Designing Letterpress Business Cards with Metal Type
If you're making the choice for letterpress-printed business cards, you are choosing to invest a bit more in a product that makes you stand out from the crowd. These days, there are many beautifully designed and printed cards that are created from digital designs - a mix of old and new technology!
Here at Fontlove Studio, we like to keep it 100% old-school. We print using all hand-set metal type and ornaments, so the design and printing process happen simultaneously in a creative collaboration with clients. Here are a couple of recent examples of these collaborations:
Animal Agriculture Reform Collaborative brings together organizations working for a more just agriculture and food system. For their cards, we created a two-color design that conveys a sense of wide open land and small-scale farms. A squiggly border, dating back to the early 1900's, creates the "field", and tiny 1/6" ornaments and border pieces were used to create a barn and silo.
Transatlantic Love Affair is an amazing physical theater ensemble in the Twin Cities. They create ethereal, nostalgia-tinged productions that defy convention. For their cards, we wanted to stick to their blue and white color palette and have a vaguely "transatlantic" travel inspiration. We duplexed these cards, gluing two different colored stocks to create a two-tone look, and matched the ink color to the stock.
Metal type is arranged in a tool called a composing stick, then locked up in a metal frame called a chase. This is then placed in the press, where each card, and each color, is passed through one by one by hand.
If you are interested in collaborating on your next business cards, get in touch!