René Tate Photography Business Cards August 29, 2011
The best way to personalize your business card is to put your signature on them.
René contacted us a while back to produce some new business cards to match her revamped packaging and branding (René Tate Photography). We discussed a few different options with René and the final piece included foil, blind letterpress, chocolate brown stock, and lettra. This isn’t our first time around the block with a photographer, we’re happy to print and design for the best photographers from the U.S. and abroad.
We really love the look of metallic foils on dark paper. The contrast of flat paper with shiny foil is something that is unique to foil stamping and complements the letterpress process nicely. We usually find the best balance is achieved when mixing the two like we did here with René’s business cards.
René supplied us with the design for the front and back of the cards.
The foil side of the business cards was printed on French Paper’s Pop-Tone Hot Fudge (140lb). What a great name for a paper color! We foil stamped the text using a metallic gold foil, that has a mirror finish.
The front of the card, with a signature style logo, was printed on Crane’s Lettra in pearl white (110lb). For the letterpress signature, we used transparent white ink to add a subtle shading to the design. The simple look of the letterpress is a nice contrast to the flashy gold text on the foil side.
Once each side of the cards were printed, we duplexed them together to create a card that was 250lb weight stock. The final result was chocolate brown on one side and white on the other. The finished size was 4″ x 1.5″, definitely deviating from the standard size of 3.5″ x 2″. Keeping the stocks separate for printing allows us to get a heavy impression on the letterpress side without any effect to the foil side.
These last two photos show the stock prior to being cut down. We foil stamped them 2-up and then rotated the stock to get a total of 4 cards per sheet of paper. The same was done to the letterpress side (below-right). There is definitely a balance between printing multiple cards up on a sheet and keeping costs for magnesium dies and photopolymer plates.
The other thing we consider, especially with letterpress, is the coverage. The larger the solid, the less the impression generally. In these instances we try to minimize the number of cards we print on a single sheet. For more questions about letterpress and hot foil production, email us (contact@dolcepress.com) or post a question below.
