Bon Voyage Emily :(

A dear friend and colleague of mine is relocating from London to Bristol. I am both delighted for her, insanely jealous, and already missing my cinema buddy.

It's also her birthday coming up, so inspired by our joint frustration with our overcrowded metropolis, we made this card for her.

From that angle, it may just look like your average beautifully letterpressed birthday card (!), but if you look closer, you can see we've been playing with blind impressions again, and a hidden message is revealed...

Here are some pics of the type being locked-up and inked. This was a bit of a messy one, our roller's too wide to do this with any finesse so we had to wipe it off before printing!

I'm pleased to report she loved it. Bon Voyage Emily & Jon, missing you guys already!

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Birthday Card

It was my best friend's birthday this week. She has the slight misfortune of being born on New Year's Day, so it's always a bit tricky trying to organise celebrations etc. Last year was her 30th and her husband arranged a fantastic surprise party in a lovely pub in North London. The theme was Buffy the Vampire Slayer (awesome), as Lisa is a huge fan of the show. We were chief in charge of decorations and got massively carried away with candles, velvet, bats, tarot cards etc. We even had my Dad whittle a stake for us. It was pretty cool.

This year, as it's less of a landmark birthday, no such shindiggery is taking place. Though we have printed a Buffy-themed birthday card for her. This is a quote from (I believe) the third season of Buffy. A slightly ironic birthday message, but I think it works perfectly...

Here's the locked-up type (I love this font, I want to use it for everything!):

A delicious blood red for the ink:

We were going to use this crossbow detail on there as well, but it looked (to use the technical term)... a bit crap.

And here's the final card! Gorgeous!

Not sure if this is a bit too niche to make available for sale, though I suppose the Buffy cult is a big one. Drop us a line if you'd like to see this in the shop : )

Putting it out there

It's been a rather exciting week. We've finally launched our website!  I know I've been hinting at it for a while on here, and now I can make good on my promises.

Without any further ado, I am delighted to announce the advent of Grey Letter Press!

We've launched so far with 9 greetings cards, with plenty more products to follow soon I hope. Just need to find some time to get our new ideas on press, and December is being, well, Decemberish.

The website and the cards themselves have actually been ready to go for quite a long time, the thing holding us up was product photography. We haven't been able to get results we were happy with, after many trials. With quality product photography, the key things you need are good light, and a decent camera. We've had access to neither of those for some time, until my lovely friend Penny was able to lend us her camera, and the sun finally showed its face after weeks of miserable greyness.

Here are our 9 finished cards, some shots of them on press, and some other bits and bobs we photographed on sexy-camera day : )

Thanks to all our friends and family for your support in getting the website launched, and those who are already talking/tweeting about it. You are brilliant.

www.greyletterpress.co.uk 

Have a SERIOUSLY Happy Birthday

Another personalised birthday card for a friend to show you this week. This one is more of a departmental in-joke at work, so possibly looks a bit odd. I'm pleased to say the recipient, my lovely Polish colleague Kornelia, was delighted with it.

This was our initial lock-up, but I decided it wasn't dramatic enough:

I needed to draw more attention to the word "Seriously" and then have the "Have a" and "Happy Birthday" almost as an after-thought for the joke to really work. So we went with mixed wooden type, like so:

A delicious hot pink was really the only colour choice here:

And then the other bit. You can't go wrong with Gill Sans:

And the finished card:

I'll admit I don't think this one is going to have much appeal outside of the Usborne Production department, but it performed its role perfectly!

What does Admiral Ackbar say?

Just a quick post today. Here's another personalised birthday card, this time for our dear friend Graham, who is a huge (and I mean HUGE) Star Wars fan.

This lovely old wooden type is so worn down that none of it is really type-high anymore, but on the proof press, make-ready is easy-peasy, so this didn't take too long to set up.

This is printed with Black Caligo Safe Wash Relief Ink on 330gsm Naturalis in Absolute White Matt (FSC).  

Star Wars not being what you'd call a niche interest, we're hoping to have these for sale one day.  We're very busy bees at the moment, taking slow but steady steps towards launching our website (with a little shop and a proper company name and everything... eek! And sshhh! It's still all under wraps for now!)

Neil Gaiman Card

Printed a card for a friend's birthday today. The two things we know Kathy loves are cheese, and Neil Gaiman. So clearly, she is a lady of taste. After failing to come up with a cheese-based concept for a birthday card (this will remain on my to do list), we went with a Neil Gaiman quote instead.

We tried a sort of gradient thing, but it needed more time than we had to perfect, so we'll save that for another day.

And the finished product...

Not exactly a masterpiece, but fit for purpose I think.