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How to prepare art for letterpress:
This is where the fun comes in. It’s not about hand set type anymore.
Dream up whatever you think will make a great letterpress piece. There
are unlimited approaches that work well in this medium; beautifully designed
typography, overlapping shapes and colors (in real ink that is), retro
styles with old-school halftones, modern styles or hand drawn illustrations
are just a few. Think of the printing process as a technique that will
add to your design’s final execution.
You can prepare art for letterpress in the same manner as preparing art
for any printing project. Please convert all fonts to paths and include
any placed images with the file instead of embedding. You can submit
any program file, but our favorites are Freehand, Illustrator and InDesign.
If using InDesign please convert to a PDF with Illustrator capabilities
preserved.
Halftones and screen tints:
We use magnesium metal plates which require halftones and screen tints
to have lower "Dots Per Inch". We recommend 100 to 120 DPI
max for letterpress where as traditional process printing can carry at
least 150 to a very fine 300 DPI. Halftones can be made very coarse for
the vintage effect. An interesting old technique is to use a grayscale
photo and cut color into it by adding fill under the halftone.
TIP: If you want to draw color fill under a halftone, create a "For Position Only" halftone bitmap of the photo. This will allow the photo to be transparent for viewing when you are drawing in your color fills. Send a grayscale version of the photo and we will swap with your FPO photo.
Spot color:
Solid color inks or spot colors, are still mostly transparent which will
allow you to create some interesting colors by overlapping. You can use
tints to create a lighter shade but with the coarse screen needed, you
will want to be careful of detailed areas. Overlapping and cutting in
color fills are a forgotten but simple technique to create effective
vintage looking letterpress. Opaque light colors or metallics can be
printed on darker paper for another interesting effect. No ink will be
100% opaque, the only way to be totally opaque is with screen printing
or foil stamping.
TIP: If you would like to see how a color will look on a dark stock, create a close representation of the paper and put the image at 70% transparent over the paper color, this will give you a rough idea of the opacity of the ink.
Paper choice:
Here are a few things to keep in mind when specifying paper for your
project. A softer paper will show the relief better where as a harder
sheet will support slightly more detail and finer screens. The letterpress
process does not restrict you to using coated run of the mill paper,
there is a whole world full of exotic handmade, classic cotton and art
papers. Commercial mills hand out swatches with many choices of colors
and weights, however many of these choices are obtainable only in full
cartons of large sheets. This may not be a problem if you are printing
large quantities, but if you only want to do a business card this can
be a problem. Please contact us if you wish to supply the paper, presses
need a certain amount of area around the image. We can cut down full
size sheets. And you should always allow roughly 10% over for set up
and waste.
Impression:
With letterpress printing, impression is the amount of pressure between
the plate and the paper. The amount of pressure used will create the
deepness of impression or "bite" into the paper. The least
pressure used will "kiss" the paper and the image will break
up. We do have control of the overall amount of impression we use per
plate. So you can specify a heavy bite on one color and a light kiss
impression on another color.
TIP: Basic physics apply here, a smaller image area will have more force and create a deeper impression than a large image area. It seems to work better to kiss large solid areas allowing these to break up and "bite" line and type for a deeper impression.
Reusing Dies:
Letterpress technology was based on the use of moveable, reusable dies.
If you plan accordingly, a die can be used for many different projects.
For example, a logo used on a business card could also be used on a CD
jacket or on top of a memo pad. These dies are made out of metal so to
be reused they cannot be enlarged, reduced, squeezed or stretched.
TIP: Certain dies can be used as accent elements and background textures. You can create (or we can supply) a FPO tiff or bitmap of your dies where you can position in a layout for us to match with the existing die. This not only can be an interesting element throughout a brand but can also make adding a second color possible on future tight budget projects. Pricing and terms:
If you are a new customer we will request 1/2 down on proof approval
and the balance at shipping. Established customers with a good payment
history with us will have 20 days from day of shipping. We can invoice
you with PayPal for credit card payment. All wedding invitations will
be 1/2 down with order and the balance due on delivery.
TIP: If you can furnish a PDF layout (even a rough one) when requesting an estimate, this will allow us to get a more precise cost of the image area needed for making the dies.
Quality:
Letterpress printing is a technique. Similar to watercolor painting,
the medium plays an important roll in the finished piece. When your design
submits to the limitations of letterpress and uses it to it's fully flawed
potential, will your piece then transcend from everyday print communication
to ephemeral art.
TIP: Let us worry about the details, just relax and have fun designing!
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