Tag Archive for 'duplex'

Finessence Photography Identity and Stationery

A husband and wife photography team, Finessence Photography had just adopted a new moniker and was looking for a fresh look when they approached us to handle their rebrand and produce their print collateral. While we spend a lot of time (happily) printing for other designers, it’s always a treat for us to act as the design firm behind a project that hits our pressroom.

For the business cards we created a custom stock, duplexing Crane Lettra Flo White 110C and Beckett Concept Mohagany 130C. The rich mahogany stock was a great way for us to counterbalance the ultra-feminine flourish filled “F” we created for the main logo with something a little more masculine. A custom brown ink was mixed to match the mahogany stock for the crisp letterpress printed type sandwiched between two bands of a sculptural teal pattern. We were also able to use one of our favorite finishing techniques, giving the slightly undersized cards a splash of teal edge coloring.

After completing the business cards we proceeded to create a photo folio and gift certificate to round out their set of presentation materials. The structure of the photo folio is a call back to the flimsy paper sleeves drugstore prints used to come in, but this version is a bit fancier. A custom steel rule die line was created, which included an interior diecut to hold the business card, letterpress printed with two inks, hand assembled and kept closed with a velcro closure.

We’re also pretty proud to say this system was a winner in the 2010 FPO Awards.

Published on July 26, 2012 in Business Cards, Design and Letterpress. 1 Comment Tags: 130c, beckett, bright white, brown, champagne, concept, crane lettra, custom duplex, custom letterpress, Design, duplex, edge coloring, finessence photography, finishing, flo white, Letterpress, mahogany, mohawk, photo folio, photography business cards, studio on fire design, teal, tonal, velcro closure.

Wondermade Marshmallow Packaging

Heads of State designed this identity and packaging for newly launched artisan confectioners Wondermade. They wanted this truly tasty marshmallow treat to be bold and fantastic on the crowded shelves at confection stores. With a unique assortment of flavors Wondermade needed a really special little box.

We letterpress printed this packaging assortment on French Papers. Using Speckletone Madero Beach 80lbC custom duplexed to six different Poptone 65lbC colors we achieved a 145lbC hefty box, still able to pack flat and fold up sturdy. On press, we used the same plates for all the boxes, just adding a color wash up on the diagonal strip plate as we rotated through the Poptone colors. That way the outside and inside of the package coordinate and the colors can be matched up with flavors. The boxes are sealed with a digitally printed label that Wondermade can add as they create new flavors. We think the letterpress craft of these boxes makes the ritual of opening and enjoying even more special. You should try them now.

Published on June 28, 2012 in Letterpress and packaging. 3 Comments Tags: 145lbc, 65lb, 80lb, artisan, box, carton, confection, die cut, diecut, duplex, florida, foodie, french, madero beach, package, pasted, pasting, poptone.

Venn Diagram Wedding

This suite, designed for Lindsay and Ben by their good friend Nicolas Carbonaro, is a great example of how to utilize overprinting inks. Since letterpress inks are not opaque, with the exception of metallics, a third color is created wherever two colors overlap–and in this instance, creating a great visual metaphor for love.

Another thing to note is the heavy ink coverage throughout the suite, so we required acknowledgment of our solid areas disclaimer before we proceeded into production. Printed with two inks, along with a blind pass, on Mohwak Loop Ivory Smooth 160c, the cards were duplexed after printing to create a hefty 320c stock.

Oh So Beautiful Paper also featured these, be sure to pop over to check out some additional pictures of the complete suite.

Published on June 26, 2012 in Letterpress and Wedding. 1 Comment Tags: 160c, 320c, blind, custom duplex, custom letterpress, duplex, ivory, mohawk, mohawk loop, overprinting, smooth, two inks, wedding suite.

Ilumini Photography Arts Business Card

Utilizing their existing logo, we designed and produced these cards for Ilumini Photography Arts, a wedding and fine art photographer based out of Hawaii. After creating a type lockup for the contact information we designed a custom diecut that would elegantly frame the ornate “I” logo.

Letterpress printed with metallic silver ink on Neenah Classic Crest Solar White 110C and a tonal varnish on the Wausau Royal Complements Eclipse Black 100C, these stocks were duplexed after printing before receiving the final diecut.

Published on June 19, 2012 in Business Cards, Design and Letterpress. 5 Comments Tags: classic crest, custom letterpress, diecut, duplex, eclipse black, letterpress printing, silver, solar white, tonal, varnish, wausau.

Thinner, yet sculptural.

A new product we’ve been asking for (for several years) has finally arrived. Crane Lettra is now available as a 90lb cover stock that is thick, but not so thick, and good for duplexing.

Being the paper nerds that we are, we busted out our calipers to compare the thickness of duplexed Lettra stocks. Our 220lb Lettra stock calipers at .039″ (40pt) and the new 180lb cover stock calipers at .031″ (30pt), roughly a 25% reduction. Available in fluorescent white, pearl white and ecru, we’ve added this to our list of preferred house stocks.

Our first project to hit press with this new stock was for director Nathaniel Freeman. Letterpress printed with a navy ink and a custom varnish, the 90lb pearl white stock was duplexed after printing–concealing the impression show through in the center of the card. The finished product features a nice sculptural impression, but with slightly less bulk to the card.

Published on May 3, 2012 in Business Cards, Letterpress and Printing Tips and Tricks. 2 Comments Tags: 220c, 80lb, business card, crane lettra, custom duplex, custom letterpress, duplex, freeman, Letterpress, lettra, pearl white.

When Designers Wed

Local Mpls designers Ross Bruggink and Jessica Keintz were married last year and we were pumped to print their invites that utilized beautiful eclectic typography.

An arrow theme, which we have a hunch is based on the bride’s wrapping arrow engagement ring, runs throughout this two color suite. Printed on Crane Lettra Fluorescent White 110C stock, the cards custom duplexed after printing, allowing us to run a heavy impression on the flood of pattern without completely killing the delicate type on the opposite side of the card.

Can’t get enough? They also created one of the coolest wedding websites we’ve seen.

additional photography provided by Ross and Jess.

Published on March 1, 2012 in Letterpress. 2 Comments Tags: 220c, crane, crane lettra, custom duplexed after printing, custom letterpress, designers, duplex, flo white, gray, lettra, minneapolis, printing, two color, yellow.

Howler Business Cards

Designed by Priest + Grace for Howler magazine, these oversize business cards are an amazing example of what a good design and a little tonal ink can do. Howler magazine is a quarterly publication for soccer enthusiasts in North America, so it only made sense for these cards to reference the size and color of actual penalty cards used in soccer.

There are several production techniques we used to successfully produce these cards. First, instead of printing all of the information blind we used a tonal ink color (a red ink on the red, yellow on the yellow). When something is printed blind it relies solely on good lighting conditions to be legible. Our solution is to print using a tonal ink, which creates just enough contrast between the artwork and the paper to make your contact information visible. Secondly, these cards were printed with fronts and backs up on the same sheet, duplexing the sheet after printing. This allowed us to run a heavy impression on press but then conceal the impression show through by duplexing the sheet back to itself.

The red cards are printed on Mohawk Via Scarlet Vellum 80C (duplexed to make 160C) and the yellow cards are on French Poptone Lemon Drop 100C (duplexed to make 200C).

Published on December 9, 2011 in Business Cards. 1 Comment Tags: custom, custom duplex, diecut, duplex, duplex after, french, lemon drop, Letterpress, minneapolis, mohawk via, red, round corners, scarlet, soccer, tonal ink, tonal varnish, yellow.

Olli Salumeria Business Cards

Yael Miller, from Miller Creative, designed these gorgeous business cards for Olli Salumeria, a salumeria that makes dry-cured salumi in Virginia. Though the outcome is, dare we say stunning, these cards posed several production challenges along the way.

As a general rule, we don’t suggest using letterpress when the design uses floods of color and require clients to agree to our Solid Areas Disclaimer before we will proceed with their job. To achieve a nice solid coverage of color we had to run the ink heavy across the card, thankfully we had added some additional stroke weight to the artwork in the pre-press stage so the line work would not fill in on press. Another trick we used was lightly wetting the sheet before running- this cuts down on the appearance of saltiness and variation across the color.

Flood aside, take a look at that red. Yael refers to it as “Ferrari red,” and we can’t say that we disagree. The design actually specified a Pantone GOE color, which is not a Pantone book we match to, but since we custom mix all of our colors we were able to match a swatch that was mailed in for reference. We took one of our base red inks and pumped it up with a hit of fluorescent red to really get the color to pop.

These cards are printed on Crane Lettra 110lb cover that we custom duplexed after printing to make 220lb. By duplexing after printing we were able to run the flood without completely flattening the text on the other side of the card (not to mention we love any excuse to make a business card thicker). A custom diecut, shaped to reference a ticket or label, finished off the cards in an unexpected, yet refined way.

This project can also be found on FPO, DesignWorkLife, and Miller Creative.

Published on December 6, 2011 in Business Cards, Letterpress and Printing Tips and Tricks. 3 Comments Tags: 110lb, Business Cards, crane lettra, custom, duplex, flood, Letterpress, lettra, red.

Winter Xgames Field Guide

We were excited to produce this booklet, designed and illustrated in-house at Target by Aaron Melander. This piece was created for guests of the Target Chalet as a field guide to the 2011 Winter X Games.

To begin the project, we worked closely on the paper selection. It needed to be thick and sturdy in feel yet thin enough to do some 180 degree folds to form the inside cover pocket. For the cover we duplexed two stocks after printing – off white on the outside and brown on the inside. The outside is 78lbC Canaletto Granna Grossa printed in tight register three color letterpress. A tonal pattern printed on French Poptone Hot Fudge 80lbC floods the inside.

One of our favorite commercial shops in town then helped with the interior printing and bindery. The gutt was traditional 4 color offset printed and saddle stitched at Shapco. Since the open edges of the cover are folded to the interior a final trim with the gutt in place was not possible. That meant the gutt pages needed to be stitched separately, trimmed to size, then stitched again into the cover.

Published on April 4, 2011 in Letterpress. 5 Comments Tags: 78lb, 80lb, aaron melander, bindery, blue, book, booklet, brown, canaletto, die cut, duplex, fold, french, gutt, hot fudge, Letterpress, offset, plaid, poptone, red, saddle stitched, score, shapco, stitch, taget, target chalet, winter, woods, xgames.

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.

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. 4 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.

Space150 V26 Business Cards

Just launched this last week was the 26th version of the Space150 identity. These guys change up their identity every 150 days. They designed this business card with lots of production love. Here are the production steps:

1. Custom pasted triple layer stock. Black with a white middle, 330lb total weight.

2. Black foil on the logo side

3. Letterpress printed metallic ink on the info side

4. Die cut with little “snake bite” marks

See previous Space150 card versions we’ve printed here and here and here.