Evolution of an Invitation

A lot of newer letterpress printers are graphic designers of some sort or another, and I've said before that I'm not. I've been doing a lot of reading and experimenting and I'd like to take a typography class and a couple other classes, but money is tight. My point is that I'm kind of making this all up as I go along. The design process, client relations, estimating production costs and time, these are all new to me (as such things would be to anyone getting into a new field), and sometimes I feel like there's a very steep learning curve. That's one of the reasons I've been printing things at cost for friends and family and not seeking out real business yet - when I end up hand setting parts of a wedding invitation not just once but about three different times, it's much better to be doing this as a learning experience for people I care about. No amount of money would make that tons of fun and there's no way I could charge people for that sort of labor anyway. I'd like to know how people who handset job printing deal with this. For job printing, plates seem like the way to go. I guess I'm a product of the computer age in that respect, proofing and design on the computer is way less trouble than on the imposing stone. And perhaps less fun?

All the wedding invitations I've done until now have been designed by others and I've just printed them. This is fine with me - I like to print first and foremost and this also meant that I have so far avoided learning all that wedding etiquette-type stuff. When I offered to print invites for my friends, John and Alissa, I thought it would be even simpler. John and Alissa are getting married in Louisville, Kentucky over Memorial Day weekend and it's going to be a summery, casual and laid-back kind of wedding. They don't want a typical, more formal  wedding - no colors or a theme, etc, and that sounded nice until I realized that picking colors for the invitations would now be a challenge since ANYTHING could go. I have a foundry type cut of a frog on a bicycle (you can see it here on a business card),  and John knew that he wanted to use that but really didn't have any further design specifications or restrictions in mind. He also wanted to just work within the limitations of my set-up: a size that the 5x8 Kelsey could accommodate, handset type, etc. Sounds pretty simple, right?

John and Alissa came over one afternoon and looked at my type and all the different cuts and we talked about paper and sizes, etc. I also have a Gocco, which is a small Japanese contraption that does a sort of silkscreen type printing, so we thought we could use that for any images we wanted to use that I didn't have for letterpress printing. So John goes home and thinks about this and comes up with a design that uses both letterpress and Gocco printing and a couple weeks later, he comes over so we could try it out. Sort of a test run.

This was actually very strange at first because I've never had anyone in my space during printing before. My "shop" is actually the hallway between my bedroom and my living room/kitchen, so there isn't a whole lot of room to move around. Really I'm the only person who can be in my house without knocking something over or bumping into something (usually my bike, which is also in that hallway), so it was sort of awkward having to maneuver around John to go between the Gocco on the kitchen table and the press in the hall. He also wanted to help and I really didn't know how he could besides cutting paper. But we ended up having fun, and I put him to work setting his and Alissa's names in 24pt. Gallia type for our test print. It was surprisingly nice to have a friend gain an understanding of the letterpress process. Glendon of course knows more than he wants to and I have a couple librarian friends that have done it before at Rare Book School in Virginia, but generally people don't really get it. So that was cool, but our tests were a disaster.

I don't even have pictures of them, but they just looked bad. John had decided that he wanted colored stock with the Gocco printed flower in white and then the letterpress printed text over that. I warned him that the white ink would be somewhat transparent and might not be possible, but on three of our four paper samples, the white faded so much as it dried that it was hardly visible. I told him that we could work around that to a certain extent, perhaps by adding a tint to the white or that we could use white stock and print the flower in a pale color, so we moved on to the letterpress portion of the afternoon. I had been wanting to incorporate Gocco and letterpress before, so I was eagerly anticipating this, but it looked awful. The Gocco ink and letterpress ink do not like each other. The letterpress ink on the paper and over the Gocco printing appeared to be different colors and the way the ink was sitting on the Gocco section just looked bad and mottled. The other strange thing was that I had given John a list of the fonts I owned and he picked a combination of 24pt and 14pt Gallia, and then he had even found digital copies of them so our mock-up actually used the fonts. So cool! Except that the digital fonts are much smaller than the actual size of the metal type when printed. We decided to up the size of the invitation and I began to worry that the whole thing would look too heavy.

Yeah, pretty much everything went wrong that day. I suggested to John that he just get at least part of the invitation offset printed, but he didn't want to. He didn't feel all that attached to his design and wanted to work within my capabilities. He had to leave so I began cleaning the press, thinking "crap, what are we going to do now?"

It's funny how mindless tasks, like cleaning the press, can sometimes help you work things out. So I thought about the frog cut and the Gallia font and what else I might have and suddenly came up with this idea of using these two cuts I have of a trellis with flowers running up it. It just kind of popped into my head that it would look nice in a limey-springy green and a summery turquoise. The text could be left aligned and I could sort of intersperse little flowers or swirls around the jagged edges of the text lines. I thought it could be summery and relaxed but still kind of elegant. I was actually kind of excited about this new idea. John and Glendon play together in a bluegrass band that was having a show later that night, and when I got there, I outlined my new idea, and they both wrinkled their noses. They couldn't picture those colors and they didn't remember particularly liking the cut I was thinking about. It actually turned out that both of them (and, well everyone) thought that my trellis was a picket fence, so no one liked it. They're right too. It's a very ugly picket fence or a very nice trellis and I'm glad I looked at it wrong! But John was willing to give it a shot - he didn't have a better idea.

So a couple nights later I handset the text, which was such a pain. I don't have tons of Gallia, so I started running out of certain letters pretty early. If we had used that original set-up, I would have had to print it in three sections to get all the letters. And then it looked like crap (does anyone sense a theme here?). I was just doing a very quick proof - inking up the type with brayers instead of using the rollers - and I didn’t even attempt to fix the leading, but I wanted to give John and Alissa an idea of what I was imagining so that we could figure something else out if they still hated it.

Both of them liked it more than they thought they would, and we decided to work with that design. John and I both agreed that the 24pt and 14pt Gallia was too much and that we needed to break it up with a smaller, less noticeable font. This presented a new problem since I have Futura & Della Robbia in 8 and 10 pt, an unsorted mishmash of things in the 10 & 12pt range and then a bunch of 18 and 24pt fonts. I was pretty sure that the Gallia required a san serif font, so that narrowed it to Futura, but I was worried that the 10pt would look too small, so I did some mock-ups on the computer, using a few different options, including throwing out the Gallia completely and using Greeting Monotone or Pacific. Results, in keeping with the project so far, were surprising.

It turns out that John hates Greeting Monotone, which I find weird since I really like it, and though he liked Pacific, he had grown quite attached to the Gallia so wanted to stick with it. The Futura looked weird with the Gallia - it was way too round and seemed cartoonish. The Della Robbia, while a bit small, looked much better, so 10pt Della Robbia with 24pt and 14pt Gallia was the new plan. I hand-set everything again, this time adding in leading and John and Glendon came over to "help" again. Since neither of them was convinced that the blue and green were perfect, I suggested that they choose another color to print with, and after much deliberation, they settled on a kind of hunter green. I hate that color, but I rolled my eyes and inked up. We also added various ornaments this time, and John had thought my idea of interspersing the ornaments at the ends of the text lines sounded difficult (which was true), so I had him choose which ornaments and where to put everything. I think he was right about ornament placement since with the large Gallia and the small Della Robbia, ornaments scattered throughout may have looked odd. Anyway, I printed some proofs and we made some changes and I thought to myself that perhaps it would have been simpler to have just bought a plate from Owosso!

We did agree that this print was headed in the right direction, but John didn't want the body text left aligned right near the trellis border. He thought it would look better if aligned more at the center. I still disagree with him about this, but I reset the stupid text that way for the next proof and he continued to like that best. I have to admit that I didn't argue with him much about changing it back since I would have had to respace everything again and at that point I was getting tired of the whole process. With this proof I also simplified the ornaments and placed them so everything seemed evenly weighted. The I chose a pinky, raspberry color that I thought would look equally good when paired with the turquoise, lime green or hated evergreen colors.

This proof, with minor spacing changes, became our final working copy. John and Alissa deliberated about the colors and finally decided on the two original colors, which was sort of funny since I had since decided that I liked the pink and blue best. Below you can see the final product. In the upcoming post, Dueling Wedding Invitations, Part Two, I will go into excruciating detail about all the problems I had printing that, but I wanted to first detail the design process for this. Lessons learned? Custom design is a conundrum. How one keeps the amount of changes and time spent on design under control is something I'd have to seriously work on in a paying situation. When/if I ever begin doing this for money, I think I'll offer templates that can be modified or hi, I'll print your design. Also, boy oh boy, handset type is great for me and my projects, but when printing for business, not pleasure, I believe I would mostly stick to plates. And, I am flighty, and by the end of this whole thing (at least a month and a half), I was thoroughly sick of these colors, these cuts and this type. How do you keep from burning out? I'm sure there were other design lessons, but right now I can't think of them, and I'll probably remember them next time I make the same mistake. And then I'll let you know so that you can either not make the same mistake or laugh at my stupidity -  I'm fine with both.

Comments

[elisabeth]

Hi Maggie,
I think it's fabulous -- the rundown especially. It is maddening, isn't it? I find it's so much easier to throw up my hands and say whatever, it's your thing -- and more often than not they'll come back to the original suggestion and chirp "well you're the expert", to which I say yes, you should have listened to me. Unfortunately it creates a certain degree of apathy because you just want it to be done.
I will say that your best bet is to charge per round of proofs. And maybe produce the digitals before delving into handset type. If clients want to see a handset proof add $100 to their bill.
Unrelated but I love that your guy is in a bluegrass band -- we've got mandolins and whatnot here but my husband is more of a guitar player. Still if you're ever in Portland, ME may I recommend you find out where the Jerks of Grass are playing.

[elisabeth]

As for the Jerks, wow I've just looked up their online presence and the recordings are terrible, flat, ho-hum. Sounds like a bunch of kids with braces in a garage. So don't take the endorsement by what you hear on the internets, they are excellent musicians live.

[Rich]

Ah, bluegrass is excellent. I play guitar myself, most anything but especially folk, and especially Bob Dylan. At least I call it playing. Jezebel doesn't seem to mind. Much.

I've heard wedding invitations are both the most lucrative jobs as well as the most frustrating. I think Elisabeth is absolutely right, you should get paid for every bit of work you do.

At my real job as a cabinetmaker we have clients sign a design retainer and pay a fee based on the high end of how much time is involved with designing an average job. That covers your time and expenses and also allows the client to back out before signing the main contract for the work. If they're not willing to sign and pay for a retainer they aren't very serious about spending the amount that the final job will probably cost so you're better off not doing any work for them. They need to show an equal level of initial commitment to yours. Your design and re-design, and re-re-design, proofs, etc. is your commitment and the design retainer is theirs.

From all the horror stories I've heard, and I'll include yours as well, except as a gift for a friend or relative I wouldn't do any weddings without a full payment structure. Otherwise it just doesn't seem worth the time and frustration, especially if it's not a source of primary income.

Personally, I like the one in the second photo, lower right.

Rich

[Maggie]

Wow, thanks for the advice, both of you. I'm having such a hard time figuring out what to charge for work (this is why I only do gratis projects for friends so far), so these tips really are useful.

As more people find out I do letterpress printing, I'm having more potential (paying) jobs fall into my lap. I feel that I better either figure out a pricing structure or decide not to print for money (I won't say profit!). I'm really of two minds on it.

Yes! So many bluegrass fans! Glendon plays fiddle and John plays banjo, but the band is 11 people total, so it's quite a show. If you're ever in NYC, they're really worth checking out (www.MShanghaiStringBand.com - there I've plugged them). Now that I've given their website, I have to agree with Elisabeth and add that I'm not sure bluegrass, or any music that's really meant to be heard live, can ever sound as good recorded - energy-wise at least. I do hope that Dylan's the exception since I wasn't able to hear him in his heyday!