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.