So three months have gone by and we’ve introduced three very different monthly Type Cards. April’s card is going to be even better! That’s because today we’re announcing a contest that will allow you to submit your own design. Here’s how it works: We’re going to be accepting submissions starting today and through March 26th, 2012. At the end of the submission period we’ll share the top designs and let   everyone decide the winner.

What’s at stake: The winner will have their design letterpress printed and shipped with every order we send out during the month of April (free advertising?). They’ll also receive 75 prints of the design and one of each of our previous Type Cards (that’s the printed FREE part).

Design Guidelines: The Type Card is meant to celebrate new/unique typefaces so we want to see how you’ll use type to highlight one of April’s holidays. Here’s a list of holidays this month: April 2012 Holidays. The most popular holidays include Easter, Passover, and Income Tax day. Some of the more odd holidays are Eight Track Tape Day, Barbershop Quartet Day, and my personal favorite National Cheese-ball day. The design should be no larger than 4″ x 4″ and 1-color (any Pantone color you like).

How do I submit: Please email all entries to submissions@dolcepress.com. For printing, we’ll need your file in vector format (preferably in Illustrator or PDF). Feel free to send us a short description of the design with your submission.

We’ll be updating everyone as the contest proceeds so check back frequently. We’re really excited about the contest and look forward to sharing all of the amazing designs. Now stop reading this and get to work on your design!

A black and white design accented with red edge coloring.

These letterpress invitations were for the Martin & Jorg Annual Christmas Party in Norway. We stumbled across them in our sample room and had forgot how nice the bright red edge was. The invites were printed on handmade cotton paper that was about 620gsm using neutral black ink. The line on the invite was left so that each piece could be filled in with the recipients name, a personal touch. After printing, each invite was edge colored in a bright red.

With the holidays fast approaching, we decided to create a limited edition t-shirt with a special holiday message. When we say LIMITED, we mean it! There are only 5 of these shirts up for sale. We used a 100% cotton long-sleeve t-shirt in a perfect holiday red color. The shirts are available for purchase here: http://www.dolcepress.com/holidayshirts

The shirt (shown above) is screen printed on both sides with white ink. The dolce press logo was printed on the front and the holiday message on the back.

So what would we put on the back of the shirt? It’s no secret how much we love letterpress, so you better just hope you landed yourself on the nice list this year!

So, what’s the difference between letterpress and digital printing? Just about everything. Whether it’s the paper, hand mixed ink, impression, or the unique look, letterpress is different in every way. To purchase one of the limited edition shirts, visit the special page we’ve setup for them: Limited Edition Holiday T-Shirts Please let us know what you think. Post any questions or comments about the shirts below and we’ll be sure to reply.

Happy Holidays from the Dolce Press team!

We’re happy to announce a new retailer for the holiday season: UncommonGoods picked us as the winner of their Holiday Card Design Contest, something that we’re ecstatic about in the studio! The process was really fun.

Here’s what happened: We submitted a few designs and the judges picked the Word Search design as a semi-finalist. From there, they posted all of the finalists – 14 total – in their community voting app (a place where customers can vote on new items). After 7 long sleepless nights of reading comments and checking votes, the judges met one last time and picked a winner. The UG team blogged about the process here: The ‘Search’ Is Over. You can see the heated debate among the judges in the photo below, looks like a lot of fun to us!

photo courtesy of uncommongoods.com

UncommonGoods sells some really great things, we’ve been browsing the site for a few days now and here are some of our favorites:

Some IPA, a ping pong and a mug walk into a bar … sounds like the start of a good joke. Those are just a few of the cool things they sell, check out our cards and a lot more on the UG website.

 It took long enough! We finally have t-shirts for Dolce Press.

We printed some t-shirts recently for everyone at the shop and I finally got around to shooting some photos of them. There’s nothing worse than getting ink or grease on your shirt so we designed these shirts with that in mind! So far we’ve got 3 different designs one about vandercooks, another about business cards, and the third about being type “high”. See all of the photos of the shirts after the break and let us know what you think!

more …

Just wanted to drop a quick note to everyone who reads the blog to let them know that Hurricane Irene came and went and we’re okay. We spent the better part of friday wrapping every thing we could to prevent damage. With people growing crazy by the minute, gas stations out of gas, and grocery stores out of food, we weren’t sure what to expect.

Thankfully for us, the storm wasn’t as bad as predicted. In fact, the studio never lost power or cable service, so we could of been printing throughout the storm but we decided it would be safer to wait it out at home. We were relieved to find out everything was ok. We know not everyone else was as fortunate and send our thoughts out to all those affected. Here are photos from part of the shop after being wrapped up!

Under the blue “tent” was our 2 beloved Vandercook Universal III’s. We stashed several flashlights (bottom-left) around the shop in case we were forced to print without power! We also made sure to strap down all of the tarps to ensure that they wouldn’t blow away. At least we knew the equipment itself wouldn’t blow away.

Second to our heart behind our equipment is our paper. We piled everything up and covered it up.

OK, now its time to get back to printing!

There’s no better way to welcome your new addition than with a letterpress card!

As a nice detour from the stream of business cards that we’ve been sharing on the blog, we decided to post some photos of custom baby announcements we designed based off of the Venice letterpress invite. We worked with Andrea to create a custom letterpress announcement for Zephyrine’s birth.

Read more about these announcements …