hot foil printing

etsy, funky print studio story, hot foil save the date, hot foil tags, letterpress, letterpress business cards, letterpress calling cards, letterpress cards, letterpress save the dates cards, letterpress stationery, letterpress tags

Latest letterpress and hot foil printing projects. Bonus, exciting news!

May 9, 2017November 4, 2017 Andreea

We’ve been working like crazy lately and i figured i should share some of our latest letterpress and hot foil printing projects. Since there were quite a lot of them, i just had to pick somehow and it wasn’t easy. That’s because i really loved working on each of these projects! I loved the artwork (a bit of self-praise here, as some of them are designed by me) and i loved the end result. The best part of all is that our clients were happy with them too and that’s really the best feeling you could have regarding your own business.

So without further ado, let’s get started!

It really doesn’t matter what Pantone says, grey is definitely the color for letterpress. We’ve had so many projects in grey ink even from our very beginning about 2 years ago! Even now, the projects i’m presenting now are most of them printed in grey ink… You can’t deny the power of grey! Well these letterpress cards above rocked grey ink!

This time around we have gold hot foil tags. My personal favorite combinations for hot foil printing are the ones that use darker colored card stock; i feel like the shiny metallic foil stands out a lot more. However, it highly depends on the design too. And if it’s a simple, minimal design such as the one above, then it works wonders on our Snow White card stock as well!

I was totally in love with the color combination of these tags and the design as well! Using 2 ink colors on small tags is not that popular, although seeing how these cuties turned out, i definitely think it should!

Getting back to the grey area, the letterpress square hang tags above and the rectangular ones underneath are both printed in grey ink on our puffy Wild card stock. I love using this card stock for designs that have thin elements or thin fonts. Since it has 35% cotton in it, this card stock allows a deeper indentation.

The design for the letterpress round cards cards above is absolutely beautiful (no, sadly, i wasn’t the one who created it)! Using grey papier mache for round cards is actually quite popular in our little studio. I never would have thought, actually…

Finally, i am proud to say that the design for the copper hot foil save the dates above is created by me and is has gotten really popular! See what i was saying before with the combination of hot foil printing and darker colored card stock? We used a dark grey card stock (of course, back to grey again!) and copper hot foil.

Well, these are only a few of the letterpress and hot foil printing projects we’ve been working on lately, but you can see more of them on our Instagram.

And finally, i did mention something about some good news, right? Well, i am happy to say that starting tomorrow, we’ll have a special sale offer for our letterpress and hot foil printing projects!! So stay tuned and find out how you’ll be able to get custom letterpress or hot foil printed business cards, hang tags, wedding stationery, business stationery or any other type of card at a far better offer than usual!!

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

letterpress printing process hot foil business cards

funky print studio story, letterpress

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

February 22, 2017 Andreea

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.

How 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.

What 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.

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

Letterpress business cards with edge painting

July 21, 2016June 12, 2017 Andreea

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.

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.

We 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.

Definitely 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!

Etsy shop I Facebook I Twitter

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

May 24, 2016 Andreea

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.

Since 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! :)

The 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!).

I 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!

Finally, 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.

These 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!

Etsy shop I Facebook I Twitter