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:

Type and Transport

You know the Tube font? It's cool isn't it? And the branding across London Transport: brilliant, smart, consistent, right? Alright fine, I bet you've never really thought about it. Take a second now though, and I think you'll agree.

It's coming up 100 years since calligrapher Edward Johnston designed that iconic typeface; so much a part of Londoner's lives that it's almost invisible. To celebrate, the London Transport Museum have put on a fabulous tour at the depot in Acton, entitled Johnston Journeys, and I can certainly recommend it. Apologies for the quality of my photos.

The depot itself is a wonder to behold. Apparently the museum at Covent Garden only represents 10% of the archive of stuff held by London Transport, and all the rest is squirrelled away in this vast depot. It's a complete Aladdin's cave of transport history, really quite extraordinary.

The tour itself was excellent fun. Very well curated, cherry-picking artefacts from all over the depot that related to Johnston and his typeface, in its various incarnations over the last century.

The absolute highlight for us (of course!) was the type case filled with wood type. They even had some formes still locked up with various bits of signage, it was a delight to see.

Sadly it was shut away in a glass case, so we couldn't really get anywhere near it... understandable though, even I could imagine getting a bit light-fingered faced with such a treasure.

The only slight downside for us was that the chaps who gave our tour, whist incredibly knowledgeable on trains, tubes, and the history of the Underground, perhaps weren't quite so expertly informed when it came to the history (and terminology) of type and printing.

For us personally, that being our main area of interest, I suppose it would have been nice to have a bit more detail on that side of things. I know I sound like a total Hermione when I say things like that, but of course I mean no disservice to the volunteers there; they're doing a grand job.

Overall, it was a fascinating couple of hours. We could have happily stayed to explore for the rest of the day. So if you've any interest in the history of type, design, branding, transport or indeed, just the history of our fair city... do check it out.

Read All About It

It's letterpress, but not as we know it.

We came across a fascinating video this week, showing the process of printing newspapers "pre-computers".

The film was made in around 1950 and it's a great snapshot of printing history. You can see linotype and teletype machines in action, proofing, plate-making, photographs being developed and some bone fide 1950s scouts. It has everything. It certainly filled a few gaps in my knowledge. Hope you enjoy this as much as we did...

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.

Off with their heads!

S'alright, we're not really decapitating anyone, just bought us a guillotine and I can't think about the word guillotine without that coming to mind. We'll only be trimming board with it, promise.

So here he is, lovely no? Please ignore our hideous kitchen, we can't afford to do it up because we keep buying letterpress gear.

We had no idea that Adana made guillotines as well as presses. I'm so pleased he's as handsome as our little 8x5!

We bought this on ebay a couple of weeks ago, collection only. The seller turned out to be a charming bloke called Glenn, from Inky Beard Press.

He's based in Whitstable, so we managed another trip to the seaside this month in order to collect. It was absolutely pissing it down, but I'm always happy to see the sea, whatever the weather.

We enjoyed an interesting chat with Glenn, he showed us around his little workshop. He has a marvellous collection of type, and this hunking beauty of a press, a Crown Folio Arab. We are very jealous:

Here's some of his lovely work. I love the 'public hanging' poster:

We can't wait to get cracking with the guillotine and are anticipating it will save us a shed load of time. We've been trimming by hand (it seems we do everything by hand!) with a scalpel up to this point, so hopefully this will give us a few days of our lives back.

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!

Gold! And a lucky find.

Let me clarify. We have not found any treasure, gold is just an ink colour, and the lucky find was a type tray. Ok, expectation management out of the way, just a quick catch-up today...

I've recently gone down to a 4-day week in my day job, allowing me the brilliant expanse of all-the-Wednesdays to focus on our little letterpress company, Grey Letter Press.

I'll admit the first week didn't go that well, I ended up spending more time cooking and cleaning, as it was such a novelty to be home and have time to do these things. Of course, at the end of the day I felt frustrated and cross with myself. I didn't lose a fifth of my salary to be a bloody housewife!

So, since then I've been much more focused and spent lots of time reprinting cards, look here I am, printing...

Cards what I printed (innit):

In big news, we're trading at our first craft market soon (woohoo!), so we need plenty of stock. I will be posting again about this nearer the time of course, but we'll be at the Crafty Fox Market the Dogstar in Brixton on Saturday 25th April. Do swing by if you fancy it (and buy loads of cards please).

We thought some of our cards could do with a little revamp, so I've been trying out printing some existing designs in gold. Gooooolllld! Whaddaya reckon? This one we've decided is definitely a goer:

Not so sure about this one, I think maybe the original black is better? What say you?

In other news, we've had a weekend away in the delightful seaside town of Aldeburgh, Suffolk. Apparently, it's pronounced "All-brough", which is confusing. Not much to do if you've got kids or are easily bored, but if you just like sea-views, walking, eating and drinking like we do, I'd certainly recommend it.

We took a very windy stroll up the coast to the neighbouring village of Thorpeness, where we found a lovely sort of vintage market, called the Thorpeness Emporium. All sorts of delightful bits in there, including a gorgeous 1960s John Lewis sofa that totally stole our hearts. Head's won out on that one (can't afford it, don't need one), but we did allow ourselves to be tempted by this very unusual looking type tray:

That's me, nearly getting blown away on the walk back. I'm not wearing a tiny hat, btw, that's the handle of the tray.

We believe the tray is for storing leading, or furniture. Well, that's what we're using it for anyway. Lovely stuff.