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  1. Letterpress Print Design

    Grow Collective business card with debossed glyphs.

    The new Grow Collective business card is in circulation. It appeared a while ago, and I’ve been meaning to post about it. Today seemed like a good day. In a calm interlude, I snapped open the lens cover, hit the macro key and, after grappling with my poor photographic technique, here you go.

    It was printed using letterpress onto 740gsm two–ply (natural white with Baghdad brown) Colourplan card by the venerable, and expert printers, Piccolo Press of Nairn in Scotland. They are one of the few remaining commercial letterpress printers in the UK who, ironically, do a large portion of their printing for clients in the States. Wherever you are, you could do much worse than a conversation with Tim Honor, or the designer, Paul. Their advice is invaluable.

    Quick Tips

    1. Letterpress is an analogue format so go to the highest resolution your machine and software can handle when producing the artwork. (I spend chunks of time waiting for changes to be applied at 1600dpi, but it was worth it.)
    2. Letterpress will saturate the card with ink, so your colours will be richer than printing on the office inkjet.
    3. You pay for the block, the card and the print run. It’s not cheap but then, it’s not lithographic quality, this is letterpress!
    4. Trust the advice of the printer (especially if you use Piccolo) on the choice of card. They can provide samples, but a good rule is, the thicker the card, the better the deboss at print. Standard weight is around 540gsm — almost twice that of litho printers.

    There’s a high resolution photo on Flickr if you want a closer peek. I’d love to hear how you get on if you go down this route. It’s more than worth it just to run your fingers over the debossing when they’re delivered.

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  2. An Ode to Exersize Book Margins

    Remember your old school exersize books? If you went to school in the UK, you’ll probably remember the margins, with a red or grey vertical line giving the page a little elbow room (and trying to make your writing line up.)

    Mine would end up full of all sorts of things: Numerous red “Sp” spelling reminders from the teacher (nothing᾿s changed you’ll note), with oft–begrudged marks of “7/10”, as well as my own art, in the loosest sense of the word. That would include snippets of ubiquitous bubble writing; predictably inspired by the girls who seemed to love it—and anyone who could do it well—even more than Wotsits or Cabbage Patch Kids. There would be various malformed “Chad” and Fido Dido sketches (inspired by 7-Up ads in Singapore when I was younger,) and carefully crafted reproductions of Biffa Bacon next to attempts at rendering male reproductive anatomy. Banksy wasn’t even a twinkle in his mummy’s eye at that point, and anyway, Chad and mutated willys were easier to draw than teddybears with Molotov cocktails.

    Therefore, I decided to resurrect the exersize book margin in my print stylesheet. It’s still a little messy and very verbose and will, no doubt, be massaged into pedantic cleanliness over time. The stylesheet, that is, not the margin.

    Asides and small pictures are pulled into the margin where they belong, leaving you bags of room for your own notes, doodles and experiments in anatomical drawings of the male reproductive organ. Ah, but if only browsers would respect orphans, page-break-after:avoid, page-break-inside:avoid and other useful print CSS, but that is a tale for another day. Do a print preview to take a peek. Perhaps the best margin art™ should win a prize—what was in yours all those years ago?

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