Design + Print: award-winning design stands test of time

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.