letterpress printing process hot foil business cards
funky print studio story, letterpress

About letterpress printing process, products and services. Tips and tricks

Letterpress is a printing technique dating back to the mid XVth century. Even though nowadays digital printing is commonly used as the main method for printing, letterpress is seeing a rebirth because of its unique feel, texture and visual effects. However, this revival, as opposed to letterpress’ use back in the day, is seen in fine arts, stationery, special events etc.

letterpress printing processHow does letterpress work?

The process back in the day followed a very strict, detailed, meticulous and precise routine: individual metal letters of various fonts and sizes were carefully arranged and put together to form the text to be printed; after that, ink was applied thoroughly over the letters and then they’d be ready to be printed by applying pressure. As an alternative to the individual metal letters, nowadays photopolymer plates are used, though there still are artisans using the old ways. At the same time, as an alternative to the hand-operated letterpress machines, automated letterpress printing machines are used.

Tips for creating a letterpress-friendly design:

  • avoid using fonts that are too thin or have fine details. During the printing process such details can be lost, so it is best to consider not using them.
  • avoid using more than 2 or 3 ink colors. Adding another color actually means starting the whole printing process all over again; each color gets its own plate and printing time, therefore, the price is surely influenced by the number of colors to be printed. Also, avoid overlapping the colors.
  • avoid using transparency, shadows, gradients etc. These can not be reproduced in letterpress printing. It’s either the color evenly spread or no color at all.
  • image files can not be used in letterpress and hot foil printing. So no, Photoshop files are not ok as they are image files. The designs used in letterpress and hot foil have to be vector files, grouped and converted to curves. That means you must use a program that creates vector files and the most common ones are Corel Draw and Adobe Illustrator (.cdr and .ai files).
  • NO: .psd, .jpeg, .png etc. The design file has to be either .cdr or .ai or vector based .pdf.

Why is letterpress printing more expensive than digital printing?

Despite the use of polymer plates and automated printing machines, letterpress is still a highly complex and time consuming process. Setting up the machine alone takes a lot of attention and patience. Each color in a design gets its own plate and each plate requires a new machine set-up, washing and inking. The thick card stock used for letterpress printing is also not your regular card as well.

Why choose letterpress?

Letterpress printed products are high quality and luxurious; they are special, they provide an exquisite visual and tactile experience that will make it difficult for the receiver to throw them away. In this era of technology when all you need to get contact information is a mobile phone and we even started sending wedding invitations through emails, paper is indeed losing ground. However, letterpress printing came to show that a tangible, physical object will surely leave a lasting impression that will definitely be beneficial on the long term.

letterpress printing process hot foil business cardsWhat does Funky Print Studio offer?

Funky Print Studio is a family-owned and operated letterpress and hot foil atelier based in Bucharest, Romania. Our services include:

  • letterpress printing (we print on an Original Heidelberg Platen windmill from circa 1960) – edge painting, rounded corners, blind impression, emboss (as opposed to deboss = letterpress printing); we also make our own polymer plates in house
  • hot foil printing – various foil colors
  • die cutting – cutting card stock in whatever shape and size using custom dies
  • finishing processes – cutting, folding, perforating, drilling

We do our very best to revive antique machinery and printing processes in order to create impressive details that will be treasured for a long time.

mint edge painting
etsy, funky print studio story, letterpress, letterpress business cards, letterpress calling cards, letterpress cards, letterpress stationery, pantone

Letterpress business cards with edge painting

It sure has been a while, but just like last time, we’re still very busy (maybe even busier!). That’s definitely a good thing, but it doesn’t leave me with enough time to update the blog. However, i do my best to continue posting live updates on our Instagram so you can see what we’re working on!

There have been many projects of letterpress business cards with edge painting we’ve been working on lately. I’m really fond of them, so i’ve decided to talk about them today.

letterpress business cards with edge painting
The edge coloring is the last and riskiest process. After the cards are printed and cut we finally go forward with the edge painting. It is a very delicate process and one little mistake could ruin everything and we’d have to reprint the project all over again. This is a process that is a lot more complicated than it seems.

letterpress business cards with edge paintingWe can pretty much match most of the Pantone colors we use for letterpress printing with the ones we use for edge painting (oh no, they’re not the same!). We received great feedback about them so far and we’re really happy about it! Hopefully we’ll work on many other projects involving edge painting! They kind of turned into my favorite type of business cards.

gold edge painting silver edge painting mint edge paintingmint edge painting black edge paintingorange edge paintingDefinitely something worth trying in order to give your letterpress or hot foil business cards that extra something to get the attention.
The Funky Studio team wishes you, as always, a colorful day!

an2

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round letterpress business cards
behind the scenes, etsy, funky print studio story, letterpress, letterpress business cards, letterpress calling cards, letterpress cards, letterpress stationery, letterpress tags, letterpress wedding invitations, pantone

Letterpress wedding invitations, business cards, custom designs & life lately

There are a lot (looooot!) of things going on at our end lately, so obviously, there’s no more time to update this blog as often as i’d want to. That’s why i kinda took it to Instagram for “live updates”. It’s a lot easier than to plan a whole blog post. And i get to share with you the latest projects we’re working on while we’re actually working on them!

There were so many great projects we took on lately that i’m not sure how i’m going to write a separate blog post for each one… Therefore, this one will be a general introduction for several of them.

We worked on some custom bow tie boxes that we hot foil printed on! This was actually the first hot foil printing project we took and they turned out so cute!! We made some samples with the foil we had available at the time, so we used silver, gold, copper, matte red and a dark brown.

hot foil boxesSince then we actually took on several other hot foil projects and i’m so very excited about this! They turn out so beautiful and elegant that i decided to change my own business cards and make them entirely hot foil!

Then we worked on a set of business cards and tags and we used a unique ink color here; very delicate and subtle and incredibly difficult to recreate actually! :)

letterpress business cards and tagsletterpress business cards and tagsThe above is Gemma’s photo and you can see pictures of her amazing work over here.

We actually hand mixed the ink so that it would get to the hue she was after and we were thrilled that she was happy with the result!

Then we worked on a couple of round business cards and i’m starting to like them more and more (actually we just took on another project involving round business cards!).

round letterpress business cardsround letterpress business cardsI was a bit nervous when we worked on the Arisdot letterpress project. Usually letterpress doesn’t work well with large portions of pressed paper, but they actually turned out great! Not only that, but we took on another similar project with pressed background and that one too turned out great!

After that we took on a custom design project that i totally loved and we were praised for!

custom letterpress business cardsFinally, the last project i’ll introduce to you here is a custom design letterpress wedding invitation. Well actually it’s an engagement invitation to be more precise.

letterpress wedding invitationThese are only a few of the projects we worked on lately, but there are so many others i have to talk about! I decided i have to have a separate blog post for all the hot foil projects we did and another one for all the projects involving edge painting. I absolutely love edge painting!

Hopefully i’ll be able to update this more often!
The Funky Studio team wishes you, as always, a colorful day!

an2

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etsy, funky box studio, funky print studio story, rant

Funky Box Studio turns 3. Funky Print Studio turns 1. Roundup!

Our boxes and packaging supplies shop, Funky Box Studio has just turned 3 years old, while our letterpress and hot foil shop, Funky Print Studio has just turned 1! Woohoo!!

funky studio anniversaryIt’s already our 3rd year selling paper goodies online and i can’t believe how much we’ve accomplished, how much we’ve learned and how much we grew during this time! However, regardless of how much we’ve accomplished, there are still new goals and new targets to beat, as much as we’ve learned, we still find out new things each and every single day, and despite the fact that we grew so much, there’s always room for better. Well the absolute best part of it all is that throughout our studio’s 3 years of existence we only went upwards. Looking back, i re-read the roundups for our first and second year and still think, just like back then: when did the time fly? You can read the first two roundups here and here.

We still get new challenges each day, we still learn, we still experiment, we still do our best for each project and we still remember Nichole, our very first client 3 years ago. I guess she will never know how special she was and still is for 2 people across the globe! Ugh! This is getting a bit too emotional! Hehe!

The most significant moments for our studio during this past year are:

  • gaining experience – this might not really seem like much, but it’s actually a crucial thing. Letterpress printing brings new challenges every single time, whether it’s about hand mixed ink colors, finding the right hue for the edge painting, working on difficult designs and so forth. You always have to be prepared for the unexpected. Well after one year in letterpress printing, i’m finally getting comfortable with the unexpected!
  • starting hot foil printing – we decided to make an investment yet again and expand our activity yet again, so we got a hot foil printing machine! This was just another challenge on top of all the others, but it was definitely worth it.
  • repeat customers on letterpress printing, having regular customers on the packaging shop – even though we started the printing shop just a year ago, we managed to have repeat customers already! On the other hand, for the packaging shop we already have customers who have been purchasing our items from our very beginning!
  • direct selling – while etsy has been and still is our main selling platform, many people have started contacting us directly on our email and that was actually one of the points where we realized we’d grown! :)

It was a great year for us and our studio. Even though we’re still not doing this full time, we can actually see it happening now. We have enough starting experience, we already know how it’s like, we have numbers, facts, calculations. I don’t know if this is the year when we’ll finally turn our studio into a full time job, but i can still dream and think positive, right?

At the last roundup i was curious about how many sales we’ll manage to have on our packaging shop at the next roundup. Well there aren’t 700 as i was hoping for, but there are 569. So we have a total of 229 sales for this past year! However, these are just the etsy sales and they’re already not relevant anymore since we’ve done a lot of direct selling.

The end of our last roundup still applies today as well, so without further ado:

It’s been a roller-coaster, but still a fun ride altogether. There were countless nights spent working in the studio, frustrations because of so many reasons, but also wonderful people who helped us wake up the next day and do it all again, small successes that made us feel like we’d just saved the planet and all of this makes it all worth it.

Thank you for your support!

The Funky Studio team wishes you, as always, a colorful day!

(photo)

an2

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