stitch.rip.repeat.

Thursday, March 04, 2010

Letterpress Neighborhood: the Process

It took us 2 months from concept to packaging to make our Chandler Lane Letterpress Neighborhood. It all started over a sandwich at Uprise Bakery in Columbia. (serious yum).

We started sketching ideas, then having meetings to practice folding and trying things out.

There were so many decisions to make along the way: paper, size, would they fit in our mailers? How many houses? Really the easiest part was the drawing. Carrie and I split up the drawing--she did the background, I did the foreground, and we each did a house and she did the trees.

This is my first drawing for the cape cod house. After I had all of this done---I decided it was too much detail and that I needed to redraw it. Because these were so tiny, we were worried about the tiny details showing up.

We also decided to move away from solid areas of color like you see above here. We wanted a lot of white, so that it really resonated with letterpress lovers, since so much of that is about lines and crisp white paper.

Here's one of our testers: Caroline.

One of many non-registered houses. We used these for test-folding. Overall, we are pretty excited about how well we can register things now. About 375 of 400 prints are perfect.

After we were done with all the sketching, planning, digitizing, printing and testing, we had to make a package. It now looks like a real "thing"! Our moms both came to the barn to help us package. Gotta love free laborers!

Now we're in the marketing phase, which is probably the least exciting, but oh-so necessary part of the job. We got on Scoutie Girl today! And I could have gotten us on Design*Sponge, (she said she really liked them!) but I jumped the gun and submitted it to other blogs at the same time. Even though we hadn't actually GOTTEN on those other blogs, they didn't want to risk not having the exclusive scoop on our project. I have mixed feelings about that. I understand her wanting to be original, but it's hard not to try to market to as many (quality) blogs as possible.