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!

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.