catskill wedding vibes

I love a challenge!

I had a super cool opportunity to create postcard save the dates for one of my long time friends and her fiance’ last month. If I’m being totally honest, it’s my favorite project to date. I love this project so much because it challenged me both creatively and mechanically, it’s totally my style, and they trusted me enough to re-envision their original idea so that we could do it on press instead of digital print.

The paper goods that I create are for particularly important moments in peoples lives - I don’t expect my clients to all be cool with handing over full creative reign and/or veering from an original idea they loved…BUT when a client does, I truly think that is when the magic happens. I am beyond grateful to Lea and AJ for going with the flow on this one because I am so proud of the outcome!

A quick note on the process

Letterpress is a labor intensive process and not just time wise. Every ink color in a letterpress design requires its own individual plate for the press. What does this mean? It means that you have to run every single piece of paper through the press once for every ink color. In this case, we made about 150 postcards - so, every piece of paper ran through the press 4 times (3 times for the front, and once for the back), totaling 600 passes. Yes, my glutes, thighs and arms are quite tired after a job like this.

This also means that the card has to be PERFECTLY (or as close to perfect as possible!) registered 4 times to make sure that the design turns out exactly as it should without any weird bleeds or spacing.

The last challenge with a design like this is that overlapping colors on press does not work the same way it does in other print forms. You can’t put mustard yellow over a navy blue sky because it won’t show up. You may not want to put mustard yellow over green because you could end up with an unfortunate brown color. It takes time and patience to figure out what colors will give you the outcome you’re looking for but it’s a ton of fun and worth every minute!