Fast/Good/Cheap

I first came across this quote as 'Coppola's Law' on my film degree. Reportedly, legendary director Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, etc.) had the following quotation displayed on his trailer door during filming:

"Fast, Good, Cheap - Choose Two"

The gist of the idea being (in case it isn't clear):
Something made quickly and on a low budget will be a bit crap.
If you want something cheap and good, you'll have to be patient.
If you want something made fast and high quality, it's gonna cost ya.

So, clearly very relevant to film production, but certainly to many other industries as well.

Alongside Grey Letter Press, I also have a 'day job' at the inimitable children's book publisher, Usborne. I work in the Production department, where this quotation is very relevant indeed!

So, I decided a letterpress print of this quote was exactly what the department needed as a little "farewell (for now)" gift from me as I went off on maternity leave.

A lot of our printing gear is still in semi-storage as a result of all the renovation work we've recently had done on the house, so I had limited typefaces to choose from. We found this rather dusty wooden type in the loft:

Interestingly, we purchased this from Italy, so it comes with some lovely accented letters and a rather unfortunate letter distribution for the English language:

Good old Gill Sans Bold was luckily also to hand:

For the ink, I mixed up a sort of inky blue, and a then a sobering black for the reality check part of the quote:

Ooh, glossy:

I'm pleased to say the print was very well received. Here it is taking pride of place amongst the snacks, until someone gets around to putting it up on the wall:

Cummings & Eyre

That sounds like it should the name of a publisher or something...

In fact it refers to two lovely quotes we've been printing. These were bespoke pieces for a wedding.

The lovely bride, Cath, had the very sweet idea of gifting her Readers with letterpress prints of the pieces that they read in her ceremony. Nice, huh?

The pieces were relatively long, so we had to use photopolymer plates, and the fonts had to be pretty small to fit into the required frame area (10 x 15cm), but obviously fine detail work like this is where letterpress excels.

Cath selected the font Dakota Handwriting to give a friendly, relaxed vibe to the prints. I think it works really well.

The date and location of the wedding were blind debossed at the bottom right of each print.

For colours, we printed in copper and an inky blue.

I'm pleased to say the final prints were very well received.

Cath was even kind enough to send us photos of the framed copies.

Do drop us a line if you have any of your own bespoke letterpress projects in mind!

Inky Goodness

Came across this marvellous video from The Printing Ink Company about how ink is made. Fascinating stuff.

Does anyone else get an overwhelming urge to just jump into one of those vats?? I think I might have a bit of a problem.

Cat Plate - Balscote Press Visit: Part Two

As promised, here's another post on what we got up to on our trip to Balscote Press last month.

This is about the rather miraculous process of letterpress printing photographs. No really.

Being the massive losers we are, we decided the only photos that would do for this experiment were of our beloved cats, Basil and Saffy (they have their own blog here). First step is to convert the image to half-tone:

This basically means it's made up of a series of dots. The greater the spacing between the dots, the lighter the area will appear when printed, and in turn, the denser the dots, the darker the area will appear. Genius.

This is then printed to film:

Then we realise it needs to be a negative and print it to film again:

To create something from which we can print, we use this magical little device to create a photopolymer plate from the film. This is a UV process. Don't ask me how it works...

The basics are that the printing areas will harden, and then the non-printing areas of the plate need to be washed away using this hi-tech method:

And you're left with this (ta da!):

This was all done in rather a rush as we were running out of time, so in future we definitely need to go at it slower. We weren't particularly confident we'd get something printable this time, but we were pleasantly surprised. We got our black ink ready:

Here's the inked plate on the Arab:

And the resultant print:

Just ignore the rather unfortunate shape across Basil's face, it's most likely due to over-vigorous scrubbing of the plate during the cleaning stage. Ahem.

Here's another photopolymer plate (not made in a rush) where you can see some very handsome fishes:

So there you have it! We're incredibly excited about the potential of this technique, the possibilities are endless really. We're very much looking forward to experimenting once we have the time, and when our Arab is ready to play of course.

I've been driving in my car

We've had a few bespoke projects to work on this January, which has been excellent fun.

I'd like to share this one with you; they're gift vouchers for a local driving instructor. My driving instructor in fact. Yes, after almost 15 years of pathological terror, I have finally started learning to drive. So if you value life and limb, perhaps avoid Bishop's Stortford on a Wednesday afternoon.

The vouchers are printed in 1 colour (black) on 330gsm Naturalis FSC in Absolute White Matt.

Here's the photopolymer plate:

And inked up:

Drying after the inked part was all printed:

I'm particularly pleased with the blind debossed L-plate borders:

The finished product:

I'm pleased to say the vouchers were very well received by our client. 

If you or anyone you know is in need of driving lessons on the Herts/Essex border, I cannot recommend Diane highly enough. 

Noted

Apologies for the hiatus, we've been a wee bit busy in the run up to the festive season. Much fun has been had with various craft markets, epic Christmas card print-runs, typing letters from Santa etc.

Most of our time has been devoted, however, to another new project, about which we're very excited... Personalised Notebooks!

This started off as 2015's solution to our annual 'massive family, no time' Christmas present dilemma, but we're pleased to say has proved popular with our customers as well.

I don't have as many 'work in progress' photos as I'd like, so will be sure to take some more detailed shots next time we're making.

The covers are letterpress printed with the text either being blind debossed or printed with black ink:

We've given a choice of two 24pt fonts. Gills Sans Bold:

Or Bernhard Gothic Light:

We were able to stick with our ethical sourcing policies by using recycled board for the covers. This is from the lovely Eco-craft, and we selected a range of 11 very sexy colours:

The few work in progress shots I do have:

To bind the notebooks, we use a simple 3-hole pamphlet stitch, like so:

Using our very lovely Bookbinding Tool Kit from the LCBA:

Here's hoping we'll be making plenty more of these in 2016.