Monthly Archive for April, 2010

A Brooklyn Boathouse Wedding

Travis at Lifelong Friendship Society in Brooklyn designed these invitations for his wedding. We love the vintage-yet-modern style with beautiful art nouveau title typography details. The text for the main invite card is nested into the unique and detailed illustration. The elaborate illustration is complete with birds and bees, spiders web, stylized portraits, and lots of geometric love.

We letterpress printed with brown and gold ink on Pearl White Crane Lettra 110lb. The three cards were printed together (in really tight register) as a press sheet and trimmed to size. The linear artwork paired perfectly with the letterpress process, creating sculptural impression highly detailed press work.

Published on April 22, 2010 in Letterpress and Wedding. 2 Comments Tags: 110lb, art nouveau, boathouse, brooklyn, brown, crane, Design, geometric, gold, illustration, ink, invitation, invite, Letterpress, lettra, lifelong friendship society, new york, pearl white, protrait, registration, stationery, typography, Wedding.

Wild Air Letterpress Poster

This poster was letterpress printed for the Artcrank poster show here in Minneapolis, which opened this last weekend. Since much of this show tends to be image and graphic heavy, we wanted our poster to stand apart with lettering only. It is an excerpt from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Considerations by the Way, 1860. The full sentence is actually, “Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air’s salubrity.” (But “salubrity” is such an odd word and just didn’t work well in the design.) The lettering started as a hand drawn sketch, then refined in Adobe Illustrator. We printed with a photopolymer plate on Crane Lettra 300gsm Florecent White at 18 x 24 size. They are on display now at One On One in Minneapolis.

They sold well at the opening night and are still available. There was some confusion about them being sold out. They are $30, to be purchased at One On One Bike Shop.

You can also buy one, now for sale on our studio site as well. Cost is $40.

Published on April 13, 2010 in Design, Letterpress and Posters. 4 Comments Tags: 110lb, ARTCRANK, bicycle, bike, blue, Design, edition, flo wh, hand, large, letter press, lettered, lettering, Letterpress, lettra, poster, print, printer, printing, ralph, ralph waldo emerson, size, type, typography, unique.

A Good Party and A New Beast

A giant thank you to all the employees, friends and family who helped with our Open Letterpress Studio on Friday last week. Several hundred showed up and helped us crush through hundreds of hot dogs, a couple kegs and a couple liters of Jagermeister. We had a wall of letterpress work up, a couple machines running in the press room, new tee shirts for sale and our “new” press arrived that morning, just in from Germany. Really a good day of letterpress!

The new beast is a very clean 1950′s Swiss-made hand feed platen press called a Gietz – one of three that we know of in the USA. (Please reach out to us if you also have one of these machines, we’d love to talk shop.) We look forward to completing the electric installation (that plug just won’t work) and getting ink on press.

Published on April 12, 2010 in News. 6 Comments Tags: gietz, jagermeister, Letterpress, open studio, party, platen, presto, swiss, wall.