Studio On Fire // Design & Letterpress Blog
AIGA Minnesota put together a short video about our studio on their emerging designers web site. Check it out:
emergingdesigners.minnesota.aiga.org
“Studio On Fire is a design workspace and letterpress printer in Minneapolis, MN backed by in-house modern letterpress printing capabilities…”
Thanks AIGA Minnesota. And a massive thanks to SevnthSin for putting this together. (You made my rambling sound coherrent!)
A bilingual wedding can be challenge. The bride needed invites in English and the groom needed Spanish. The simplest solution for this wedding in Mexico was both English and Spanish versions of the invitation. We designed and letterpress printed them with a textural yet refined style – a geometric border with a simple hand lettering for the couples names. The stock is Canalleto Grana Grossa 111lb Cover (20% cotton) and is printed in three match colors. The overprinting creates additional dimension and colors in the flower and vine motif. To integrate the invites closely with envelopes, we matched our ink colors to existing envelope colors from French Paper’s Poptone color line – orange fizz and limeade. Salud!
We like our printing aprons, but sexy and sustainable clothing fits nicely with letterpress too. We were asked to designed and produced these new garment tags and business cards for new LA based label – Degree Six Clothing. And they are sexy indeed, but in an earthy conscious sort of way.
They create garments with consciously produced fabrics, so for our part we used a fully recycled material for the project. Notable is the 100% recycled 80pt book board. Also, the cards are long and narrow – only half the size of a typical business card. We worked with the Hot Snot screen printing shop to put down our fluorescent green plant pattern on sheets of the book board. Since screen printing ink is opaque, we got a nice bright green color on the darker colored board. Then we letterpress printed metallic 877 for the text. Screen printing does well on a lot of things, but it does not like tiny type. The tags were hole punched, trimmed to size and edge colored with the signature fluorescent green Degree Six color. The board thickness is great for flashing a glimpse of the accent edge coloring. Can wait to see them in stores soon.
Bon à Tirer // Taken from the French, “bon à tirer” is a technical term used by printmakers to indicate the final proof of a print, the standard against which all others in the edition are judged.
We got some shirts printed up by the Hot Snot Print Shop for the AIGA event last week. We’ve also got a bunch left- so we’ll be putting them up on our web-store next week along with the “Birds of Sadness” poster Ben did for the Sweet Hair show a few weeks back. We’ll be sure to let all you fine folks know once they’re ready to be purchased.
The shirt was designed with our good old tabletop manual proofing press, strong wood type and a steady hand.
Last night we had a rockin’ time showing off our studio space and letterpress shop to Minnesota AIGA members. A big thanks to Minnesota’s AIGA chapter for giving us the opportunity.
We talked about the relationship of letterpress and design, did some Q&A, drank some Pabst Blue Ribbon and wrapped up the event with a little coaster project on press. Take a look at the coaster sheet – it’s 60pt Ahlstrom blotter paper. We pre printed a couple colors before people arrived. Then, we had a different color set up on both of our Vandercook presses. Everyone got to pull a couple prints, then we die cut the sheet into the set of four coasters. Lots of paper touching and good times had by all. Thanks Kayd Mustonen for taking some pics to share.
We just got these suckers back from Ideal Printers over in St. Paul- designed by SOF and offset printed (feasibility and cost issues made it much more reasonable for offset) for The College of Visual Arts- in St. Paul as well.
In order to make the colors on this guy pop as hard as possible we swapped out the standard CMY inks with their florescent equivalent. The actual design process was one of the funnest yet- we took various wood type and ran scrap paper through a little tabletop proofing press and immediately sprayed with our press wash-up solvent and then isopropyl alcohol to make interesting splatters / streaks / clouds / etc. The solvent and the alcohol has the same effect when mixed as gas and water.
We worked with Vermont couple Dana and Katie to design and letterpress print their wedding invitations. They had a custom silhouette using their own hands to make a heart shape produced by Le Papier Studios. We used this motif throughout the invitation stationery. The soft cotton paper and bright blue silhouettes are contrasted with a simple recycled brown bag envelope and typewriter style navy typography – just the right balance of a raw yet refined style. The invites are printed in a square format with 2 inks on Crane Lettra, 100% cotton stock. All the cards were letterpress printed together on a 13 x 13 press sheet for cost effective production.
Dana and Katie are excited to be on the cusp of history, celebrating just after Vermont legalizes gay marriage on September 1st. Congrats!
Toot toot! Our Design Camp system for last summer’s event (designed and letterpress printed by SOF) has been making the rounds in the local and national design competition circuit- and lucky for us, doing quite well.
So far we got in at the AIGA MN show, the AIGA National show, and Print’s Regional Annual- and we couldn’t have done it without our copywriter on the project, Riley Kane, illustrator extraordinaire Jenna Brouse, Jeff Baker at Shapco and Dave Lundell at Anchor, Aleks Stancevic and for the Minn. AIGA for givin’ us the darn thing in the first place.
It took about 3 months to design this sucker from the ground up and another month (thereabouts) to mash pretty paper with big greasy machines until this came out:
The Wall. Its up- in all its magical glory. So special, so tasty.
There’s a better half of a thousand cans up there and darn near all are (diligently) cracked open from the bottom, preserving the original seal. Also out of all the cans hanging, there’s only a handful of duplicates. We are quite proud of this assemblage of our cultural history and all of us, at one time or daily, have to be reminded to get the hell back to work and stop staring into abyss of an unfortunately long-gone and better era.
Have a good weekend everyone- and for all those in America, “Don’t blow your hands off.”
Gems: (Note late 1970′s “Grain Belt Extreme”)
We designed and letterpress printed this poster for the Sweet Hair poster show featuring 37 Minneapolis artists. All prints are hair-inspired, handmade and created just for this show. A portion of proceeds benefits Locks of Love. It hangs at the Art Minion Gallery in Northeast Minneapolis until mid July. If you love hair, check out the Sweet Hair site.
Our 18 x 26 poster is a single color printed on 220lb Crane Lettra Pearl White. The type intertwines with a .30 point stroke that flows throughout the poster, making a nice deep impression on the cotton stock. The quote is a Chinese proverb that reads “You cannot prevent the birds of sadness from passing over your head, but you can prevent their making a nest in your hair.” If there are any left when the show comes down at Art Minion, we’ll sell them on our site.
A little design and print job we just wrapped up. Robot Deer. Enough said.
Rotate an eyeball towards that real small type on the front- 1.5 point type, whew.
This is a CD package we designed and letterpress printed for Erik Brandt with illustrations by Andy DeVore. He put this CD together after spending a year teaching in Hungary. The structure houses both a fold up lyric sheet and a CD. We printed the packaging with two ink colors on 140lb French Poptone. The design keeps cost down because the panels all print on one side only and the fold up design allows for a do-it-yourself assembly. We finished it on our 13 x 18 Windmill with unique shaped die cuts on the flaps.
