Tag Archive for 'printer'

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Birds of Sadness Letterpress Poster

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.

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Published on June 30, 2009 in Completely Unrelated, Design, Letterpress and Printing Tips and Tricks. 26 Comments Tags: 220lb, art minion, birds of sadness, chinese, deep, Design, edition, hair, hand lettering, impression, Letterpress, lettra, line, locks of love, poster, printer, printing, proverb, sweet hair, thick, thin, type, typography.

Serious Foodies Business Cards

We just love folks that can blur the line between the disciplines of design and illustration. Jessica Hische is certainly one of those rarities. Be sure and check out her site for more great hand lettering and typography. She designed these business cards for new project by Mischa and Jacob DeHart called Culinary Culture – A Site for Serious & Aspiring Foodies.

We letterpress printed these cards on 220lb Crane Lettra, 100% cotton stock. They are printed three colors on the logo side and two colors on the text side. Additionally, the logo side needed the dark red run as two passes – something we often do in letterpress when there is a solid area of color and text on the same plate. The heavy ink density needed to cover a solid versus the light ink density for text lets the type remain crisp and the solid run as saturated as possible. (That means this piece of paper ran through the press six times – four on front, two on back.)

And of course they just wouldn’t be complete without some edge coloring. These have a contrasting green edge which is nice and noticeable on the thick 220lb stock. We usually recommend edge coloring be applied to stock heavier than 160lbC. Coloring can be applied to thinner sheets, but the effect is more pronounced with thicker paper. _0000_culinary_culture_business_cards

Published on June 29, 2009 in Letterpress. 10 Comments Tags: 220lb, business, card, cards, cotton, crane, culinary culture, Design, edge, edge coloring, edges, handlettering, heavy, illustration, jessica hische, Letterpress, letterpress business cards, lettra, painting, printer, printing, serious foodies, thick, tipping, type, typography.

Hello Letterpress Operator – Join Our Studio

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Studio On Fire is hiring for a full time Letterpress Operator position becoming available soon. Another of our letterpress gurus is moving onward to grad school. This is a chance to join our unique letterpress team. Other than our insane focus on detail, we are a small and easy going team of designers and artists committed to excellence in print.

You must have BOTH of these TWO requirements for consideration:

1. YOU MUST HAVE SIGNIFICANT EXPERIENCE OPERATING HEIDELBERG WINDMILL AND/OR HEIDELBERG CYLINDER PRESSES.

2. YOU MUST HAVE A FINE ARTS DEGREE IN PRINTMAKING OR A SUBSTANTIAL FINE ARTS, CRAFT FOCUSED BACKGROUND.

We care about craft. If you are a crafts person that loves the challenge of highly demanding production projects, this is the job for you. Look through the posts on this blog to see the kind of custom work that is typical of our press room.

We offer attractive compensation, flexible full time hours and health benefits.

To apply, email a description of yourself.

If this is not you, please spread the word to anyone you might know matching this description.

………………………………………………

NOTE: This is a post for experienced persons only. We are not hiring intern or entry level positions. Inquiries outside of the skill requirements of this post will not be contacted.

Published on May 17, 2009 in Letterpress and News. 3 Comments Tags: 10x15, 13x18, cylinder, Heidelberg, hiring, job, K series, ksba, Letterpress, minneapolis, operator, position, printer, printing, Windmill, work.

Ornamental Wickerwork: Carolina Wedding Invitation

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We figured we’ll keep going with the wedding invitation posts all this week.

This letterpress invitation is an exquisite balance of wickerwork ornament and type. The graphic ribbon creates a wonderful sense of dimension as it intertwines the ornamental panels. The script font combines with the serif and italic fonts to establish a Continue reading ‘Ornamental Wickerwork: Carolina Wedding Invitation’

Published on May 5, 2009 in Letterpress and Wedding. 5 Comments Tags: bird, brooke, cards, carolina, cleve, crane, Design, fonts, gray, invitation, invite, Letterpress, lettra, minneapolis, minnesota, north, ornament, ornamental, printer, printing, ribbon, rococo, script, serif, shell, smith, stationery, type, typography, wagoner, Wedding, wicker, wickerwork, yellow.

Birds Of A Feather, Letterpressed Together

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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.

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Published on April 21, 2009 in Letterpress. 6 Comments 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.

Electric Green Edges

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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.

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Published on April 20, 2009 in Letterpress. 12 Comments 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.

Skype, Twitter, Letterpress

Now it’s even easier to get in touch with us for your custom letterpress project.

For our international and long distance clients we can be reached on our skype account to discuss projects.

10 am – 5pm CST.

And if you need more, follow our tweets.

Skype: studioonfire

Twitter: twitter.com/StudioOnFire

Land Phone: 612 379 3000

Email: Request an estimate here

Remember, If you can send a PDF preview of what you have in mind we can offer you the best price and advice based on your artwork.

And here is a preview our new certificate of production seal:

Published on April 17, 2009 in Letterpress and News. 2 Comments Tags: business, cards, invitations, letter, Letterpress, minneapolis, minnesota, press, printer, printing, skype, stationary, stationery, studio on fire, twitter, Wedding.

One Card For Three People

The esteemed fellows at Wilderness in Portland sent us an unusually simple business card for letterpress printing. Rather than load up the card with four telephone numbers, an email, a fax, a twitter, etc – they all simply share the same card. A nice solution for keeping cost down too. Wilderness is the new design trailhead of Aaron James Draplin, John Phemister and David Nakamoto. We can’t wait to see what they do next.

Of course, simple design doesn’t always mean simple production. We printed these on 220lb Pearl White Lettra, 100% cotton. Flooding a dark color like this on letterpress is difficult to lay down and keep consistent over the course of the print run – especially on a stock that has some texture to the surface. When we print a solid like this, we generally go to our Paul Bunyan of Heidelberg Windmill presses – the 13 x 18. Even so, there is still a salty, weathered look to how a stock like this will take a solid coverage on letterpress. But we like it that way, it ain’t offset.

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Published on April 14, 2009 in Letterpress. 3 Comments Tags: 13 x 18, 220lb, business card, color, cotton, dark, DDC, Draplin, Field Notes, flood, Heidelberg, Letterpress, letterpress services, lettra, Nakamoto, OR, pearl, Phemister, portland, printer, printing, solid, stock, typography, white, Wilderness, Windmill.

Four Friends Letterpress Business Cards – Pt 2

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This is part two showing the production of business cards on our Heidelberg Windmill. Be sure and see Part 1 showing the finished cards.

We start with a high resolution film negative. The negative is used to expose the plastic plates. The plates are attached to an aluminum base and placed into the press. The press uses air suction to pick up a sheet of paper on the left side and deliver it into the press for printing. The printed sheets are automatically stacked in the delivery pile on the right side of Continue reading ‘Four Friends Letterpress Business Cards – Pt 2′

Published on April 7, 2009 in Letterpress and Printing Tips and Tricks. 4 Comments Tags: 10 x 15, 10x15, blind, Business Cards, card, fabien barrel, france, fred dauzat, french, graphic exchange, heavy, Heidelberg, impression, ink, Letterpress, letterpress services, limited press, minneapolis, minnesota, paper, press room, printer, printing, so goods, stock, thick, Windmill.

Mix Tape Letterpress Wedding Invitations

This invite pumps up the jam with an old school boom box and mix tapes. We love it for it’s fun factor and unique departure from most wedding stationery. The horizontal size is different, the illustration is super fun and the couples initials are even in the speakers of the boom box!

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Adam Ramerth at Lark designed this set. He did a fantastic job with the theme. And we must say, this is a demanding letterpress printing job. The registration is TIGHT. The two yellow and blue colors align critically over one another to create the green as they overprint. The large graphics with small type make Continue reading ‘Mix Tape Letterpress Wedding Invitations’

Published on April 5, 2009 in Letterpress and Wedding. 18 Comments Tags: adam ramerth, boombox, crane lettra, french paper, ghetto blaster, ink, invitations, invite, lark, Letterpress, mix tape, overprinting, printer, printing, stationary, stationery, tapes, two color, Wedding.

Affordable Letterpress Wedding Invitations – Part 2

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This is a follow up to our post about affordable wedding invites. These invites were designed by the bride and groom Stephanie Mead and Doug Kohnen at Docent Creative. Doug did some beautiful illustrations that turned out stunning on press. We letterpress printed and trimmed the cards for them. They are dense black ink on Crane Lettra 110lb Pearl White, 100% cotton. They sent us some photos of how they assembled everything with a tag and ribbon. They even silk screened their own envelopes. So, how do you get a gorgeous wedding invitation for a reasonable price?

Continue reading ‘Affordable Letterpress Wedding Invitations – Part 2′

Published on April 4, 2009 in Letterpress and Wedding. 7 Comments Tags: affordable, bargin, best price, bride, c, cards, cheap, cost, deal, designed, docent creative, groom, invitation, invite, invites, Letterpress, minneapolis, printed, printer, printing, sale, screen, sets, stationary, studio on fire, typography, Wedding, wholesale.