The One that Started it All

The fact that I'm somewhat knee-deep in custom work at the moment kind of got me thinking the other day about the first custom printing job I ever did.  I really, truly love doing custom work for people and have been designing custom letterpress printed items and other personal projects for quite some time now (for at least the last seven years), but this is the first custom job I can honestly say was done under the name of Twin Ravens Press. 

Twin Ravens is still a very young little company and when I started it almost a year ago, I had a good friend, Ashley, who was about to have her first child.   Ashley is also an artist and illustrator and she had seen some of my early Twin Ravens greeting cards and some of the custom projects I had done for other people prior to starting Twin Ravens Press and she really wanted me to design and print her baby announcements.  I was totally excited and thrilled to do so, but I insisted that the project be a joint venture.  This is what we came up with: 

Ashley had just gotten back to Oregon from a vacation she took in Hawaii and really wanted an ocean-themed birth announcement.  She drew the cute little octopus down at the bottom right-hand corner of the announcement and I found the two starfish shaped ornaments in my metal type collection.  All of the words are Baskerville handset metal type.  The announcement was printed on an A7 size card with rounded corners and was paired with a coordinating blue envelope.  Here is a detail of the type (and yes, that is, in fact, their son's real middle name):

 

Pretty fun, don't you think?  Oh, and did you notice that picture of the cute little boy playing in the fall leaves at the beginning of this post?  That's Ares now.  He's already almost ten months old.  I took that photo of him playing in our backyard just a couple of weekends ago.  I guess what they say about time is true: it sure does fly...