Studio On Fire // Design & Letterpress Blog
These over sized plaid pattern business cards were designed by our good friend Mark Saunders for his new solo creative venture PlaidLab. They use some great vibrant colors and the overprinting inks make rich and saturated secondary colors.
We letterpress printed them on heavy 220lb Cover Crane Lettra Pearl White. We usually run smaller custom business card orders two cards up on a small press sheet, so it was easy to provide some variety by including two different patterns. The magenta color is the same on both cards, but a color change from orange to blue on one plate gave the cards even more variety. One thing we did to keep the quality of the type crisp and punchy was to print it as a separate pass. By printing the same color in two passes we could run the large graphic plaid with heavy ink density and light ink density on the type. Mark was shooting for something about the size of an iphone, so the final cards were round corner die cut to an over sized 4.5 x 2.25. See comparison pic alongside a standard 3.5 x 2 inch business card for scale.













colleen
August 4, 2010 at 1:11 pm
these are so amazing!
kerri-lynn
August 4, 2010 at 1:38 pm
wow, these are ridiculous. and by ridiculous, i mean fantastic.
Mark
August 4, 2010 at 1:47 pm
Awesome work, guys. I’m verklempt. Thanks for blogging these!!
Donna
August 4, 2010 at 7:42 pm
Impressive! And that detail is hard core outta control—-they actually look like fabric swatches!
Erin
August 6, 2010 at 5:01 pm
These are insane!
Emilie
August 9, 2010 at 3:26 pm
Sweet baby Jesus, I LOVE THIS BLOG. I want to eat it for breakfast. You guys slay me with how talented you are. The plaid business cards may be the second best thing I have ever seen (the “double rainbow” video trumps ever so slightly). I doubt I will ever need wedding invitations or packaging design, but maybe I’ll get you to design a new pup announcement for me when I adopt my next dog biscuit.