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Michael Stevens

@michael____stevens

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Yale GD MFA ‘26

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The New Ressourcement is a quarterly journal published by Word on Fire Academic, rooted in the French tradition of ressourcement theology. The design draws on the history of French theological publishing, pairing cover illustrations lifted from illuminated manuscripts with a type system evocative of early-twentieth-century French printing. by @michael____stevens

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a month ago

Did it! And with the best thesis group I could have possibly hoped for.

Grateful beyond words to my family for their love and support over these last two years, and looking forward to the next chapter with much joy and hope. taken in Yale University by @michael____stevens

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The title A Collection of Autograph Love Letters was inspired by a conversation with my thesis advisor, Andrew Walsh-Lister (@a___w___l), in which he said my projects often feel like “love letters to the source material.” The book is autographic in the sense that it is a record of real ductus—real graphein (the Greek verb meaning to write, to draw, to scratch, to inscribe, and the root of the word graphic). In a way that a human scribe never could, the plotter’s gestures did not distinguish between image and text—between drawing and writing. It was a fitting method of production for a book whose pages were designed as they were being written, and written as they were being designed. As I prepared artwork for production, I was continuously moving between modes—writing as I was typesetting, illustrating as I was drafting captions, proofreading as I was preparing images for pen-plotting. Ideation, design, and production, typically spatially and temporally separate steps, became a unified process. The clicking and chirping of the moving pen plotter provided a metronome as new spreads took shape—both assuring me of the book’s progress and marking the approach of the April 23 deadline like a ticking clock. There was satisfaction in the improvisational urgency and material immediacy. It felt perfectly intuitive to make the object in its entirety, and this forced me to reconsider the illustrated, autograph manuscript—a typology of object I had come to associate with a certain special-collections exoticism—as a form so natural as to be obvious.

During an advising meeting, I told Andrew I was thinking of pen-plotting my entire thesis book. “When else in your life are you going to pen-plot a whole book?” was his response. Later that day, I came back to the Atrium with around thirty BIC pens. taken in Yale School of Art by @michael____stevens

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4 months ago

A page from Imperfect Facsimiles, featuring a re-typesetting of De Aetna (1495) in Matthew Carter's Yale typeface, overprinted with a graph of Mount Etna's volcanic activity over the course of a year. The graph was printed in fifteen successive passes on a laser printer, allowing the toner to accumulate into a low-relief surface. I was interested in the possibility that the heat-based printing process might itself echo the volcanic subject matter: each layer of toner deposited, fused, and cooled, gradually forming a topographic terrain.

Special thanks to @artodd for the help photographing the book at the Yale Peabody Imaging Lab. taken in Yale School of Art by @michael____stevens

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4 months ago

So proud of this project! ⚡

Designed in collaboration with @camillegwise and @ellenfabini, POWERLINE documents Yale's 2025 Painting Thesis Exhibition. Section dividers introduce each artist through scans of scraps and detritus collected from their studios—little glimpses into the processes, references, and worlds behind each thesis. It was such a joy to honor these artists and their work. taken in Yale School of Art by @michael____stevens

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My thesis book, A Collection of Autograph Love Letters, was produced at my Atrium desk using an automated plotting machine and BIC Round Stic Medium ballpoint pens. Over the course of seventy-six pages, the book explores themes of historical form, trompe-l’œil, facsimile, and visual indistinguishability through a roughly chronological survey of projects from my time at Yale.

The book folds to A3 and was plotted on 70 g/m² Holmen TRND. Inserted CMYK pages were printed on 60 lb. Finesse Gloss by GHP Media in West Haven, CT.

Front cover: Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid, Johannes Vermeer, 1670–1671.

Back cover: Reverse of a Framed Painting, Cornelius Norbertus Gijsbrechts, 1670.

Special thanks to @nontsimutiti, @a___w___l, @alvinashiatey, @julian_bittiner, and my dear colleagues in the cohort for their feedback and encouragement throughout the project. taken in Yale School of Art by @michael____stevens

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5 months ago

Had the privilege of collaborating with the fiercely talented @ohlookitsgracehan and @yalepaprika on Paprika! Volume 14, Issue 4: World Building. In keeping with the theme, we built the issue from the ground up: three custom typefaces, 16 pages pen-plotted, then scanned and prepared for offset printing. taken in Yale School of Architecture by @michael____stevens

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Imperfect Facsimiles, 2025. taken in Yale School of Art by @michael____stevens

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7 months ago

taken in Yale School of Art by @michael____stevens

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a year ago

Continuing my documentation of a semester of book(let)s, here's a specimen I made for Renommée, my revival of a hairline Egyptian by Deberny & Cie. taken in Yale School of Art by @michael____stevens

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a year ago

Another project in my music notation class involved “adopting” a musical manuscript from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and writing a report based on direct, in-person observation of the physical object. I chose Beinecke MS 1159, a fragment of a neumed medieval gradual that was later repurposed as binding material for a seventeenth-century book.

What struck me most about MS 1159 was its diminutive size—the closed book measures just 105 ×140mm. To convey this scale, the Riso-printed cover of my report includes a reductive, actual-size diagram tracing the manuscript’s footprint. taken in Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library by @michael____stevens

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a year ago

Quartet for Audience-Composers by @michael____stevens

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a year ago