Thursday, March 1, 2012

Stuff for When People Get happy

Some think romance is romantic but we here at Isle of Printing know the truth.

LETTERPRESS is the TRUE reflection of love!

Just like love - letterpress leaves and impression, can be beautiful, and can be messy or painful if you don't know what you are doing......

Every year we are fortunate enough to help guide many a happy couple through the perilous rapids of bad wedding design into the safe calm eddies of balance and harmony.  It is a personal journey and we feel protective of that experience for our clients.  The truth is it is a personal experience for us too!  Most jobs we do at IOP are fully custom - so our sweat and blood go out in every card.  Why? because we believe that if you are going to make something it should be worthy of taking up valuable space on our increasingly overcrowded planet!

However if you like mediocre design - you're in luck too - the paperless society is a perfect solution!  Just send an email so the poor soul receiving it can delete it as soon as possible.

but I digress.....

After a full year of pumping out the wedding jams for people who I'd like to think are our friends and family now  - we thought we would share them with the wider world




This invitation is a 5-color ode to the tree of life,  circle of life and love.  With a perforated rsvp at the bottom -  it folded up into a self mailer to save real trees from the paper mill.  After all you can't love trees in design if you don't love them for real!  We are very excited to have been involved!






Meg and William's invitation was commissioned by William and his parents after many years as fans of our art prints! We wanted to illustrate the good times the wedding party would be having at their Texas rehearsal dinner and give a bit of western feel.  So the family brought us pictures of the event space and we hand drew the night time scene and then hand-carved the blocks for the barn illustration below.  Once again this is a tri-fold self mailer with a detachable rsvp card.  

Afterwards, we carved MORE blocks for a full-sized print of the barn party!  Which is now framed at the newly weds house!!!






When Ben and Tara came to us to help them with their wedding and save the date cards - we really wanted to do something unique!  Ben owns a handcrafted drink emporium - so we thought it fitting to incorporate the high art of toasting into the save the date cards.  And since we are always trying to give our products a second life and keep them out of the bin - I suggested we make the save date info into drink coasters.   It was also our humble hope that every time their friends had a drink they would raise a glass to the future of the friends...and remember to save the date!

We sourced coaster paper to make them legit and used some of our favorite flourishes from the 19th Century design world to accent the wood type.  After we handprinted them on our press we then die-cut them into actual coasters to pop out and use!


For the invitation we revived another popular design element from the late 1800's.   It consists of a border set that a letterpress printer could put together much like legos to create endless permutations of designs from a few simple shapes.   Here we used it to create a graceful and unique border for the invitation that would compliment the spirit of the event - without becoming too fussy. This invite was printed deeply on all cotton stock one by one, then folded with an embossed envelope and letter pressed belly band.  Classy - just like Ben and Tara!











Mandee and Wes wanted an unpretentious wedding invitation that celebrated a love of nature and represented the venue over in the hills of East Tenn.  We found a beautiful woodcut frame in our collection and a funny border off an old ham bag that fit the bill perfectly!  The cuts are rustic, but the invitations retain a sense of simple elegance through the choice of silver ink on a creamy heavy stock paper.







This invitation is full of ornaments and filigree, but what really sends it home is the custom illustration of the wedding location: Nashville's Shelby Street Pedestrian Bridge.  We all liked the idea that a detachable portrait of the Bridge would be a really nice way to remember the day and be something the guests and family could hold onto long after the wedding had come and gone.







We love to draw here at IOP, and we definitely love to illustrate mice!  Imagine our delight when our friends Mike and Rachel mentioned they liked the idea of a mouse sized representation of the wedding weekend's events!!!!!   Happy days!  Thanks for letting us create this completely hand-drawn invitation of tiny mice doing the things that people do at weddings on the coast of California.....etched into two magnesium plates and then run in two colors by hand on cream stock.   Another trifold self mailer - cause mice need some air!




Trains, trains, trains! Can't go a day in our neighborhood without hearing a train go by. These fine folks decided to tie the knot at the old Houston Station down the street (also near the tracks).  Thus we made them a locomotive to deliver the details to their friends and loved ones with a few details of the historic water tower. Choo choo!


All our clients are hip and on the move come wedding day it seems!


                                        

Here's another completely hand-drawn wedding invitation featuring mice, partying hearty on the Music City Queen! Even though this one was only a one-color job, you definitely can't call it "plain!"




That's all for now, folks! Remember, tons of people get hitched every day, but only the genetically superior have their invitations letterpressed, and the best of those folks have them done at Isle of Printing!

love- Gal Friday Rothenhöfer
and your old pal Hiram Kneesch