Beast Pieces

Well Crafted Coffee, Well Crafted Labels

This coffee label packaging was designed locally by Holmberg Design. Dogwood Coffee Company is a small coffee roaster based out of Minneapolis, Minnesota (and generously present at our last studio party.) They source, roast and serve some truly amazing coffees. And what is especially unique to the experience of Dogwood Coffee is the single cup brewing. Visit them and always expect a well crafted, fully realized flavor. And be sure to take beans home in one of these delicious bags. This is the good stuff, these guys love crafting coffee as much as we love letterpress.

We printed these with two colors – a red and a very light gray /nearly blind ink for the diamond texture. They are printed on our house label stock which is Strathmore Writing, Ultimate White Wove. This label takes a stiff impression and has a bit of tooth and texture that adds to the artisanal quality of letterpress. They are kisscut two up on an 8.5 x 11 sheet. They are cleverly designed to be end user friendly with use of simple rubber stamp imprints specific to the roasted microlots. Overprinting the stamp on the letterpress imprint gives the surface another layer of texture.

Also see the “Reserve” coffee labels we printed previously (when Dogwood was still a part of Bull Run Roasting) also created by Holmberg Design.

Published on March 14, 2011 in labels and Letterpress. 7 Comments Tags: blind, crack and peel, die, diecut, dogwood, dogwood coffee company, holmberg, holmberg design, kiss cut, kisscut, labels, minneapolis, Minneasota, MN, red, strathmore, texture, tonal, ultimate white wove.

SXSW Squarespace Skull Cards

This is a letterpress card designed by Jessica Raley at Bantam Design for Squarespace. They are busy handing them out at SXSW Music Festival in Austin this weekend.

And they took some time to print, seven passes through the press to be exact. Due to the card volume, we printed them on larger 13 x 20 press sheet 15up. They are printed on two paper stocks. Side one on Wausau Royal Complements Eclipse Black, printed with black, varnish, dark silver, light silver. Side two is Mohawk Via Scarlet Red printed with varnish, black and light silver. To hide impression show through we pasted them together after printing, adding thickness and rigidity with another 100lb cover sheet in the middle. The final three ply paper thickness is 280lbC. We trimmed the sheets down and edge colored them in a metallic silver.

Also check out the striking Squarespace business cards we’ve posted about previously.

Published on March 12, 2011 in Business Cards, Invitations (non wedding) and Letterpress. 6 Comments Tags: 280lbC, 3ply, black, cards, cougar, coupon, cylinder, edge color, edge tip, edges, heavy, Heidelberg, impression, ink, large press sheet, Letterpress, metallic, mohawk, red, show through, silver, skull, solid, thick, thickness, tonal, triple, triplex, wausau.

Matching Paper To Sand

Sometimes when you run an island in the Bahamas, you’ll need a business card that reflects the surrounding beauty. This textural business card was designed by island director Cathy Daly for Musha Cay, David Copperfield’s lush 700 acre tropical retreat.

These cards were letterpress printed in three colors on an appropriately sandy colored Mohawk Loop Antique Vellum Husk, custom pasted to a 220lb weight. Note how the island seal is printed in with just tonal transparent white ink. After the letterpress printing, these sheets were pasted back to back with digitally printed sheets (with the island beach image) for a 320lbC final weight. Those sheets were trimmed into oversize 4 x 2 inch business cards and edge colored in a matching blue.

Published on March 8, 2011 in Business Cards and Letterpress. 8 Comments Tags: 220lb, 320lb, antique vellum, bahamas, blue, business card, david copperfield, digital, heavy, husk, ink, islan, loop, luxury, mohawk, musha cay, oversized, recycled, sand, sandy, textural, thick, thickness, thump factor, tonal.

Typography Deconstructed Poster

Ready to pump up your type vocab and sound smart next time you bump into Matthew Carter? Well then, this beauty of a poster designed by Drew Binkley at 38pages is just for you. They have a nifty site called typographydeconstructed.com with great typographic anatomy content. This poster is for sale there too – ready to release the inner type freak in all of us. Get yours with promo code SOF2011 good for $10 off.

We letterpress printed this poster on our Heidelberg 21 x 28 cylinder. You can see in the photo details, the polymer plate is positioned in the press on a custom made full size 21 x 28 inch Boxcar Base. The poster is printed with extra tight register (no trapping) on 100% cotton Crane Lettra Fluorescent White 110lbC and trimmed to a final size of 16 x 24 inches.

Published on February 28, 2011 in Letterpress and Posters. 8 Comments Tags: anatomy, black, blue, crane, cyan, deconstructed, flo white, large format, letterform, Letterpress, letters, lettra, poster, teaching, terminology, terms, tight register, type, typography, vocabulary.

A Matchbook Made In Heaven

We designed this wedding invitation for the lucky couple that won our giveaway with Martha Stewart. It’s only too fitting that the couple we chose to work with will be jumping fires on their wedding night. Besides complimenting our studio name, their scheduled wedding night activities (get your mind out of the gutter) lends perfectly to the orange and white color palette featured by Martha Stewart.

Juan and Irma will be getting married in Madrid on the 24th of June, the night of “San Juan,” traditionally a night when friends and family gather to build bonfires and leap across them in celebration of the summer solstice. (We did some intense Googling and it appears that in many parts of Spain this is a party night not to be missed). They wanted to keep the invitations informal (reflecting the backyard bbq reception), to the point where it doesn’t even use the word wedding–we had to imply celebration and union strictly through the design.

With fire as a central part of the celebration, a matchbook format for the actual invitation seemed only natural. The whole letterpress printed suite is designed in physical layers, causing the viewer to interact as they unfold the invitation setting the stage for the matchbook sitting in the center of a custom frame. The invitation itself is a two and a half inch by three and a quarter inch matchbook that opens to reveal french folded text weight sheets (spanish on the front, english on the back), an intimate piece meant to directly reflect the fires that will be sparking that night.

The copy inside reads “Celebrating the arrival of the summer solstice (amongst other astronomical events),” so we created custom illustrations based around the sun, the moon and the stars to give the suite a celestial feel.

The wrap features the graphic sun inspired emblem with a smattering of stars making their way to a moon icon on the inside flap.

Several diecut papers and a pop of edge coloring create a custom built A7 size frame surrounding the matchbook invitation for mailing.

Published on February 23, 2011 in Design, Letterpress, packaging and Wedding. 6 Comments Tags: die cut, duplexed, edge color, edge tipping, french fold, invitation, invite, leader, lettra, martha stewart, match, matchbook, orange, pasted, spain, spanish, stapled, stationary, stationery, tonal, Wedding, white, wrap.

Letterpress Open House TONIGHT

Final reminder for our Love Machine Open House Party tonight. Hope to see you soon.

Leaving you with a beautiful thought about machines from Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin:

“Machines challenge certainty so well. They should not be able to move. But they do. They turn, and move, and never cease — there is always an engine going, somewhere — like generations of silver hearts they keep the faith of the world and stoke imagination in its continued and splendid rebellion.” Quote from “Winter’s Tale” by Mark Helprin ©1983

Published on February 11, 2011 in Letterpress and News. 4 Comments Tags: Letterpress, love machine, machine, machines, minneapolis, minnesota, MN, northeast, open house, open studio, party, press, printer, printing, twin cities.

Badges for Bruises Rollergirls Poster

Adam Hoganson designed this subtle and beautiful poster for the Minnesota Rollergirls. We letterpress printed these for the bout that took place this last weekend. The poster is an 18 x 24 three color edition on Wausau Royal Complements Natural 100lbC. A big congrats to our press operator and MN Rollergirl “Lizzy the Axe”. She was a brutally wonderful jammer during the bout. (And she printed the poster on our Heidelberg S cylinder 21 x 28)

A word about letterpress poster image size… We get a lot of designers that are surprised by the cost to print at this size. This is not silk screen printing and comparatively, the costs are nowhere near similar. Printing poster size things with letterpress can be an expensive adventure. One way to keep the cost down is to limit the image area since plating is charged by the square inch. (For example, a single plate at 18 x 24 will run about $250, just in plating costs for EACH color) On this poster even though the paper trim size is 18 x 24 the image area is only 11.5 x 16 making plating costs a bit more reasonable.

See a previous poster we printed for the Rollergirls here.

Published on February 8, 2011 in Letterpress and Posters. 4 Comments Tags: 100lbC, 18 x 24, adam hoganson, complements, edition, Letterpress, minnesota, MN, natural, plate, poster, print, printing cost, rollergirls, royal, wausau.

Point Form Business Cards

We recently printed these business cards, designed by the fellows at Point Form, a Canadian design collective.

A little tricky production was in order with their design. The paper we used is a 100lb French Poptone Sweet Tooth custom pasted (duplexed) after printing to 100lb French Poptone Lemon Drop for a final 200lb Cover stock. Pasting sheets after printing can add a little cost, but with a two sided card it is the best production move because we don’t need to worry about impression show through from a heavy letterpress imprint. Note that there is no indentation from one side to the other.

Published on February 2, 2011 in Business Cards and Letterpress. 2 Comments Tags: 100lb, 200lb, business card, duplex, french, lemon drop, pasted, pasting, solid, sweet tooth, tonal, tone on tone, type, typography, yellow.

Love Machine – Letterpress Open House

You are invited to a party! We are loving our machines with plenty of oil and our guests with plenty of other social lubrications. Join us as we celebrate our new office and press room with an open house on Friday, February 11th begining at 4pm. Come and see some letterpress action and talk shop. We’ll have a limited edition project on press as free gift to party guests. Hope to see you here soon.

Published on January 25, 2011 in Letterpress and News. 3 Comments Tags: love machine, minneapolis, minnesota, open house, party, press room, studio on fire.

Letterpress Wedding Giveaway

UPDATE

UPATE: 11.17.11 – Wow, well over 100 entries this past week! NO FURTHER ENTRIES ARE BEING ACCEPTED, WINNER TO BE ANNOUNCED ON THE MARTHA STEWART BLOG SOON.

As our first post of the year, we are excited to announce a co-sponsored wedding invitation suite give away. The goods: a luxury letterpressed wedding invitation suite inspired by the color palette in the newest issue of Martha Stewart Weddings, to be designed and produced by Studio On Fire, and featured on the blogs of both. That’s right, get your invites custom designed and printed- for free! There are a few requirements, so be sure to read the following:

- Wedding suite will be created in either of the following color palettes: white + orange or white + slate.
- Wedding suite will be printed the first or second week of February. Due to the quick turnaround you must have all of your information ready to go (date, location, hotels, times- anything you want included) as soon as we announce a winner- we will need to jump right into the design process. Winners will receive the final products no later than the beginning of March.
- Suite will (at minimum) include the invite, invite envelope, rsvp card and thank you card. Once we choose a winner we will discuss your specific needs and see what cool bonus items would work well for your day.
- Wedding materials produced will be featured as is (no blurring, no fake names) on the Martha Stewart Weddings Blog and BeastPieces.com, no exceptions
- Quantity is capped at 200 invitation sets, letterpress printing only
- The couple’s creative input will be considered, but ultimately final design considerations will be decided by Studio On Fire.
- The chosen couple will be responsible for any addressing and postage fees
- Studio On Fire will judge a winner based on the uniqueness of the responses
- Winner will be announced Monday, January 17th

How to enter:
Send an email (do not comment on this post to enter, and please, no calls) to
Contest at studioonfire.com with the following info:
(Being concise here is a must)
A quick paragraph that tells us the theme of your your wedding.

A couple sentences about you as a couple.

Which color combo you prefer (white + orange or white + slate)

And tell us what the last thing you ate was… just because we’re curious.

Published on January 11, 2011 in Letterpress. 4 Comments

Letterpress Love With Baker Associates

We’ve worked with BAKER here in Minneapolis on a few really fun letterpress projects over the last year or so. And they’ve designed some beautiful things for pressing. Most recently, their second installment of the bird themed holiday ornament cards rolled off the press. It is a little bird (a good luck Cardinal) with an ornate frame that die cuts and punches out of thick 60 point blotter stock. It is printed two color each side.

Last years card for Baker was a die cut bird ornament as well. The same production specs, but featuring a punch out owl.

Also in the last few months, we worked through the letterpress printing of the new Baker identity on their business cards. And is was quite the undertaking. They have an interesting post about the process of icon development here. Each employee has their own icon and each card has four color ways. With over 60 employees that was a lot of icons and business cards! They are a custom duplexed 200lbC black and white stock in an undersized narrow card format. (1 x 3.5 inches) BAKER is printed in silver on the black side and the white side receives the four different color variations.

BAKER is a Minneapolis based Branding + Design firm specializing in package design. On the web: bkrdsn.com or tweet: @bkrdsn

Published on December 20, 2010 in Business Cards, Holiday and Letterpress. 2 Comments Tags: 100lbC, 60pt, ahlstrom, baker, baker associates, birds, black, blotter, blue, business, Business Cards, cards, coaster board, coaster stock, coasters, color ways, custom, cut out, cute, cutting, die, diecut, duplex, eclipse black, green, hanging, heavy, Holiday, Letterpress, narrow, ornament, ornate, owls, pasted, printing, punch out, purple, red, thick, wausau.

Great Gatsby Business Card Poster

Heads of State designed this F. Scott Fitzgerald inspired poster, capable of bringing tears of joy to English teachers and designers everywhere. It is an epic layout project containing 32 calling cards of fictitious Great Gatsby characters. Each card is its own nugget of typographic excellence modeled after 1920′s social stationery.

This was an ambitious letterpress printing. (did we mention 32 card designs up on a sheet) With its large size, four ink colors, full dry back between each color, tiny type plus full solid areas, tight register and heavy stock this took some patience on press. We printed on French Poptone Sweet Tooth 140lb C – a massive 20 x 26 press sheet trimming down to the final 18 x 24 inch poster.

The poster is for sale at the Heads of State store

You can also check out our post on previously printed business cards for Heads of State.