For the second year in a row, Minnesota Monthly magazine has included Lunalux in its annual Best of the Cities feature. We’ve been tapped for Best Paper Goods, and the write-up on page 75 makes us blush just a little… OK a lot! Praise for our Stationery Saturday series is followed by this: “The shop’s top reputation for custom-designed, letterpress-printed invitations, stationery, calling cards, announcements and more continues to grow.” Aw, shucks! We’re tickled and honored and grateful to be included. Congratulations also go to our neighbors who are mentioned in this feature – Nick and Eddie chef Derik Moran made the list of best chefs (they call him the Rising Star), and Cafe Lurcat has been flagged for Best French Fries. Are we the most decorated block in the metro area or what?
You can read part of the Best of the Cities feature on the Minnesota Monthly website, but to see the whole feature (including the bit about us) you’ll have to get your paws on a hard copy. Which shouldn’t be hard, because the September 2010 issue just hit news stands a few days ago.
We’ve just unveiled the designs for our September Stationery Saturday event, and we need to personalize some of each to use as samples. What should we print on these samples? You decide! Enter our contest for your chance to win one of four sets of personal stationery. Winners will receive 15 buckslip flats, imprinted in red ink with the name or phrase of their choice (one line of text below the image, up to 30 characters and spaces), featuring one of four designs: Minnesota silhouette, three stars, Minneapolis stamp or St. Paul stamp. The hefty natural white felt-finish notes will be paired with blank #10 envelopes.
To enter the contest, visit www.lunalux.com/saturday to read about Stationery Saturday and review the four design choices for September; then tell us about your favorite by writing on the Lunalux Facebook wall. Your post must mention a) which of the four buckslip designs you like best, b) what you want printed on the card, and c) how you will use them. We’ll pick four winners, one for each design, and post the results at facebook.com/lunalux
Entries must be live on our wall by Thursday, August 26, 2010 at 3:00p.m. CST. You can post an entry for more than one design. The winners’ personalized cards will be used to promote Stationery Saturday – we’ll put pictures of them on the web, and display them in our Minneapolis shop. We’ll ship the cards to you (or to a friend, if it’s a gift) after the September 11 event.
Last week we were asked to create invitations for the opening night of Thom Pham’s Wondrous Azian Kitchen, a much-anticipated new restaurant in the heart of downtown Minneapolis. Sometimes when clients approach us to turn around jobs in a matter of days, we simply can’t accommodate them because we’re so busy. In this instance, we were lucky enough to have a little wiggle room in our production schedule, so this invite went from concept to finished product in just 48 hours. Chris from Twincy, the agency that helped Pham concept and promote his new venture, asked us to incorporate the rooster graphic, use perforation somehow in the design, and find typographic inspiration in the restaurant’s high-profile neon sign. And here’s what we came up with. The buckslip invite measures 3.875 by 9.25 inches, and fits into a vibrant red open-end #10 envelope. The invites were printed in blazing red and orange inks in 130# bright white bristol cover, and we used our ancient step-down perforating machine to create the pin-hole perforation for the tear-off ticket.
