Getting Down to Business (Cards)

We printed our business cards just in the nick of time for Crafty Fox last month. It all ended up rather last minute because of the number of incarnations the cards had to go through before we reached a final design we were happy with. I thought I'd share some of our process with you...

Some of our initial designs were really rather vile. In fact, I'm not even going to show you. I think our evil twins were in on those days.

The main element was our big G logo. We tried it blind debossed:

Printed in opaque white ink:

Dark grey:

 The winner in the end was this palest of pale greys:

For the 2nd colour, of course, we went with a lovely zingy orange, to match our branding:

We actually printed the orange first:

We originally thought, we'd print two-sided with one colour on each side, but the G logo all on it's own was too subtle even for us!

And here's the finished product:

Stand By Me

As you'll tire of me mentioning, we (as in Grey Letter Press) have a stand at the Crafty Fox Market in Brixton on 25th April. As this is our first ever market, we've had a heck of a lot of prep to do.

We're chugging away reprinting our current range, designing our business cards, thinking about packaging etc. We even bought a cash box. It's all very exciting.

Here are the paper bags we've letterpressed with our logo, cute huh? Our customers (if there are any, eek!) deserve the best...

Our biggest concern so far has been how we're actually going to go about displaying our cards at the market. As part of Crafty Fox Uncovered, we're only allocated a table around 75cm square. Which is obviously fine, but requires some creative thinking to have it not look a busy mess, whilst still displaying as much of our work as possible.

Obviously there's nothing wrong with a good old fashioned wire rack display, but it didn't seem very 'us'. So, one half of our duo having had a former life as a paper engineer (not me, the other one), we decided it might be a good idea to make our own display stand. As if we didn't have enough work to do already...

Well, I'm delighted to say it's done, and in my humble opinion, it looks bloody fantastic! Thought I'd share some pics with you here. It's made out of grey foamboard, cut out with a scalpel, and slotted together by hand.

Please ignore the pencil marks we've still to rub out, which rather spoils the look, I know!

It has the advantage of being easy to transport as it's incredibly lightweight and breaks down to relatively small pieces, as you can see.

For any fellow traders out there who like the look of this, you can download the PDF designs for it here. You've still got the hard bit to do, obviously, but we hope it proves useful!

We've going to use a wooden type tray alongside this as well, to allow us to show more designs, and give our stall more of a letterpress-y vibe. It's all coming together!

We do hope you'll be able to come along and see us. Saturday 25th April at the Dogstar in Brixton - get it in your diary or magic phone thing.