The Studio On Fire 2010 Calendar is now available on our new web site. This calendar is a decade marker for us. Established the end of 1999, Studio On Fire began letterpress printing in a cold Minnesota basement. Our first press occupied a spot between the boiler and the litter box, and oh, how the studio has since grown. Now seven presses strong with a fully equipped studio space, we celebrate ten years as a bustling design and print studio.
This Tenfold Edition calendar is letterpress printed with four colors on a cotton-blend stock, each month beautifully illustrated by selected designers the world over.
Contributors:
Jan/Jul_ Studio On Fire
Feb/Aug_Cecilie Ellefsen
Mar/Sept_ Brian Gunderson
Apr/Oct_ The Little Friends of Printmaking
May/Nov_ ghostpatrol
Jun/Dec_ Rilla Alexander (Rinzen)
Published on
January 7, 2010 in
Design, Letterpress, News and Studio On Fire Products.
Tags: 2010, Brian Gunderson, brown, calendar, day-glo, Design, easel stand, edition, florescent, ghostpatrol, green, illustration, Letterpress, little friends of printmaking, months, pink, poptone, printing, rinzen, studio on fire, tenfold.
Not that a heart felt email blast or animated web message for the holidays isn’t all well and good, but as you may have guessed we are suckers for a good old fashioned ink on paper. The next few days, we’ll show some previous custom holiday projects we’ve letterpress printed in the hopes of inspiring your own letterpress holiday projects. The holiday card seems to be one of those notorious last minute tasks for creative types. We are already heavily into estimating custom cards for many designers. And as much as we love rushing last minute projects, earlier is always better and leaves many more production options available. Word to the wise, ask us early for an estimate on your project.
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Who says typographic characters don’t make delightful tree ornaments? This card was designed by Katie and Nate over at Eight Hour Day. The green combined with hot pink makes a unique holiday color combo. The card was die cut to produce two parts for a desktop Christmas tree, to be decorated further with objects on your desktop. It was letterpress printed on thick Fox River Blotter stock from Neenah Paper. Since the paper is produced without any surface sizing the blotter sheet has a more mottled appearance in how the textured surface accepts a large solid ink area like the green tree. This gives the printed piece some additional tactile quality. Fa la la la la, ooolala.
Published on
October 28, 2009 in
Holiday and Letterpress.
Tags: blotter, card, cards, christmas, custom, Design, die, die cut, eight hour day, flourescent pink, fox river, green, greeting, heavy, Holiday, Letterpress, neenah, paper, pink, printing, score, tactile, thick, tree, type, typography, unique.
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!
Published on
August 31, 2009 in
Design, Letterpress and Wedding.
Tags: 111lb, bilingual, border, canaletto grana grossa, cards, Design, english, flower, geometric, green, gruppo cordenons, hand lettering, invite, invites, lettering, letterpress wedding invitation, mexico, orange, printer, printing, spanish, stationary, stationery, texture, type, typography, vine, Wedding.
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.
Published on
August 27, 2009 in
Design and Letterpress.
Tags: book board, bright, business, Business Cards, cards, clothing, clothing label, colored, d6, d6 clothing, degree six, Design, fluorescent, garment tags, green, half size, heavy, hot snot, labels, painted, recycled, screen printing, tags, thick, tipped, typography.
This invitation suite was designed by the bride, Stacey Averbuch. It is an elegant invitation in it’s typographic texture, mixing a coarse script font with a finely serifed engravers typeface. The ink is dark brown letterpress on Crane Lettra cotton paper. A cement green envelope color from French Paper was used for all the envelopes in the set. Email Stacey if you really like the design and would like her to work on a custom stationery set for you.
This a good wedding tip: Colored Envelopes. We like the simplicity of adding color to a wedding invitation set by using a colored envelope. It’s a great way to put some color in the set without the expense of letterpress printing more color.
The same dark brown color is printed on both the cards and the envelopes. We printed the invite cards together on a single press sheet and trimmed them to size after printing. That keeps the cost of all the cards more friendly. Also, don’t forget to include a thank you card while printing your inviations. That saves time and money in the long run. We specialize in printing custom sets brought to us by other designers and event planners. Thanks Stacey for a sharp looking invitation.
Published on
April 30, 2009 in
Letterpress and Wedding.
Tags: brown, color, contrast, cotton, crane, custom, dark, engravers, envelope, estate, french paper, green, hamptons, invitation, invite, Letterpress, lettra, printing, script, serif, texture, tree, typography, vineyard, Wedding.
Adam Hudson Photo sent us these cards for letterpress printing. The unique narrow format really make them different in your hand. And the three color options of orange, green and gray on one side is a nice way to add some simple variety to an identity piece. We keep the plate set up on press and just add a couple wash ups to the printing process.
A thick 220lb cotton stock takes a beefy impression. When a two sided card is pressed with a solid color, we almost always print the solid side first, then the text. This makes for a better sculptural impression on a text only side. Putting an overall impression on a solid area has the effect of ironing the paper flat and will diminish any impression of artwork on the reverse.
Another ink effect we like on this card is the white ink on white paper. We are using a tinted white ink to create a nice subtle detail with just the right amount of contrast to keep it readable. Some times an inkless (blind) impression doesn’t have quite enough visibility to read clearly. We put a little bit of silver in the white ink to give it just the right amount of eye love.
Published on
April 22, 2009 in
Letterpress.
Tags: 220, adam, blind, business, card, cards, cotton, day, glo, gray, green, hudson, impression, ink, inkless, Letterpress, narrow, opaque, orange, photo, photographer, photography, solid, tinted, white.
Wedding invitations need not be all typographic. This is a nice change in pace from most invites that tend to focus more on type than image. And we love letterpress printing lots of color, so this artwork does the trick. It was designed by Sheraton Green over at CSA Design. The peacock image comes from the CSA Image collection – an easy $40 bucks to license for wedding invites.
Since CSA also designs all the French Paper stuff, they sent over 140lb Cover Poptone Sweet Tooth paper stock. We printed four PMS colors, with some really beautiful overprinting happening inside the illustration. These kind of solid areas are always a challenge for letterpress. Note how the solid areas are a bit “salty” in the ink coverage.
Published on
April 21, 2009 in
Letterpress.
Tags: art, bird, bright, cards, colors, CSA, Design, feather, french, green, image, invitation, invitations, invite, Letterpress, letterpress services, love bird, minneapolis, minnesota, orange, paper, peacock, pink, printer, printing, spot, thank you, trend, typographic, Wedding.
Edge coloring is an amazing addition to a letterpress project. These are a couple thousand cards stacked up, just completed for GS Design in Milwaukee. They designed these for their client Dohmen. The radial dots are a nice contemporary design on the face of the card and the sides are a matching vibrant green. They are printed in two PMS colors on thick 165lb Neenah Solar White.
We can match edges to any printed PMS color. And the effect looks at it’s best on stock 160lb or thicker. It’s taken us a few years of practice to get the edge coloring production process just right, so we are purposefully a bit elusive about exactly how we do this. It has something to do with unicorn tears and hens teeth. ;) The effect is much more subtle when seen as a single business card and always makes people take a closer look.
Published on
April 20, 2009 in
Letterpress.
Tags: 160lb, 165lb, accent, bright, business, card, color, coloring, contemporary, cover, edge, green, heavy, Letterpress, letterpress services, paint, pantone, paper, pms, printed, printer, printing, stack, stain, stock, thick, typography.
