AIGA Minnesota Design Camp!

Normally we leave the shop about once or twice a year, which I realize is not nearly enough by my calculations nor the standards of a normal person. So if we are going to venture out we want it to be worth our while.

Design Camp was all that and more for us. The event was well-organized, full of awesome printed lovelies, and there were happy designers conversing and finding inspiration in every direction.

Spark was thrilled to host three letterpress workshops. We had two projects: a calendar and a set of coasters.

For the calendar, we made a 15-month wall calendar printed on various stocks. It had the words I am knocked out of a vintage Minnesota map. We did a split fountain from silver to copper and went for a very deep impression. We were very pleased with the results and were excited to get it into the hands of our workshop attendees. We brought along photopolymer stamps that completed the “I am” statement. Things like married to my iMac, creative, honest, caffeinated at all times, a Minnesotan, etc. Everyone had fun adding these words and phrases to their calendar. We had a few attendees who did not want to disturb the beauty of the calendar and that was cool too.


The coasters project was a simple one, but oh-so-fun. Before camp we printed up coasters in two colors – a minty green (with an opaque white base) to match some of the print materials and then black. The coasters featured some of über-awesome icons created by the Target In-House team. Then at camp we letterpress printed the AIGA Minnesota Design Camp 2011 logo in the upper left corner of each one. It was great fun to see the workshop attendees carefully pressing their coasters. This year we were the only hands-on workshop so I know it was an exciting break for all who came.


We’ll do a separate post to tell the story of our C&P Pilot because that has its own storied past.

Images in this post are courtesy of Lisa Valley.

Here are a few more pictures from the event courtesy of @iBran (Brian Douglas Hayes):
http://flic.kr/p/asDq7y and http://flic.kr/p/asALBD

And even a few more pictures that we took:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sparkstationery/sets/72157627850007874/

Thanks again to everyone at Design Camp for making this our amazing outing for the year. We hope to see you again next year!

- Valerie & Jim