You can often hear The Raconteurs blasting through the print room here at blush°° so you can imagine how thrilled we were when asked to print the invitation for the inaugural playing of Jack White’s Blunderbuss.

The invitations were letterpress printed on a Heidelberg platen onto 425gsm cotton paper.

Design by XL Recordings & Third Man Records

We are looking for a letterpress printer. Someone with exceptional printing skills and a desire to produce a perfect letterpress print.

We are a modern letterpress printing company working on prestigious accounts with leading designers and are seeking a letterpress printer to join our busy print room. Experience operating Heidelberg Platens and/or Cylinders is essential and a good knowledge of letterpress printing, from prepping and setting up to mixing inks and trimming is expected.

• Can you operate a Heidelberg platen or Heidelberg KSBA cylinder press?
• Print to an exceptionally high standard?
• Mix inks accurately to Pantone refs?
• Can you operate a guillotine?
• Are you passionate and enthusiastic about letterpress and your work?
• Do you have a meticulous attention to detail?
• Have a good eye for colour and quality?
• Have any photopolymer platemaking experience?
• Do you thrive working closely with others and to tight deadlines?
• A UK resident or have permission to work in the UK?

So do you have the desire to produce a perfect print? If you do then we’d love to hear from you. Drop us an email.

This vacancy is for a full-time position, we are not looking to fill a placement or internship.

Here’s another wedding invitation from our archives. Featuring hand drawn elements and a beautiful beautiful choice of colours. Letterpress printed on 425gsm cotton paper.

Designed by Aled Lewis.

Business cards for Dragons Den’s Douglas Richards. Letterpress printed with silver ink onto 540gsm black Colorplan and finished with a striking light blue edge paint.

Looking through our archives we came across this beautiful wedding invitation and RSVP we printed for Delaine & Adam Coppack. An elegant use of typeface and colour. Letterpress printed 2 collours both sides on 300gsm cotton paper. Designed by Adam Coppack.

The third in the Assorted Types series is hot off the press and available to purchase from our online store!

Letterpress printed QR codes can and do work when letterpress printed, as can be seen here on the business cards we recently printed for Tim Brook at BeApt.

The cards are printed black over a blind deboss onto 540gsm Colorplan.

Printing a large flat area of ink on uncoated stock can be tricky, but with careful setup on the press it can be done. We achieved a good solid black on these business cards for Neil McLean of Ayelike. Printing a solid black with a reversed out white logo was an alternative to a white hot foil.

Press: Heidelberg 10 x 15 platen
Stock: Colorplan 540gsm
Colours: 2
Dimensions: 85 x 55mm
Client: Ayelike
Designer: Neil Richards

Søren Ragsdale came to us to create and print this simple card.

Here’s Søren’s brief:
“I’d like to order a set of business cards that just say “No Thank You” in a clean, serifed script. I’ve just moved to London where there are a ton of people trying to hand me flyers. I’d like to have something to hand back to them.”

I wonder if the people who receive them keep them or just throw them away? Either way, what a great idea!

Letterpress printed black 1/0 on Cranes Crest 365gsm, 100% cotton. Dimensions: 85 x 55mm.

Some rather special letterpress business cards for Romanian company Brain Up. Printed 3 colours both sides on a hefty 700gsm Colorplan and finished off with vibrant green edges.

The stock allowed a deep impression on both sides without too much show through on the opposite face. The original plan was to use a triplex stock, white/green/white, but edge painting ultimately has a powerful presence.

Print Specs:
Colorplan 700gsm, 3 colours both sides, green edge paint, letterpress printed on a Heidelberg platen.

We are often asked what’s the smallest point size letterpress can print. Well hopefully this will give you a good idea of how small we can go.

Hot off the press are these striking business cards for WHP Creative. The cards are a Cranes Crest / Accent Fresco 700gsm duplex, letterpress printed black and blind deboss on the Cranes, black ink on the Fresco. The black logo on the Fresco was originally intended to be a blind deboss but we advised a black ink to help lift it. We can edge paint a Duplex stock and these were painted in a vibrant aqua green.

Design © WHP Creative

Letterpress printing onto 425gsm cotton paper creates beautiful, tactile wedding stationery. Printed onto 425gsm 100% cotton paper. Design © Julia & Anthony Iredale.

This TwitterTreat has now ended. The winner chosen at random from our Twitter followers who retweeted is @Burlisaurus

This years Christmas Twitter Treat is for some rather lovely business cards, letterpress printed onto Colorplan duplexed with recycled Greyboard. You even get to choose the colour of the Colorplan!

Print Specification
100 Business Cards
85 x 55mm (Landscape or portrait)
2 colour/1 side or 1 colour/2 sides
350gsm Recycled Greyboard / 350gsm Colorplan – your choice of colour!

Creating your artwork
The print area is 85 x 55mm. Artwork must be supplied as a print ready PDF or Illustrator .ai or .eps file. Please ensure all fonts are converted to outlines. Set your artwork file up as CMYK, not RGB and use spot colour from the uncoated Pantone colour books, no tints, shades or gradients.

The winner will be picked at random from our list of Twitter followers at 2pm Thursday, 22nd December 2011. The winner will be notified by DM on Twitter.

The winners artwork will be printed after the Christmas holidays.

How to enter:

Step 1
Follow us on Twitter!

Step 2
Retweet this tweet

Step 3
Cross your fingers!

SOME RULES

• The winner will be picked at random at 2pm Thursday, 22nd December 2011 from our list of Twitter followers who have retweeted as above.
• We reserve the right to showcase the winning business cards on Twitter, our website, blog and other websites for promotional purposes. We will include credits and links where applicable.
• This offer is open to anyone in any country.
• This offer cannot be used with any existing print orders.
• The winner must agree to these terms.
• Our decision is final.
• We reserve the right to withdraw this offer, change or amend the print specification or these rules.

Mark Dowsett of Stranger Studio came to blush°° for some quality letterpress printing. Mark’s postcard features a large QR code that you can scan and feel. Once scanned on a smartphone reveals his contact details, address, email and web address – very clever and a cool way to give people your details.

The postcards are letterpress printed on 540gsm Colorplan Citrine yellow, both sides on a Heidelberg platen. Colorplan is a fairly hard stock but does take a nice clean deep impression.

The first in the ‘Assorted Types’ series of letterpress prints showcasing classic typefaces. Designed by Jim Williams, an award winning typographer & graphic designer who has a lifelong passion for the craft of typography and letterforms. He also has a keen interest and understanding of letterpress and teaches typography at Staffordshire University. Jim’s knowledge of typography and attention to detail is second to none. Constantly ‘tweaking’ his work until it is just perfect, kerning here, letterspacing there, a real perfectionist.

The prints have been lovingly printed to perfection on our vintage Heidelberg cylinder press onto 300gsm Somerset Velvet 100% cotton paper.

Limited to 100 prints and individually numbered and are available to purchase from our online store.

Follow Assorted Types on Twitter for updates, special offers and exclusive previews during the production of the next prints.

We were thrilled when Candykiller aka Brian Taylor called on Blush to produce his latest ‘Beast’ print. We have worked with Candykiller before, printing the 5th Anniversary limited edition prints. Candykiller’s illustrations print beautifully on the press and Brian’s attention to detail and technical ability when it comes to artwork is first class.

We printed the Beast on 300gsm cotton paper on a Heidelberg platen press, tweeting live at each stage of the production, from platemaking to trimming. The first stage of the job was to prepare Brian’s artwork for print. The artwork was supplied digitally and we check the file before creating the separations. Each colour is a separate pass through the press, so once through for the red and through again for the black. This means we would need two plates.

We mix the ink to a Pantone ref supplied by the artist and ink up the press. We decided to add the rider roller to give an even and consistent spread of ink across the image and to prevent ‘ghosting’.

The plate is attached to a base to bring it up to type height (.918″) and locked up in the chase then locked into the press.

We ink up the press and pull some initial prints to check for registration, ink coverage and impression. We also check the print for any defects in the plate.

Once we are happy with we run the sheets through the press.

After the first colour run we wash-up the press and prepare for the second colour. Change plates, ink up for black pass and reload the paper on the press.

We pull some prints and check once again for impression, ink coverage and registration.

Then run the sheets through and print the black plate.

The final prints are checked and trimmed on the guillotine before packing.

You can see more production shots on our Flickr pages and follow us on Twitter for news and updates on future live letterpress tweets.

The prints are available to purchase from the Candykiller online store.

Red and white duplex is a striking combination as seen here in these business cards we printed for James Sheriff at Genius Division. Printing red ink to complement the red paper and then printing red ink over the red side rather than a blind deboss really help lift the pattern.

Letterpress printed onto 540gsm Duplex on a Heidelberg platen.

Deeply Impressed is a new website dedicated to showcasing letterpress and hot foil printing in the UK. The sites creator wanted to send out a promotional card to coincide with the launch of the website and of course it had to be letterpress! We discussed papers and ideas to help create a simple effective print to whet the appetite, give an idea of what letterpress is and how it feels.

The A6 cards are printed on 425gsm Saunders 100% cotton.

We tweeted the print run live on Twitter, photographing and posting each stage of the job. You can see and read the results on our Flickr pages.

Letterpress stationery and business cards for Crowne Chauffeur Services, designed by Alan Haverty. The business cards are letterpress printed onto 540gsm Colorplan black & white duplex with a deboss crown logo on the black side. The letterheads were printed on matching 135gsm Colorplan in black and gold ink.

We paid special attention to the delicate type. Small fine fonts have a tendency to break up under the extreme pressure on the press but a careful balance between pressure, ink and packing on the press can help keep this to a minimum.