He becomes a professional!

My little brother and I designed a business card for his current postgraduate job search/networking blitz, and it came out so well I decided to post all the photos. This way, maybe some of you who aren't familiar with letterpress can get a sense of the printing process we use in the studio. Although Evan's focus is on sports and (excellent) sports writing, we thought it might be fun to play around with two other elements of his personality: his love of music, and his affectionate nostalgia for the '80s. The result? An electric blue cassette tape with his name on it! 

 

We started with some sketches, and he tried a few different pen widths to get his name just right.

I finalized the design and, with the green light from Evan, emailed digital images to my platemaker to have them made into plates for printing. Then I took a field trip to the platemaker's studio, aaaaaaand ta-da! I actually made the plates myself! Evan's card required four plates, one for each color to be printed on each side: one blue layer, one gray layer (the lines of the drawing), one black layer for the front (his name), and one black layer for the back (his contact info). I shadowed my intrepid letterpress leader, Via, around the platemaking "lab" in Berkeley and helped to turn the negatives of my plates, into plastic polymer plates. It involves a machine the size of a small dishwasher that combines NASA-like good looks with oven-like functions. And it smells like a dark room. You can see one of these plates on the press bed below:

So, the first run was the blue, since it was the lightest color of the cassette image. I printed 130 ridiculous blue blobs...

... then added the linework. Wow. Check out the difference it makes! I started getting really excited...

Lastly, I printed his name on the cassette, which he and I designed to look like he'd written it in Sharpie. What do you think?

He picked a really nice luxe heavy paper from Paper Source, whose tooth you can really see in the close-up below. This thickness and texture is perfect for enhancing letterpress impressions.

 

Now all I have to do is crop these into their final dimensions (3" x 3.5", larger than the standard business card) so he can start handing them out to potential employers. I would definitely hire the kid who handed me this card!