Just got these in the mail yesterday! So pumped! While I haven’t yet run out of my personal business cards, I thought it would be a fun idea to make Daily Drop Cap cards, since for the most part that’s what everyone knows me from. I designed them so they could be used as the project continues and after it is complete (can’t wait until I can start checking off the “complete” box). If you want to zoom in, you can see a much larger image here. These were printed by Cranky Pressman, and they did a truly excellent job! Some specs: Two color front (black and pms warm red) / blank back; Printed on Crane’s Lettra 220lb Paper with edge painting. The registration is absolutely spot on and I couldn’t be happier with the end result. Everyone hire Keith to print your stuff! He is old school and uses metal plates for everything (I usually print with polymer), which rules. Because I ordered 1000 of these and will no way be able to hand that many out in person in the near future I’ll be tossing one in the next hundred or so orders I get from my store. Huzzah!
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New Daily Drop Cap Business Cards
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Art Directors Club Paper Expo
I had the pleasure of designing the ADC Paper Expo poster and promotional materials this year. It was a total blast! Usually designing for designers can be a bit tough, but this process was totally smooth as Laura Des Enfants’s main art direction was to make something awesome. Long live paper and print design!
XXMaking this design look like cut paper actually took a bit longer than I thought it would. I kept trying to make it look as though the type were cut out of a white sheet (basically the inverse of what I ended up with). After looking at a lot of cut paper art online I realized that the characters and scenery were almost always made out of the paper rather than cut from the paper (positive vs. negative). Once I changed things around to work this way I had a eureka moment and thought “ok, I think this will work out and not look like shit vector art…hopefully”.
XXOne of the hardest things about this project was that I had the opportunity to work with 5 ink colors if I wanted to. FIVE! I’ve never had that chance before with the usual crappy print budgets of other clients. I kept trying to think up ideas that would allow me to use a metallic ink or overprint a gloss varnish — something, ANYTHING, special and expensive. In the end, I knew I wanted to make it look cut paper-ish and there was really no need to do fancy printing. I had to accept that fancy printing conceptually didn’t work for the poster, which was tough. Designing appropriately for the project is one hurdle that I think a lot of people have trouble with. Everyone (including myself) want’s to fancify everything even when it’s not necessary just because it feels good to make fancy things. I’m really happy with how this turned out and can’t wait to see the actual printed mailer. Thanks ADC for an awesome project! See you all at the event! Here’s a big version in case you didn’t get the email blast (and even if you did get it, this one is the correct version—for the blast they exported my file incorrectly (overprinting of the shadow didn’t show up). The perils of handing over a vector file.) -
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Just got these in the mail today from Chronicle, totally pumped at how they turned out!! I can’t wait to post the full project on the design page, just need to take some more photos. I love designing cookbooks because 1. I like food and designing cookbooks means I get to eat for “inspiration” 2. the hierarchy of type (and the style sheeting) is so complex and making it pretty / readable is really fun and challenging.
