We first met Jen back in 2014 when we printed the wonderful invitation set she designed. Since then she's been hard at work building her cake-baking empire at Bakedown Cakery.
Check out her work below, and if you don't get too distracted by the cakes, scroll down to see the awesome duplexed letterpress + holographic foil business cards we printed for her.
Right around the same time Parklife Press was making the move from North Carolina out to Portland, Gritchelle was packing up her San Francisco apartment and heading up to Portland as well. We ended up just a few blocks from each other. As part of a portrait project capturing creative Portlanders in their element, Gritchelle photographed me during a press run this January. Her blog post is here, and I'm reposting a bunch of her shots below.
These striking cards for Melbourne architecture firm Northbourne were printed on 600g Fluorescent White Lettra with a blind impression on the front and black and custom mint ink on the back. Finished with mint edges match. Printed by Parklife and designed by JT at A Door Ajar.
Another G Brand design, this one for design and builders Dixon Kirby. These are duplexed cards, printed with two inks on Pearl White Lettra for the front, and one ink on Adriatic Colorplan for the back.
Bax's cards presented a special challenge. Normally, to create an odd shape (basically anything non-rectangular), we'd make a die and die-cut the cards. But Bax wanted edge paint — and a die-cut edge isn't crisp enough to paint cleanly. So we (very carefully) knife-cut these 600g fluorescent white hexagons with our 19th century guillotine cutter, then edged them with metallic gold paint.
At the time of this post, a Google image search for "ostrich wedding invitation" turns up not a single invite with a full ostrich. Ostrich feathers, sure. But no full birds. Chia and Kendall sought to change that, and we were happy to help.
Using our Fountain invitation as a template, we added a confidently-posed custom-drawn ostrich to the top, and carried the artwork through to website cards and thank you notes (notes regrettably not pictured).
Solid floods of color can be tricky with letterpress. But if you play your no-pun-intended cards right, you can get great results. Lighter/brighter colors tend to print more evenly. And die-cutting the cards rather than knife trimming can help keep the raised unprinted paper from getting squished or scuffed.
For these square cards we printed for Birmingham Developer, Ford Waters, we printed on separate sheets of 300g Fluorescent White Lettra, then duplexed and die cut. Design was done by long-time Parklife friend, Chad Martin of The G Brand.
