We promised this some time ago, and now here they are… Scans of nearly 200 of our vintage letterpress plates for your designing pleasure! These beauties make for great inspiration and tools and come to you in one easily downloaded zip file chock full of 300 dpi 50/50 bitmapped greatness!

Just click the pic below to download all 191 bitmaps!

ps. if you have a copyright claim on any of these, just shoot us an email and we’ll remove anything protected by copyright from the collection. these pieces are intended for inspiration only, use at your own risk.

Kwu stopped by for a few days and filmed what we do. Enjoy!

We approached our good friends at Makr with the idea of modifying a letterpress to print their wallet boxes and this is the awesomeness that ensued. Video by Jonpaul Douglass.

I remember when we first met with Julianne and Phil. The most striking image of everything shared about the wedding was Jewel’s yellow shoes. She wasn’t yet sure if they were for the ceremony, the engagement pictures, or maybe the post-wedding dash to the car – all she knew was that they had a place in the wedding and that she loved them.

Some of you may remember their save the dates highlighted in our blog post, The New Full-Color.

The couple wanted their printed materials to be a balance of playful & classic. Early on we landed on a truly vintage postcard for their save the dates & when it came time for the invitations months later – Julianne’s love affair with her shoes was still stuck in my mind. The meeting lasted less then 5 minutes. I quickly sketched a scene of the couple standing side by side with a bright popping yellow, highlighting Jewel’s shoes. Not your typical wedding invitation scene, but typical isn’t what the couple wanted.

I am especially in love with the tri-fold wrap. 110# Pearl White Lettra Duplexed to French Paper Lemon Drop, we experimented with a type of die cut that allowed the wrap to fold and expose the yellow paper underneath creating a tri-colored edge. A subtle detail that the most aesthetically sensitive recipients will surely appreciate. Ad a wax seal and the wrap is complete.

A collaboration with our friend & officemate, the talented Brian Boesch of Itchy Illustration, Julianne & Phil’s save the date and wedding suite are amongst our favorites that we’ve designed and printed this year.

click to enlarge

Here’s a little process we’ve been working on perfecting and wanted to share… Full wash letterpress cards.

SEE: The new incarnation of the Mama’s Sauce Business Card.
1-color black letterpress on 110# Florescent White Lettra duplexed to 140# Black Muscletone.

When you give the negative space in your design some room to breathe, surround it with enough coverage, and then build just the right counter you can really make a pillowy fluff that’s somewhat like a hybrid emboss.

All of the white type is knocked out from the plate, which affords us the chance to put as much ink on the plate as we want. That coupled with just the right impression allows us to get near 100% opacity on the color wash and create an inverted effect from the standard letterpress deboss. Had there been positive text along with the knockout, it wouldn’t be possible to get quality results on just one plate, as positive type can’t be slathered with ink. Why can’t we put as much ink on positive type as we do with knocked out? Science. We don’t know the science. It just is.

Lesson to take from this: Big color washes belong on their own plates. You can knock type or imagery out of that plate/color and not affect opacity much, but don’t even think about adding in positive area text or imagery on that plate/color unless you’re willing to either sacrifice opacity overall or severely bleed out the positive images… Want solid washes and good clean positive type on the same color? Then be prepared to pay to plate the two separately. There’s no wrong way to do it, I mean shoot, there’s something to be said for lowering the opacity on certain wash areas… We just want you to be prepared and in the know.

Signed,

-J. Walter Weatherman

Over the years we’ve amassed a collection of vintage letterpress cuts. These dies were mostly etched in wood or or copper and some are dated back to the late 1800′s! Within the collection are examples of typography, illustration, & just pure weirdness that we think you would die to have… So have them you will. You see, we’ve begun the process of printing each and every one of these vintage cuts. After they’ve all been put to paper, we’ll scan ‘em, zip ‘em, and have them available as hi rez bitmaps for your inspirational enjoyment! Sound good? I think so.

Here’s snap shot of the first sheet we ripped…

Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps was birthed in 1867 and and still operates today. They produced some seriously gorgeous hand-lettered maps back in the day, many of which can be found in the Library of Congress. These late 19th and early 20th century type treatments are well worth passing around for all the design world to be inspired by. See the entire scanned collection at BibliOdyssey. (Most of the images on that page link to hi-rez scans on Flickr!) There’s also a great little discussion/comment thread in BibliOdyssey’s entry on Typography vs. Lettering. Some real nerd stuff. Love it.

A few of my favorites.

You design something like this and send it over for a letterpress print on some tea-stained paper and I’ll be well inclined to give you a seriously hooked-up price on it!

So I’m going to try something that requires a little discipline here… If you follow us on the Twitter and Facebook, you’ve probably seen ‘What’s on Press…’ which is basically a snapshot of whatever we have on press that day. We’re pretty good about keeping up with it and people seem to like it. Well, we print a lot more than we get to share – so each week I’m going to try and collect everything in bulk and put it out there. I really feel lucky to work with all of the wonderful designers who we print for, and hope that sharing the work that goes through our presses will help inspire you to see the possibilities that still exist with traditional print mediums. I’ll be trying to make it a Friday thing – forgive me for jumping the gun a bit early this week! Enjoy this weekly update – and if you want daily’s make sure to follow our FB & Twitter. Both links can be found in the right column of this here blog.

Click to make them big. Enjoy.

After our last blog post, I thought it prudent to kick off the ‘no more full color printing’ roll by highlighting a of a full color print that we just did! “But wait, didn’t the last post just say that you’re going all screen print and letterpress?” Yes, yes it did. If you dig deep, you’ll see that there are cases where we’ll print full color prints still. One full color type of job that qualifies would be a full color letterpress print. Yes, that’s right. A 4-color process letterpress print.

We designed this save the date with the idea of the recipients getting something authentically old in their mailboxes. Something not just designed to look old, but authentically printed to feel like a save the date just found after aging decades in the wedding album of a couple married fifty plus years.

Printed on 140# French Muscletone – this save the date was both a blast to design and print!

run on a 1950 Heidelberg Windmill. the front ran through 4 times (CMYK)

the back of the print is a 1-color black letterpress print

look at those beautiful halftone dots!

We did it! We’ve finally thrown caution to the wind and decided to completely ignore the fact that we’re living in the new millennium! What does that mean you ask? Well, we’ve finally gotten to the point where we’ve shut down all things digital and henceforth will only be offering true boutique printing. Digital printers? Gone. Gang run flyers and promo material – not here anymore. We’re not saying that there’s anything wrong with modern printing methods or the need and/or desire to purchase them – we’re just saying that these products and processes aren’t for us anymore. Ours was a head over heels falling in love sorta thing with letterpress and serigraphy… While the falling happened quickly, it took us over 2 years to ween ourselves off of doing the actual digital processes that once paid our bills after deciding to do so.

Having made the switch, we feel more focused than ever. There’s a power to keeping processes to a minimum. It allows us to put sufficient time into what we love doing while staying the size that we want to be. It’s easier for us to manage a smaller foot print with less moving parts (unless you count all of the moving parts on a press!)

An example of our focused energy can be seen in the redirection of our website. Education, portfolio & connection have become this website’s primary focuses. Through our Tips & FAQ & Paper’s Explained pages, we hope to educate the good people of the design community on the specifics of designing for the processes that we handle – Letterpress & Screen Print. We hope that educating on these old world processes will help bring understanding and therefor breakdown any fear that may exist in the unknown. From there we hope that our portfolio (currently only visible on our quote page), will serve as inspiration for your designs. And then there’s connection. Of course we want to hear from you about working together, but we also want to continually grow our education sections – so please feel free to ask for tutorials to be added on anything relevant to designing for spot color work.

If you are at all interested in Screen Print or Letterpress, please take some time to visit the Tips & FAQ as well as the Paper’s Explained pages. Read them in their entirety. I dare you. If you do, I promise that you will a better designer, more education enthusiast, and/or satiated print nerd upon completion. If you’re not, then you’ll at least be able to tell us why not and what we’re missing. So there’s your invitation. It’s not pressed, but I do hope you take it, read it, and share it.