A local photographer come to me with the charge of creating packaging for his business. He hands out a lot of CD’s when he does photography for clients and wanted a unique solution for how they are protected and presented. We created a custom die-cut and printed chipboard with red on one side and gloss varnish on the other. the result was a nice tactile piece that he could be proud to give his clients.
I do enjoy printing on a Vandercook proof press! Cylinder presses allow for uniform pressure across the entire surface of the print because you only have a small portion of the cylinder touching the form at one given time. On a platen press you dispurse all the impact pressure across the entire plate which reduces the overall impact pressure on a large form. The drawbacks of using a hand crank proof press of any kind is speed. You need to account for many more hours behind the press on large jobs because there is no way that you would be able to keep up with a motorized platen press even if it is hand fed. To put it in perspective, I can hand feed 1100 impression per hour on my Chandler & Price 10 x 15 platen press. To hand crank a Vandercook I can only pull between 200 – 250 with accuracy.
As I packed up samples I found a few things that I decided to take pictures of to show things that we have done in the past here at It’s Fancy. This is a custom baby announcement where the images tuck into a custom die-cut pocket with the announcement.
The great thing about die cuts is that they are reusable! This 1.5 inch circle was a great fit for my logo. I used some cast off paper from a previous project and ran a couple hundred of these. Printed one color on a 220# Lettra all cotton stock.
Invitation and insert: Letterpress Printed 2/0 (Light Green + Brown) on chipboard.
Envelope: 2/0 with green on green and a brown overlay.
I had a great opportunity to work on wedding invitations for a friend and his bride recently. There were no real constraints but a request for something poster like. They has a few colors that they liked but left the major choice up to me. After I played with standard 5″ x 7″ formats and nothing seemed to flow like I wanted it to so I started looking at #10 policy envelopes that opened on the end. Once I switched the format everything just started flowing together nicely for this custom letterpress invitation package.
Why is it that the last person to get taken care of is always myself. I have been meaning to reprint my business cards for months now but every time I have a moments free time I fill it with someone else’s project? I always tell people not to run out of business cards, not because I want to get more business (well kind of), but because you don’t want people to forget how to contact you after you have a face to face meeting. that is why I have decided that no matter what is going on in my life in 2 weeks I will get my business cards reprinted!
Enter the magical world of letterpress printing. I love these old videos that show how things should be done on a letterpress if people actually used in a fashion they were originally created for. In a modern digital age we have adapted them to use photopolymer or metal plates and found that they can place a beautiful impression into thick buttery papers. While I still use lead and wood type regularly I an very picky about how much pressure I actually want impose on them. If I am going for a nice deep impression I use a polymer or metal plate. That way I don’t ruin the lard to find handset type lead and wood that I have collected.
I had a incredible opportunity to print a wedding invitation designed by a bride from Spain. This invitation needed to be printed and shipped on a truncated timeline. It ended up being a 2 color 2 sided invitation with a blind deboss the front. We printed it on Lettra 110# Pearl White cover.
Sugar Skull Letterpress Poster – six colors
Size:11×17
Price: $35
Limited edition of 200, signed by both artists
Using the unique art of David Lozeau we hand cut linoleum, hand set type and ran multiple passes of ink for countless hours to create this incredible letterpress poster.
The Sugar Skull designed by David Lozeau combines Carnival, Day of the Dead, and tattoo imagery. Underneath it we layered multiple colors of wood and metal type to create a rich composition. This poster is limited to a run of 200 and is signed by both artists.
Gilbert paper makes a great, but expensive, line of papers. Esse is the line I am talking about. This wedding package uses the Pearlized Latte 100# textured cover. I LOVE IT! It however needs a bit of specialty ink so it can fully dry. We had to find a fully oxidizing ink because the paper will not absorb it. But the end product definitely has got some FLASH. This package consists of a Save the date, 3 part main invitation, reply postcard and thank you card. Needless to say it has been a HUGE learning curve. This project has definitely taken me twice as long figuring out the best way to run this paper on my presses. The great part is it was all worth it!
