Letterpress printing is basically the first ancestor of all printing machines today. It was invented by Johannes Gutenberg in the 15th century, and involves inking and pressing a set form of raised letters/images into paper. This process, still used today by boutique studios like ours, creates visually distinctive stationery unmatched in elegance by other forms of printing.

Firstly, letterpress stationery is printed using antique machines that are hard to find, use and maintain compared to digital printers. They can’t be hooked up to a computer, so once a design has been finalized everything is done by hand. It’s a time-consuming and labour-intensive art form. Also, good letterpress requires good paper – we won’t print on anything less than our 300 gsm Italian-milled paper – which means you can see and feel the quality of our work.
Like any luxury product, letterpress is not mass. It’s not going to be an option for every budget; its exclusivity is what makes it special and unique. While we’d never pressure anyone into ordering from us, we stand by the ability of our products to elevate an event, business or personal image and give real weight to your words. To us, the question is: can you afford not to use letterpress stationery? If your goal is to stand out from the masses and leave your mark as a sophisticate, it’s a question worth considering.

We have an ever-expanding list of house ink colours, which most clients find a more than adequate selection. However, if a specific pantone colour is required, we will have it custom mixed to order at $50 per colour.

Definitely! Dual colour printing can get expensive, but there are other ways to tie your invitations in with your wedding colours. Envelope liners, bellybands, invitation folders and edge painting are great options, and less expensive than having multi-coloured invitations. If this is a direction you’d like to explore, please ask us about them during our initial meeting and we’ll be happy to go over your options.

Printing sans ink is called printing “blind”. It’s a really beautiful way to tone down a design for more of an understated, elegant look – which can make even more of an impact than full colour printing in some cases. Because they still require a dedicated plate made and their own run through the press, blind impressions are billed as a separate colour.

Yes. While we specialize in letterpress, we are happy to use other print mediums to supplement elaborate, custom designed invitation suites. Letterpress has limitations when it comes to producing extremely small fonts and highly detailed multi-tonal graphics (like photographs), so while we don’t do digital printing alone, we will sometimes recommend a multi-media approach to a client depending on their stationery needs.

While these are both things we are working towards, we are unfortunately not able to do either at the moment, though (schedule permitting) guest speaking at events and classroom lectures on letterpress may be arranged. We post regular news updates via our blog, facebook page and twitter feed, and we encourage interested parties to check there for updates.