Sunday, January 18, 2009

Save the Date: Dana & Robert are getting married!



I've been really busy printing lately and I wanted to share with you a very cool set of Save the Date cards that were completed for a lovely couple in New Jersey last week.  This is perhaps one of the most unique sets of Save-the-Date cards that I've printed lately.  The design for them was fairly simple - we used only text elements in the design, but it was fun because we played around with several different combinations of fun fonts until we came up with the set you see above.  The really unique thing about this set is the paper that it's printed on.  Dana and Robert's Save-the-Date cards are printed on a stiff 100% cotton paper from Crane & Co. in Espresso Brown.  This is the same paper that I used back in October for some really cool calling cards. Because of the papers stiffness, you can't achieve the same deep imprint with the letterpress that you can with a lot of other 100% cotton papers, without the print looking kind of smashed in and messy, but the color of the paper is so unique that I love the way the printing looks on it anyway.  With letterpress, it's often fairly difficult to achieve a good print on such a dark color of paper, but I think that Dana and Robert's Save-the-Dates turned out fabulously!  The ink colors we used were a metallic copper and a very dark plum purple.  I was worried that the plum wasn't going to show up well, but check it out in the detail shot below:


Pretty cool, don't you think?  They also chose to include a small accommodations card with their Save-the-Dates rather than with the invitations so that if they have guests that are planning to come really far in advance they can already make their accommodations arrangements.  Check out the card below:


We chose to round the corners of both of these cards, which I think was a really nice touch. Unfortunately, Crane & Co. doesn't produce a matching monarch size envelope for this paper, so instead, I paired the set up with a chestnut brown monarch envelope from Green Paper Company and printed the return address on the flap.  I think the pairing of papers from the two different companies was a really good match - not exact, but they still look very nice together. 


I was so excited about how the copper metallic ink turned out on the dark brown paper that I ended up printing a few Twin Ravens Press business cards with it on the same stock.  I'm not going to do this all the time for my business cards, because the chocolate brown paper is quite a bit more expensive than my regular stock, but I figured they would look really cool, so I had to try it out.  Check out the photo below!


I'm really excited to have gotten to work with Dana and her fiancee on her Save-the-Dates.  I actually worked with them before on another stationary project last year, prior to starting this blog.  Dana really likes fancy envelopes with cool envelope liners, so I created this set of stationary earlier last year based on a very cool envelope liner paper she found.  You can see pictures of that whole stationary set below:


Above is a single sheet of the stationary with the matching envelope.  The envelope had their address letterpress printed on the flap.  Below is a close-up shot of the stationary with the open envelope, so that you can see the aforementioned fancy envelope liner.



And above is a fun close-up of a few sheets of the stationary fanned out together.  I really love the way this pattern turned out.  

Thanks again, Dana & Robert!  You've been really great customers and I'm really looking forward to working with you on your wedding invitations!

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