These cards were letterpress printed on 220# arturo with Pantone match and matte metallic gold inks as a 1/1 business card for Phoebe. Phoebe is an excellent graphic designer and designed these cards for her branding collateral as an extension of her already awesome website.

I am a big fan of chevrons lately and am totally digging these wide set ones on the back of Phoebe’s card, how about you?

Edge painted with a custom mix strawberry ink, thanks Phoebe for being so excellent to work with! I loved how these turned out.

Above and below are two pre-press proofs that we pulled for Lindsey so she could compare the color of the gradient, the value of the line screen clouds (which were hard to photograph but looked awesome in person) as well as the value of the silver. Above we have a more peachy hue, and below more pink with a lighter silver.

Upon sending images over to the client for final sign off we hit the presses and shipped these babies out!

I’m just slightly infatuated with pantone, if you haven’t noticed. And this year the 2012 color of the year is Tangerine Tango! I love how the yellows are being infiltrated by the oranges now.

This was a wedding suite for a November wedding for Preeya. First off, she was SO fabulous to work with and had the most amazing mood board. (See at the bottom).

She was right on the money regarding color trends and the design was so fun to develop with her.

The suite was printed on 110# cotton paper, 2 inks, paired with gravel envelopes and dark gravel ink. Pieces included Invitation, Directions, Details and RSVP cards for the letterpress pieces, and then place cards and menu for digital pieces for the day of events. To price out an invitation suite like Preeya’s head over to the shop and customize your letterpress suite to your heart’s content!

SO, on with the giveaway! Win a set of 100 offset holiday cards – tell me which design is the set you’d like to win in the comments, and for an extra entry you can tweet or post it to facebook (come back here and let me know you’ve done so). Tweets must include hashtag #loveDP to qualify, Facebook posts must link back here with a url in the comments section.

Open until Sunday Dec. 4, 2011 – We’ll ship these out to you next week with your info input along with a photo that you send us!

Head on over, this deal only comes once a year!!

These were letterpress printed on 110# luxe white paper in gravel ink with papaya edge painting.

 Sold in sets of 50, this is a great way to get into a set of calling cards without the investment of meeting the press minimum of 250 cards for a custom print order. Get an estimate here, these are always a big hit for gifts for the holidays and turn around super quick!

The Smudge of Ink series will have an inspirational image, pantone swatches, CMYK coordinates, RGB HEX (for web), and sRGB values. While there is no perfect match across the board if you are using more than one medium to promote your business or match your big event, however these formulas will help close the gap with wondering what will be a good match in different applications.

Original image from Christian_25′s Photostream, blogged at Happiness Is… 

To download the swatch ASE for importing into Adobe Applications click here. To import the swatch book click your Swatches Palette > toggle More Options > Open Swatch Library > Other Library > click the .ASE that you want to import. From there the Pantone swatches will load in a new palette with the remainder of your tool bar.

These letterpress wedding invitations were the first invites I printed with the technique of a split ink fountain. To achieve a gradient, the steel cylinder on the press is inked up with two colors, one on the left and right of the cylinder. When the ink distributes it creates the gradient that happened here in the great oak background. I’ve found since printing this and other split fountain pieces, that it is a lot harder to keep color consistent with two analogous colors on the color wheel as they just want to blend all together as the ink distributes more throughout the run. We had to clean the press about 3 times for this set of 100, so as to not have the yellow and green become one middle color from the continual distribution. In the end though, this is another favorites of mine – the gradient is intense yet subtle at the same time and creates some beautiful depth in the piece paired with the chocolatey brown.

Included in the suite were thank you notes, RSVP, and Map (obviously with the invitation). Above is the 4Bar thank you note.

4×6″ Map/directions insert. Have I mentioned I LOVE maps? They are sooo fun to create!

An isolated shot of the invitation only. Letterpress printed on 110# soft white Lettra paper. Two inks, background split-fountain gradient.

I like the implementation of the school seal, really elegant with the simple Bembo typography and paired with the grey ink. If you are interested in a set of 25, 50 or 100 be sure to request an estimate now – our turnaround for these is usually 2-3 weeks, however with NSS coming up, we want to make sure you get them before June!