Fluoro Wedding Invitations

Designers often ask us if we will work with them if they supply the design. Even though we are a fully fledged design & letterpress studio, we don't exclusively provide a combined service. Sometimes we design & print and sometimes we letterpress print only. So the answer is a resounding 'Yes - we love working with your designs.'

When we first saw this amazing wedding invitation design we knew we had a winner on our hands. It is hands down, one of our all-time-fave letterpress jobs and a fantastic example of what can be achieved when a graphic designer works with a letterpress printer to create something bigger than both of us.

"Yes - we love working with your designs."

Cat approached us with her absolutely cracking wedding invitation design. Her font combinations and typesetting walk that fine line of balancing the informal and formal simultaneously. Her design imparts a sense of movement, fun and frivolity and yet still manages to capture the importance and gravitas of the occasion. Not an easy feat to achieve.

Cat mentioned that she wanted to achieve a two-tone result. This is actually a problem for the letterpress process. Letterpress cannot print tones or tints very well on the cotton papers required for a wedding invitation. Letterpress is best at printing 100% solids colours.

To try to explain that a little better in non-printer terms, the letterpress process is more like house painting. You mix up a paint colour you like and you paint that onto your walls. You cannot all of a sudden make that paint 50% lighter - you can only paint in 100% of that colour. So it would be impossible to paint your walls in 100% orange and 100% red and have those colours blend together seamlessly.

And so how did we achieve that result? We incorporated a seldom used printing technique called split duct printing. What is actually happening is that we have placed two inks in the ink reservoir (duct) on the press at the same time. This ink has to travel down a series of rollers in order to reach the printing plate with the design on it. As the ink travels down the ink train, the ink is gently mixed together to create the effect of one colour blending smoothly into the other.

You can see it in action in this video below.

And just to make the blend a little trickier, we used a fluorescent orange and fluorescent red ink. Traditionally, fluorescent inks work best on gloss papers because the surface is smooth and shiny enabling the ink to sit evenly on the surface creating maximum impact on the eye. However, when we try to print onto a textured uncoated paper like our Gmund 100% Cotton (featured in the photos), the uneven surface diffuses the light reflecting from the ink into your eye, which makes the ink look dull rather than vibrant.

But it just so happens that we know a mad cap ink chemist who is a bit like 'Q' from James Bond - white lab coat donned and always creating experimental things for testing. He had been working on a new type of fluorescent ink and we jumped at the chance to road test it. And the results speak volumes for his genius. The colour leaps from the page! And we love the way the light and shadow interact when the typework is impressed into the paper creating that depth and dimensional effect. Just a wonderful project to work on overall.

Note: We get so many comments from designer about this font stack - it is proving to be a real trend-setter. We can put you in touch with Cat if you would like to know more about her design.

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Fluoro Edge Painted Cards

At The Love Press, we love getting out the craft glue and safety scissors and experimenting with new embellishing techniques and improving upon existing ones. It had been bugging us for a while that whenever we did a fluoro edge painting job, the colours just looked a little lack lustre. We certainly weren’t achieving that 80’s fluorescent vibe that we were after.

So we rolled up the lab coat sleeves, bought every available fluorescent paint on the market and got to work. After a week of testing we had determined which one yielded the desired result ie the fluoro colour most likely to cause us to break into Wham’s Wake Me Up Before We Go-Go and dance around the studio whilst man-clapping.

With a bit more testing we refined the fluoro edge painting application method even further (top secret of course) and tested it to ensure we could consistently achieve the result. So once we were happy that we had nailed it, we just needed a real job to test in out on.

That day, an order came through for some letterpress business cards for Led By Design, a crack team of visual artists. The card was a nice clean design printed black letterpress both sides. Quite a nice job on its own, but knowing that the Led By Design crew understand the importance of communication pieces with impact, I thought they might be a good candidate for some fancy fluoro edge painting. Luckily they agreed!

#EdgePainting #EdgePaintedCards #FluoroEdgePainted #FluoroPrinting #Letterpress #LetterpressPrinters #LetterpressBrisbane

Laser Cut Business Cards

Everybody loves lasers! Lasers immediately conjure up thoughts of Imperial Storm Troopers bearing down on rebel forces, a doctor performing life changing eye surgery or for the less imaginative, the scanning of your barcodes at the supermarket. Lasers are pretty much everywhere these days and the print industry has also found a way to harness their power.

So what is laser cutting? Laser cutting is a technology that uses a laser to cut or etch materials like glass, perspex, aluminium and paper, leaving a high quality finish on the edge. The shape that is to be cut must firstly be digitally generated on a computer and then the laser head follows this shape during the cutting process. You can see it in action below.

So why laser cut instead of diecut? With these Pure Interiors business cards there are three layers of paper glued together in a process known as triplexing. Two layers of 350gsm Colorplan Dark Grey and a layer of 450gsm Boxboard to give a super chunky 1150gsm result.

Because the cards are so thick, if we were to attempt to diecut, the pressure of die on the paper would cause buckling of the cards at the edges. With laser cutting however, we can simply cut through the three layers without putting any pressure on the paper itself. Just a matter of setting the intensity and speed of the laser to ensure the paper does not get burned and away we go.

#LasercutCards #Lasercutting #LetterpressPrinter #LetterpressBrisbane #TriplexedCards