It must be back to school season throughout the world. Two weeks ago we got more orders than we have had in our entire history, and they haven’t let up yet! Grady from the USA wanted 100 business cards, Ingeborg from Amsterdam wanted 50, a local church was looking for 200 invitations for a youth event, and Dexter from Norway ordered 25 correspondence cards. Needless to say we’ve been printing our fingers to the bone in our spare time.
Grady’s choice in letterpress business cards are our most popular item on Etsy. We don’t know what makes them so popular. It’s probably the combination of Rockwell’s fun, the diagonal printing, and of course the cheap price. We’ve got pretty good at typesetting and printing these quickly, and once again they look pretty sweet.
Ingeborg is a job-seeking friend of ours. She wants some stylish, old-skool letterpress business cards, something we are quite capable of supplying. We had a long lunch at Greenwoods in Amsterdam, and discussed paper stock, type, ornaments and colours. The whole time we sort of felt like we were in American Psycho. Eventually we decided on Richmond Old Style and Caslon in red and black. She hasn’t seen these cards yet (they’re in the post), but we’re sure she’ll love them.
Dexter was our first customer to buy letterpress stationary. We’ve had stationary on Etsy for ages, and never could understand why no one would buy it. But now we hope that Dexter has broken that jinx. We had a little trouble printing Dexter’s cards as he has an ‘Ñ’ in his name. Apparently when the English were casting type in the beginning of the last century, they never considered that people might want to print és, às, üs, or ñs. Which doesn’t really make sense as there are quite a few English words with accents (to name just two: naïve and séance). Fortunately we had a tilde (~) that matched and we could print it above the N. All in all, his cards look pretty stylish, and we’re sure he’s going to make a good impression with them.
Finally, a local church wanted some letterpress cards to use as invitations. For the last two or three years they had been using Moo’s business cards, and now they wanted something different to re-engage the imaginations of their youth. To help meet this goal, we designed a two-colour card with blind embossing. This makes these cards really stand out from the crowd, and hopefully they will bring much luck to that church.
And now we’re all done. We’ve got four little packages all wrapped up, ready to post tomorrow. Soon our handmade wonders will be winging their way around the world.
To the Letterpress! 