Windmill vs. Cylinder

As I was running a job on our KS cylinder this week I was again reminded of the differences between a platen job press and a cylinder. The latter aren't called "buchdruck" (book printing) presses in Germany for nothing – they are truly better suited for long runs of one big job than a bunch of smaller ones. Things such as roller installation and adjustment, oiling, etc. take significantly longer with the cylinder. The minimum amount of ink required for the fountain is three to four times that of the windmill.

More than these, the key difference to me is momentum. The cylinder is a juggernaut; you can't stop and start it instantly like the windmill. The windmill is perfect for short runs because you can stop it dead with a sheet in the grippers, tweak the register, and run just one more sheet for another proof. You can run a few hundred sheets while wasting only a couple of sheets. The cylinder needs to get up to speed, and then you must run at least two sheets as the first will have excess ink from multiple roller passes. Then you can either print two more sheets using the stop lever at the delivery, or you can get by without printing any more sheets by using the quick stop lever. This will run two sheets through without printing, which must be returned to the feeder.

That said, for the right kind of job the cylinder is unstoppable. Nothing can lay down a heavy solid as well, and of course they came in L, XL and XXL compared to platens. Ours is the "baby" cylinder (KS for Kleine Schnellpress) with a 15"x20.5" sheet size. If you have the room and can find one that hasn't been butchered into a diecutter, Heidelberg made them up to a sheet size of 25"x35". The register is easily tweaked without tools, and some other adjustments are very easy and precise as well. The cylinder will also handle most any printing, diecutting or scoring job you throw at it. For the vast majority of jobs you get the feeling the machine isn't even breaking a sweat, where you can tell with a platen press that it's starting to work hard past a certain point.



To me what makes the windmill endearing (as much as a machine can be) is that it's human-scaled. When you stand in front of it, it's all right there and there's a lever for each of your hands. It's tall and narrow and you can get all the way around it quickly. Despite its strength it almost feels delicate. The cylinder press is a car-sized brute. It's quite intimidating and you always are aware that there's a lot of metal moving around that could thoroughly ruin your day. The windmill has that too of course, but friendlier somehow.

So, as long as you know what you're getting into, each machine is genius in its own right. Also, as you have just read, the mind has lots of time to wander on those long jobs...

Elephants on Parade!

Spark's Elephant Invitation (#5) from our Loop Collection is featured in the most recent issue of Stationery Trends magazine. Loop utilizes 100% recycled chipboard and recycled packaging for all of its products, and is letterpress-printed of course! The entire collection which includes four different animals (tiger, whale, kangaroo and elephant) was illustrated and designed by one of our very own talented designers, Kate. In addition to the party invitation shown, the collection is completed by coasters, gift tags, notepads and postcards. The line is starting to pop up at retailers nationwide, so be on the lookout!

Wedding Spotlight: Destination Weddings

Destination weddings are definitely a popular trend these days. Couples are tying the knot on tropical islands, in European villas or in the foothills of mountains – places that create magical moments amongst breathtaking scenery.

Creating wedding stationery for such an event takes a little more effort for couples, simply because there is more information to relay to invited guests. It is essential to set the tone and anticipation for the event by weaving the wedding stationery together to create a cohesive design style.

The following stationery pieces ought to be part of the destination wedding stationery suite (in addition to the invitation set).

• Save-the-date. Please give invited guests ample time to make travel arrangements for a destination wedding. Save-the-dates are mailed at least 8 months to 1 year in advance of the event. Include travel and accommodation information as well as a list of all scheduled activities (date, time, location) during the wedding weekend.
• Ceremony & Reception Program. Print a double-sided program, die cut into an interesting shape. We recently did a program in the shape of a scallop shell as the ceremony took place on the beach. Remember that this can be a keepsake for guests!
• Place Cards, Table Cards & Menus. Keep with the design style to create these additional pieces that will make your reception memorable down to the last detail. We often die cut menu cards in the shape of a circle to fit nicely in the plate charger on the table.
  

Destination Hawaii



Wedding Stationery Suite: 4-piece invitation set, welcome cards, program and thank you note set.
Spark Retailer: Pulp & Ink, Chicago

The invitation panel and reply card is printed on Crane Lettra 220# cover paper in Fluorescent White. The design is based on our Meadowbrook invitation featured in the Spark Custom Album, except that the bubbles on our sample were substituted with sea turtles. Ink colors are navy and spring green. The A7 size envelope is lined with text weight navy paper to compliment the navy ink on the panels.



There are a set of five welcome cards that greet invited guests to the wedding weekend, recommend various activities on the island, map the airport and hotels and outline the scheduled date, time and location of the scheduled activities. The cards are printed on Crane Lettra 110# cover in Fluorescent White. Ink colors are blue and green (custom colors).



The program front and back cover is printed on Crane Lettra 110# cover in Fluorescent White. Inside pages are printed on Crane Lettra 80# text weight in Fluorescent white. Ink colors are navy and spring green. A double-faced satin ribbon in navy is tied bookmark style at the top to secure the pages. The program provides a detailed description of the Jewish wedding ceremony. Over nine plates were used to print the program on our Heidelberg Windmill press – this spent many hours on our press to complete!

The thank you cards are a flat, A2 size card with printed envelopes. Featured on Crane Lettra 110# cover in Fluorescent White. Ink colors are navy and spring green.

Many thanks to Colin at Pulp & Ink, Chicago, and to the groom who drew the wonderful sea turtles featured throughout the wedding suite. Let’s also not forget designer and artist, Cassie Medema, who created the Meadowbrook design featured in our custom album.

Landscape Garden Center Holiday Promotion

Landscape Garden Center Tree Garland
Design: Eva Hofer for Fresh Produce
Paper: Neenah Classic Columns in Spring Green, 80# cover
Ink: Silver and Dark Green
Run: 8000
Finishing: Custom tree garland die with a perf along connection of last two trees. We folded all of the trees carefully by hand and delivered to the mailhouse for envelope stuffing and distribution to many lucky recipients.
Timing: Crazy! We printed this job on our Cylinder press over two very long days, and then we had our friends at Moberly’s do the diecutting on this piece due to the overall size. Once they were back from Moberly’s, it took a bunch of us several hours to fold all of them and box them up. It was hard enough trying to decide how to box them.

Another busy week

It was another busy week of printing and designing. The bulk of everything we did revolved around weddings of course. I know I've said this before, but we did do some really fun ones again this week, and yet again I do have to wait to show you what we created.

We are very close to completing our Spark Stationery catalog of our new product lines, after reviewing it a million times.

In the coming weeks, we will be announcing who our newest Spark Custom retailers are. We're so excited about who we've found to represent Spark, and it's exciting to have new retailers to work with. We're only adding a few since our custom line needs a special kind of retailer – someone who understands what we can do.

Other than that, there isn't much to report. I had a chance to enjoy time with Lucia this weekend, so that was a nice change of pace. For those of you out there who work the same crazy hours that we do at times, you can probably understand where I am coming from!

Nothing says "Happy Birthday" like calling someone a Cake Whore!

So our Bittersweet Ink collection may not be for everyone, but we've found that many people have a friend or family member that can appreciate the dry humor these cards put forth. Our good friend, Larissa Cole, came to us with this wonderful idea for a collection of cards. Larissa wrote the copy for these cards, we created the design, and of course we also printed them.

Each card is letterpress-printed in black ink on Neenah Esse 100# cover in White and comes with an Neenah Eames Furniture envelope in India Pink, Tivoli Green or Pacific Blue. Both papers contain 30% post-consumer waste and have a wonderful texture and subtle grid pattern to them.

The cards are available at our online store and have been picked up by many retailers nationally as well.

Skip Feeding

We thought we would expand on our recent post about achieving solid areas of ink. One thing that we've found to work well on some recent jobs is skip feeding.

This is a way to accomplish "double rolling" of the form on the Heidelberg windmill.

Skip feeding allows two (or more) passes of the rollers, which works very well for eliminating ghosting and maximizing coverage. It requires quick, constant two-handed operation of the feed and impression with each sheet, and so is only really practical for short runs of special items. If you're running a few thousand of something, you probably want to figure out how to make it work with the rider roller—unless you really enjoy working out one arm and hunching over. (This is one thing that is more easily accomplished on a hand-fed press such as a C&P where you only move the throwoff lever on and off, as feeding is at your manual control. You simply pause and let the press cycle once more, while having a leisurely interval to ready the next sheet.)

After a sheet is picked up, the suction trip is pushed in (turning off the paper feed) and the impression lever is pulled on. After the impression, the lever is pushed in (impression off) and the suction trip is pulled out (feed on.) The key is to develop a rhythm, and the machine makes plenty of sounds you can synchronize yourself with. I pull the impression knob out as soon as the paper is pulled from the suckers by the gripper. The impression lever needs to get all the way out and down in its "notch" before the press closes fully. The following video shows a pretty slow pace for demonstration purposes.

On YouTube:


On Vimeo (high quality and downloadable):
http://www.vimeo.com/1402764

Welcome Lucia Grace Watne

Over the coming weeks, we want to introduce our blogging friends to all of us at Spark. We thought we would start with our newest team member, since she is also the most exciting addition as of late.

For those of you who know us well, this won't come as a surprise. In mid-April, Spark founders Valerie Carlson and Jim Watne (I kept my last name when we married in 2003), added to their family with the birth of Lucia Grace Watne. We've been meaning to print the already-designed announcements, but for now we thought we should share a picture seeing as how she is already three months old.

Lucia comes to work with us every day, does press checks, answers phones and enjoys cooing at our visitors. Although it makes things a bit challenging for us at times trying to balance the demands of a growing business and caring for an infant, we wouldn't change it for the world. Lucia will only be here until the end of October when she transitions to daycare a few blocks away, so we have to make the most of the time we have with her now.

Rainone/Roofener Couture Stationery Suite

One of our first Spark Couture clients, Danielle Rainone and Ted Roofener, decided to work with us to create their wedding stationery due to the overwhelming amount of stationery needs they had in mind for their wedding weekend. While we enjoy our relationships with our retailers, there are a select number of clients we take on each year through Spark Couture. These clients typically need original artwork or more than a save-the-date and wedding invitation set. We have the ability to do the design, printing and finishing work all at our facility allowing the couple and Spark the greatest amount of control over the quality and look of the final product. It was such a pleasure to work with this couple as they were so appreciative of our efforts.

Each set includes a printed outer envelope with a printed liner, an blank inner envelope also with a different printed liner, and a main invitation panel printed on 4-ply Rising Museum Board in White. Three additional panel cards are printed on Rising Museum Board in White, only using 2-ply so they are set apart from the main invitation. The three panel cards are sized differently so they are different from each other. The reception card is the smallest, the welcome celebration card is next and then the reply card is on the bottom since it had the most information. The panel cards and reply envelope are enclosed in a Gilbert Esse Espresso 100# cover wrap, with a white Arturo printed band holding the wraps shut.

More pictures of their set can be found on our Flickr page.

Conyers Design, Inc. Gift Tags

Each week I have a plethora of wonderful projects to review, both present and past, and for some reason I was thinking about these great little gift tags Conyers Design, Inc. (Des Moines, Iowa) had us print for them late last year. Maybe it is because of the major heat waves we’ve been experiencing, and I was just trying to remind myself of cooler weather. This was our first project for Conyers Design, and I remember the phone call from them after they received the shipment from us. They called just to say “woo-hoo” (or something to that effect). It’s always a great feeling when you make a client happy just by doing your job well.


Conyers Design Holiday Gift Tags
Design: Conyers Design, Inc.
Paper: Crane Lettra Fluorescent White 220# Double-Thick Cover (another of our tree-free house stocks)
Ink: Silver, Red and Aqua Blue
Run: 150+ on our Heidelberg Windmill, plus die cutting the tags into 3” rounds plus a small hole (done in-house).
Notes: The gift tags printed even better than we had hoped. I think these are an excellent example of great design meets letterpress printing. We ran all of the silver plates through our press twice to give it as metallic of an appearance as possible. The registration was tight on many of the designs, but it gives us a nice feeling of satisfaction every time we align something just so. After printing, we die cut the tags (on-site) and that made all the difference. It’s amazing how designs look great on-screen, but once they are printed and finished, they just look even that much better!

More images of this project and others can be found on our Flickr page.

No end in sight to wedding season...

but we don't care! We love printing such a wide range of wedding stationery for our retailers and other designers. We have several wonderful clients that keep us especially busy, busy, busy this time of year.

One of our custom invitation design studios had a rush job that involved three color letterpress that we printed over two days and then it was shipped to their engraver. In case you missed my excitement for this order - it was three color letterpress PLUS engraving! We can hardly wait to see the final product.

We also printed several invitations this week including two sets of our diecut circles design. The circle invitations seem to be going over big at our retailers as we see more and more requests for these all the time. We now stock several circle dies including 3", 3.5", 4", 4.5", 5.25", 6.25" and 6.75" round.

In addition to printing, we’ve been keeping busy in our design department with several clients who have made some interesting design requests of us. We had a great week and hope you did as well!

Henry is a real dog!

Our Henry greeting card line is inspired by Valerie & Jim’s real life miniature dachshund, Henry. The original Henry illustration is based on one of the many photos we’ve taken of him over the years. Henry has been a great dog for us, and he even comes to the office every day to help out. Mostly he just barks at the UPS and FedEx drivers and many of our other unsuspecting guests. If his legs weren’t so short, I’m sure he’d be operating a press or working in shipping & receiving.

The Henry stationery products were a labor of love for us. We were planning to keep them simple, but as Henry is a complex dog, we felt it was only right to make his cards a bit more of a challenge as well. Each folded greeting card is printed in three colors – a transparent gold for the type and tail wag lines, Henry brown as it is known around the office which is really just PMS 4625, and then the different designs feature a third color to make the illustrations pop. We also have five different custom-printed envelopes that coordinate nicely with the designs. They come in Whip Cream, Red Hot, Banana Split, Sour Apple and Razzle Berry (paper from French Paper’s Poptone line).

Be sure to check out our complete line of Henry cards, invites, moving announcements and coasters, now available for sale in our online store.

Blind Debossing + Ink = GOOD

We've had a number of requests lately for blind debossing and tone-on-tone printing. Now of course this would mean without ink, which honestly is something I prefer to avoid, unless I am using an unusually heavy stock.

One thing I've found to work for Spark's clients is using varying degrees of transparent white ink. I feel it gives the impression just enough definition to make all the difference. When the client wants even more definition without running a color, we'll add in a hint of silver or gold. The gold works especially well on the off-white stocks. Either I need to get more rest, or maybe I just have a decent eye for color, but the transparent white does dry a bit darker than it looks when it first comes of press.

Also, I do make sure I clean the rollers especially well before running transparent white (or any light color for that matter).

Two Spark designs featured on nymag.com!

Two of our custom designs are featured in New York magazine's Shop•A•Matic. We are numbers 57 and 66. It's always fun to see things we created be published - whether online or in print.

http://nymag.com/shopamatic/products/stationerys08/

Spark Custom: Kensington Invitation

The above invitation set, known as Kensington, joined the Spark Custom Album in the spring of 2007. We decided to feature this invitation, as it is a classic, popular design, not only for wedding stationery, but for personal stationery as well. In the spring of 2008, it was featured in all of the regional Brides magazines across the country, along with our Graceful Orchid invite.

The Kensington 4-piece invitation set includes the invitation panel, printed invitation envelope, reply card and printed reply envelope. This two color letterpress piece, shown in copper and black, is priced at $1210 retail for 100 sets. The invitation is a 5x7 card and is paired with an A7 square flap envelope. The reply card is 5.5x4.25” in size and is paired with an A2 square flap envelope. The reply card allows guests to write their own reply.

Our clients are able to customize this invitation set to suit their personal style. This includes more than simply changing the typeface or the color(s) on the invite. For example, the graphic pattern on the invitation may be substituted with a different graphic pattern from the Patterns page in our custom album. We are able to create a custom pattern upon request.

Clients may also change the format to a tall or large square panel card at no additional charge. Dress up this invitation with a paper backer, full paper wrap & band or place into a custom pocket fold. Ask us about our custom-printed envelope liners, as they are a stunning addition to any stationery set.

To receive a custom quote on this invitation, visit one of the Spark Custom Album retailers. A listing of our retailers is available on our website at www.sparkstationery.com. If there is no retailer near you, please contact us directly at custom@sparkstationery.com.

Otto Bock Advisory Council

We recently had the opportunity to work with IMAGEHAUS in Minneapolis for a project they designed for Otto Bock. There were five cards in the set as well as a round coaster. The crisp impression of the rich blue and subtle gray inks against the bright white cotton stock made this stunning.

Otto Bock Advisory Council Welcome Cards and Coaster
Design: IMAGEHAUS
Paper: Crane Lettra Fluorescent White 110# Cover (our house stock) for the welcome cards and 220# Double Thick Cover for the coasters.
Ink: PMS 661 and Cool Gray 3
Run: 165 on our Heidelberg Windmill, plus die cutting on the coasters (done in-house).
Notes: The cards were straightforward and toward the “easier” end of the spectrum to print. The coasters needed two runs through the press to achieve a really solid blue, but it was definitely worth it. The white type and details literally pop off the paper.

Thanks, Broadway Paper.

Broadway Paper in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is one of our newer retailers. They carry our custom line as well as many of our new stationery products. Check out their blog for a nice mention of our Henry and Bittersweet Ink lines, and some cute pictures of the owner's dachshund puppy! Too cute. In addition to their blog, they have a great online store featuring a lot of fun products.

broadwaypaper.blogspot.com

Hot off our presses...

It was another busy week at Spark. We had several fun and labor-intensive client projects that we were working on over the past week. Although we can’t show you these creations quite yet – we need the bride, groom and their guests to see them first – we hope to share them with you soon. What I can tell you is that it was a metallic-infused Spark this week due to these orders: copper, ivory and gold inks and paper; sewing with gold thread, binding with copper ribbon, and more.

We are in the process of reprinting many cards from our product lines as we begin to run out of the bestsellers, and ended the week by reprinting business cards for one of our favorite design firms – J.D. Gordon Advertising.

In addition to printing, the true highlights of our week were definitely techy in nature with the launches of our online store, revamped Blog and new Flickr page.

Spark's Big Friday

Today is a great day at Spark and here's why:

Spark’s Online Store is Open
sparkstationery.com
Our online store is open for business and can be accessed through our web site. All of our new product lines are featured and we can’t wait for you to see them. Click on the Shop link on the right side of the page to go to our shopping site.

Here are a few images of our newest products:


Read our Blog
sparkstationery.blogspot.com
We're making a renewed commitment to keeping our blog up-to-date since we have so much we want to share and so many people we want to share with. Our blog will be a great source of images and articles about our client work, technical information about letterpress printing, and all of the latest happenings at Spark.

Here is our post schedule:
Monday - Client Projects
Tuesday - Wedding Projects
Wednesday - What's New
Thursday - Letterpress Institute
Friday - Stationery
Weekend - Hot Off Our Presses

Visit us on Flickr
flickr.com/sparkstationery
Visit our Flickr pages to view images of our shop, our presses and our work. We are still trying to get caught up with photos of past client work – for design firms and private clients – so continue to check back for new photos.

Have a great weekend from all of us at Spark!

Spark Institute Now in Session

Professor James Curtis Watne
Lead Press Operator, Spark Industries

Disclaimer: These are methods that I've found to work for Spark. I make no claims to complete knowledge and I'm sure there are lots of other ways out there that I don't know about. But since continuous learning is part of any worthwhile craft, I'm happy to relay what I've figured out.

Letterpress and Solid Areas of Ink

Solid areas typically present a challenge when printing on a platen press. This is because of two main factors: inking and impression.

In their original uses, platen presses were not expected to lay down huge amounts of ink and so typically have two or three form rollers. In addition, the rollers must pick up ink from a disk or drum, then pass down over the form and back up. (A cylinder press such as a Heidelberg K or S continually supplies ink to four form rollers from sizable distributor rollers.) As the ink supply is not continuous, at a certain point the roller has used one full revolution of ink and ghosting can occur.

Impression is probably the biggest issue in laying down a large solid. A platen press must make the entire impression at once, versus a cylinder press which "rolls" the paper across the form, with only a narrow band of contact at any one time. A given platen press will have a limit in the amount of force it can exert before something gives. As these machines are no longer made, we don't want to push them near that point! The Heidelberg windmill platen does have a shear collar which is designed to give way before something more expensive does, but a press such as a Chandler & Price will respond with a fracture in its cast iron. So one has to be realistic with what a machine can handle. If a client is set on having a full flood of ink across the back of their letterhead, it would probably be best to have that side offset printed. Printer and client will probably both be a lot happier!

Here's an order of approaches that I typically follow on the windmill for large solids:
1. heavy-ish inking with two rollers
2. add rider roller
3. two hits
4. skip feeding (this will be a future topic)

If I can tell at the start a job will need a certain approach I'll start with that. If coverage is insufficient then things get "escalated." A job may require the material to be split into two runs to achieve proper inking for a large solid along with a text area of the same color. Inking heavy enough for the solid to come out nicely can be way too much for the text area. Two hits with moderate inking can give the client's desired impression while being much crisper than one hit with heavy inking. Skip feeding allows two (or more) passes of the rollers, which works very well for eliminating ghosting and maximizing coverage. It requires quick, constant two-handed operation of the feed and impression with each sheet, and so is only really practical for short runs of special items. (This is one thing that is more easily accomplished on a hand-fed press such as a C&P where you only move the throwoff lever on and off, as feeding is at your manual control. You simply pause and let the press cycle once more, while having a leisurely interval to ready the next sheet.)

All of these approaches naturally require use of the ink fountain for consistency across a run. That's another topic for the future...


This example has a 5x7 full bleed solid on the back of 220 lb Lettra. The rider roller was employed, and two hits of ink were required.


This letterhead's large orange block was achieved with the rider roller and use of a thin rubber sheet in the packing. The French Durotone has a varied density throughout, and so does not lend itself to a smooth result easily. The rubber becomes in essence a variable packing to give more push behind the thinner areas. The back's full flood of orange was offset printed in advance, and the letterpress inking (from the same can) adjusted slightly to match. Our offset printer told us that even with their large press the backs required double hits of ink and as hard an impression as possible. Luckily the client expected and liked the slightly mottled look. The envelopes were printed flat on our Cylinder and converted.

Spark Online Store...Opening Soon!

We are pleased to announce that after countless hours getting our online store ready, we will be launching the store this Friday, July 11. The store will feature all of our latest products we just debuted at the National Stationery Show in May, and we can't wait to share these fun creations with you.

Thank you.

We wanted to take a moment to thank our clients for their patience in the month of June as some of us at Spark dealt with a death in the family. This is the program we created for the memorial service of Dennis Carlson (father to Diedre and Valerie). It was the hardest thing we've had to design and print, but it brought us a small amount of joy in a month otherwise filled with sorrow. We're glad we could create a fitting tribute to our Dad. As a side note, the program features a drawing Denny did of himself a long time ago. Again, thank you for your condolences and understanding.

Cherry Blossom Wedding Suite

The above wedding invitation set was printed late 2007 for a couple in New York City. The cherry blossom artwork was created especially for their invitation set and thank you cards. The couple selected our favorite Crane Lettra 110# cover paper in fluorescent white. Crane Lettra is a 100% reclaimed cotton paper, so no trees have fallen to make this beautiful paper. The set is a two color letterpress piece in fuchsia and dark brown with small rounded corners. Pay special attention to the arrangement and detail of the blossoms, as well as the tight registration achieved.

We started the process with a phone call with the bride to discuss her design style, colors, typeface likes and dislikes and briefly discussed the invitation wording. After the first encounter, our designer provided the couple with a PDF proof of the invitation panel which included the cherry blossom artwork. This artwork went through a couple renditions before it reached its final format. The rest of the invitation suite was created and approved all in a matter of a few weeks. Rest assured, our bride enjoyed the experience as did we!

The cherry blossom artwork is not featured in our custom album, however we are happy to reproduce this artwork upon request. Please contact custom@sparkstationery.com for more details or simply visit one of our retail stores and mention this entry.

AIGA Wink Event Postcard and Poster

Last year we sponsored a talk by Wink for AIGA's South Dakota chapter, as well as donating the printing of the postcard and poster. As we were going through projects we wanted to share with everyone, this definitely had to be the first one as it continues to be one of our favorite projects that we've printed. The event was a huge success and a lot fun to attend. If you haven't heard them speak, we highly recommend it as they were both hilarious and insightful.

Wink Event Postcard for AIGA South Dakota
Design: Wink
Paper: Most of the postcards were printed on Eames Furniture 120# DTC in White, which was generously donated by Neenah. Just for fun we printed extra postcards for ourselves on Rising Museum Board 2-ply White (which is actually a beautiful soft white).
Ink: PMS 1775 (pink) and PMS 724 (brown). The pink was run first and the brown was semi-transparent so you could see it overlay on the pink cow background. Keeping the brown true to the PMS swatch and still transparent was a bit tricky, but worth the extra effort.
Run: 500 on our Heidelberg Windmill
Timing: This was a pretty easy job for us to run. Straightforward and to the point. The ink mix was the trickiest part, but all in all I think we spent about four hours total running it.
Notes: The Eames Furniture 120# DTC didn’t perform as well as we would have liked. This was our first time working with this stock and thought it would take a crisper impression, but we were a bit disappointed. They turned out nice, just not as nice when compared with the postcards we printed on the Museum Board.



Wink Event Poster for AIGA South Dakota
Design: Wink
Paper: Most of the posters were printed on an 80# cover donated by Duffy. Since we already had the press inked up, we printed extra posters on our house stock, Crane Lettra 110# Cover in Fluorescent White as well as Monadnock Astrolite 200# Cover in Bright White and Eames Furniture 120# DTC in White. It was interesting to see how the different papers fared with the same design. The 80# cover didn’t take an impression as we expected. The Lettra ended up with a beautiful "weathered" look. The Astrolite turned out the most even and probably showed the impression best. The Eames Furniture had the most "weathered" look of the bunch.
Ink: PMS 717 (brown), PMS 872 (gold) and black. The gold was used for his tooth only and it is hard to see in this photo, but he is sporting a nice little diamond!
Run: 600 on our Heidelberg Cylinder
Timing: We ran this job over three days to give the heavy coverage time to dry a bit in between plates.
Notes: The trickiest part of this job was the inking and feeding. The feeding shouldn’t be a surprise since we were running four different stocks and three different colors. The inking was hardest with the brown but we figured it out pretty quickly. In some ways, the posters with the uneven inking turned out the most interesting with their unintended artistic effects. Those of our clients that received the posters in a sample pack liked the weathered look and thought we had done something special to achieve it during prepress.

To see more images of this project and others, visit us on Flickr: http://flickr.com/photos/sparkstationery/

Visit our old Blog for now.

Spark is working on a ton of exciting and informative new posts about letterpress printing, invitations, client work and more.

Please visit our old blog sparkprintsolutions.blogspot.com for now, while we work on transferring things over to sparkstationery.blogspot.com.

Since the majority of current and future clients will know us by our Spark Stationery name, we've decided to house all future posts here.