We’re swooning over this save-the-date announcement we created for Matt & Stan earlier this month. The combination of a clean, simple cattail illustration and basic wedding details set in traditional type looks so lovely letterpress-printed on soft cotton card stock. Click on the picture for a larger view, you’ll see that irresistible texture that can only be created by letterpress printing. The dusty blue envelope is from Green Paper Company, which makes envelopes and cards from a well-edited palette of recycled papers. So many clients ask about recycled papers now, we expect that people will really respond to this company’s beautiful colors.

Like all of our wedding stationery, this save-the-date was custom-designed for the happy couple. Matt and Stan liked the overall look of our work, but wanted something we hadn’t done before: cattails. It’s a fun challenge when clients come in with very specific requests, and a great pleasure to make their paper dreams a reality! If you’re thinking about custom invitations for your upcoming wedding, click here to learn more about our design and printing services, or read about other wedding projects in our blog archive.

As a graphic designer, it can be enlightening to revisit old projects. Preferences, skills, habits and trends can shift dramatically over years, so looking at stationery or invitations we created on 2003 can be both fun and traumatic. Sometimes a printed piece will withstand the test of time quite well, but other times I cringe a bit at old work – What was I thinking? Why didn’t I do it different, smarter, prettier? So when a long-time friend of the studio came in last fall to ask us to reprint cards we’d designed five years earlier, I was pleasantly surprised to find that I still really like what we created for her.

Gail has been a regular customer since we worked on custom-designed letterpress-printed business cards for her back in 2003. We created a logo with her initials, and used that logo on business cards. The composition was unique, and we printed on cotton watercolor paper so the cards felt very luxurious. Last fall, as she prepared to relocate her business office, she asked us to update the cards and create matching letterhead and envelopes as well. She still loved her old cards, but asked me to experiment with new layouts and fonts. After looking at an array of nice ideas, we came to the conclusion that the five-year-old layout was the best of the bunch (Jenni pats herself on the back). We switched up the font and the paper, and brightened the ink color a bit, but it looks remarkably similar to the original. The cards, along with the new monarch letterhead and envelope, are all printed on high-quality natural white papers in a punchy green. We even printed a small stack of business cards in red ink, because Gail really liked the color but didn’t think it was quite right for the whole system.

The history of this project makes me extra-proud that this design has won an award! We submitted Gail’s stationery to Mohawk Paper’s quarterly Strathmore Letterhead Design contest, and for the the second quarter in a row, we were awarded the bronze prize (Jenni pats herself on the back again). You can see Gail’s stationery, along with the quarter’s other winners, at the Mohawk website.

In the past few months, we have created lots of new letterpress-printed greeting cards for our wholesale line. Last week we sent samples to our sales reps; now we want wholesale buyers new and old to see them too! We’ve added yet another PDF to our catalog page, click here to download that document (cleverly titled lunaluxnew09) and check out all our new additions. The 22 new cards — a monumental release by Lunalux standards — includes an addition to the very popular Chickenboy series. Just in time for Valentine’s Day, we have a tu-tu-clad chickenboy-ballerina, mid-grand jeté, declaring “I love you this much!” You’ll find other love-themed cards that are great for V-Day, plus new designs for Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and graduation, some holiday cards (plan ahead for Christmas ’09!) and plenty of charming everyday. As soon as we get these new cards properly promoted, we’ll start work on a new full catalog, which we hope to have ready in the next month or two. We hope you like our new cards, and we hope you’ll call us if you have any questions! As always, we encourage wholesalers to keep an eye on our blog, we often introduce our new designs there before we have a chance to add them to our catalog.

Mind your manners and be sure to send proper thank-you notes for any and all holiday gifts you received! At a loss for words? Check out the in-depth thank-you note primer we published last January. Need some thank-you notes? Consider this new design we just added to our wholesale line. “Thanks a Million” is letterpress-printed in gold ink, surrounded by an intricate vintage frame in dark green, on thick natural white wove-finish bristol cover. It looks so money, literally and figuratively. “Thanks a Million” is available now at the Lunalux store; individual cards cost $4, boxes of 6 cards go for $14. This card is one one of six new designs that we just finished printing last week, all featuring vintage decorative frames – we should have more images of these new cards on our site soon, but if you can’t wait that long, check the Lunalux Facebook page for a sneak peek.