Learning how to letterpress business cards

Seeking help from the traditional print tutors to develop hand pressed business cards for my extended practice was fun and useful. Traditional print has always been so far distant from my practice (aside from when I finally tried my hand at screenprinting last year) so after advice from Alec to get them letterpressed I figured this was something I could learn myself.

Around 200 business cards would have cost £120 to be letterpressed by a company. Instead after coursing enough free samples from GF Smith and buying the woodblock letterpress plates (around £50) the project all in all cost less than half that of outsourcing to someone else (no doubt not as high quality but a high enough standard that the client was happy with).

Mixing Inks

Test printing business cards

Final Cards

The one gripe I had with them was the quality of print on the back, embossing didn't work as well since the type was so small so by mixing a slightly darker ink than the colour of the paper, it enhanced the emboss creating a subtle print.

Feeling confident in my abilities to letterpress business cards now (after doing over 100 of them) I think this is something that I could potentially do for my own personal branding as the finish feels much more tactile than digitally printed business cards.