hand comes up a lot in those illustrations as a way to bring emphasis to something. So for me, that's where that comes from, the use of art to bring attention to something.
Current people I like… Lisa Congdon is a well-known popular one and then I also really like Devon Blow. I see a lot of their work all over the internet.
It seems like you've gotten the chance to move around a bit and show your work in different places. I’d love to hear about your experiences and if any places stuck out to you as really influencing your work.
I have traveled a fair bit and I lived in a bunch of different places growing up, mostly along the East Coast, Midwest. My family moved and traveled a lot as I was younger. This is the farthest west I've ever been, and I'm excited about that. I wouldn't say there's any one place that particularly influences me, but I do think having had the ability and the privilege to have experienced all these different places does inform my work in that it shapes my perspective on the world. But I wouldn't say there's one particular place.
I am interested in place and the history of place but maybe I need to think more deeply about this. Because, for example, I've been living and printing in St. Louis for the past five years or so and there is a strong history in St. Louis of both printing and protests. So all those protest posters that I was printing, place probably did influence that. Now that I'm out here and surrounded by nature, I can feel that I want to bring more nature into my work.
An artist is coming to my mind who's local here, not to say that my work would in any way reflect or be derivative of his, but the artist that's coming to mind is John Isaiah Pepion. He’s a Plains Indian artist from the Piikani Band of the Blackfoot Confederacy whose work is often on ledger paper. I really, really like his work. There is history in his work of place and people, the displacement of Native peoples in this area. By using actual ledger paper, that literal piece of paper, and then bringing nature and beauty back into that piece, he takes this physical thing and transforms it. That's inspiring to me.
How do you use art to talk about the history of place? How do you use nature to engage people with where they are and where they want to go? In that way, place is something that I think about. I haven't thought about it that explicitly and I think I'm going to be churning on it for a while, so thank you for that. In many ways you can't extract place from the art that people are making but whether or not it's conscious is always the question.
Kay Lyle of Manicule Studio is The Making Place's April Maker of the Month.
Learn more about her Intro to Letterpress Workshop here.
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