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.
We turn some tricks in addition to letterpress and design. This little production trick may cause a full-on business card fondling session. We call it edge tipping, edge painting, edge coloring. We use the process to color the edges of cards, books, journals, notepads – anything with a thickness can be colored. Any Pantone color, including metallics, can be specified. For single cards we recommend stock of 160lb and up. We do this after printing and trimming the stock to size.
House of Monks is one of our favorite cards using this process. Her design takes the color printed on the face of the card and matches that same color on the edge. So simple and modern, we call that sweeeet.
Published on
February 13, 2009 in
Letterpress.
Tags: accent, books, Business Cards, coloring, edge, house of monks, journals, letterpress services, metallic, notepads, painting, pantone, pms, printing, tipping.
Letterpress can use Pantone colors just like other types of printing. We prefer to mix our own ink from Pantone base colors using the Pantone formula guide. This means we don’t have to buy a pound of ink when we really only need a small spoonful for the project. We mix ink to match other things too – like paper stock, fabric, other pieces in a business system produced on offset presses. We use soy based inks whenever possible. The important thing is remembering not to taste the ink.
