At Last!

We've been printing a number of posters and large prints lately, many celebrating weddings and anniversaries in a novel way. This poster invitation for Orin and Cliff is no exception. They were looking for a colorful poster to share with their friends and family announcing their upcoming wedding. This one features a few sweet elements to give it a breezy, vintage Florida feel. The little 8 pointed stars are actually new wood ornaments from Moore Wood Type, and it's such a delight to get brand new wood type! The large yellow block around their names is a linoleum cut, purposefully offset a bit to make the names pop. The ampersand is printed in the blue color, but is transparent enough to look green and create other shapes and colors via overprinting.

Orin and Cliff also liked many of the cityscapes we create, so the poster features a little section of Jacksonville, complete with a water line and sun-like ornament. And surely the wedding will be just as bright and sunny!

Stephanie + Keith

Stephanie and I met at IndieWed back in January, and she was instantly smitten with our Wanted! Wedding Collection. She loved the idea of the 3-panel, accordion fold style, so that their names could be large and the details could be on the second panel. We looked at a number of color options, but greens seemed to stick, so we went with a dark chartreuse and warm gray on textured off white card stock. Gotta love the 'messiness' in this wood type!

These little fan-like ornaments used throughout are new to the studio. They were a recent purchase from Skyline Type Foundry and have already put in appearances on a number of projects.

More little ornaments from the same Skyline collection. The more type the merrier... and check out the shading on 'DINNER'. Can't get that detail in magnesium or polymer plates.

And it's finished out with a mad libs-style perforated reply postcard.

While working on the invites, we also put together some fun flat cards to be used as thank you notes and anything else the couple might need them for. And because Keith goes by both Conley and, ahem, Keith, we put their first and middle names on the cards. These use some of our tiniest wood type, which is just shy of an inch.

We had such a good time with the invites and note cards, Keith wanted to do a run of rehearsal dinner invitations as well. These could be more playful and definitely push the Wild West theme (unfortunately we didn't have any small gun ornaments as requested, but did have some pretty awesome manicules, or little hands).

There's a lot of heavy forced justification in this layout, which is a great way to tie together disparate typefaces. And the diamond shaped linotype slugs were found at the always great Platen Press Museum type sale back in May. The pointers next to 'given by' are over 100 years old, and were made right here in Chicago.

To stand out from the invite, we printed on kraft stock and worked in brick colored envelopes. What's really WANTED! in this picture? The chance to work with Stephanie & Keith again!

Tonight... and every night after

Charlotte came to me with a request for a customized poster that she wanted to give to her fiance on their wedding day. Her ideas were all fabulous, and text rich, which makes for challenging experiments with type. Having lived in Nashville and being huge live music fans (Alex proposed while attending a show), she wanted something reminiscent of Hatch Show Print, but with a more urban, Chicago-y feel, given that this is now their home. We decided to go large with a poster that would be 14x18", with bright colors that would match their home. Here are a few shots of the form I put together. With a few tweaks, it was ready to print!

And here's the final print, done in three colors. The teal and bright red overlap on their names to make them pop. Little Stella is their sidekick dog.

Conveniently, this little Chicago cityscape existed in the studio collection, along with the Chicago stars and music notes.

Charlotte and Alex have lived in numerous places, many of which are listed in the style of concert tour locations. They enjoyed a lovely trip to Europe, which shows up here as a 'multi-city European tour'.

Congrats to both! If the marriage is half as fun and entertaining as this poster was to print, it's made to last.

Cocktails, lemurs & dinner

Marissa and Ned came to me with the idea of printing a poster for their wedding invitation that would fold down to fit into an envelope. Their inspiration was their location... the Bronx Zoo, and specifically this vintage poster:

I felt we could reduce the awesome hippo to a two-color linoleum cut and combine it with some of the 20's era type in the studio, both metal and wood. Here are the linoleum cuts along with some of the type used. There's a great deal of tricky spacing with more stylized typefaces and forced justification. It was also an opportunity to use brand new casts of the swirly ornaments from the fine folks behind Skyline Type.

And here's the final piece! It measures 7x20", and folds like an accordion down to 5x7". The accommodations card (which has directions on the reverse side) and reply card are both perforated so they can be torn off of the invitation to be both used and returned. Who will have the most fun at this wedding, the guests or zoo residents?