New website for us, new business cards for them

Since we quietly launched our website redesign on April 19, we’ve been enjoying a steady stream of compliments regarding the new look. If you haven’t taken the time to click around a bit, we hope you do – there’s lots of good stuff to see and read here! The site was redesigned by our friends at Dragonfly Networks, and we were happy to return the favor by creating remarkable business cards for them. In addition to letterpress-printing their basic contact information in navy ink, we also ran the cards through the Heidelberg a second time to print a dragonfly wing with no ink. We love the juxtaposition of the structured block of text with the curvy, organic wing. The cards are printed on soft 100% cotton Lettra cover, which takes the deep letterpress impression so perfectly, and trimmed to an unusual size (1.625×3.5 inches, rather than the standard 2×3.5), which makes them stand out even more. We can’t say “thank-you” enough to Mark and Nick at Dragonfly Networks for giving our website a dramatic and much-needed face-lift. They built a custom WordPress theme for us, full of hand-coded bells and whistles like drop-down menus on the top navigation, and dynamic sidebar content. They translated our napkin sketches and off-hand suggestions into a real hum-dinger of a site. We’re still discovering and ironing out the occasional kink, but overall we’re pleased as punch!

More recently, we printed similar calling cards for a client who’s on the prowl for a new job. Jenn supplied the design, we just did the heavy lifting (i.e. printing). Normally the Lunalux blog features projects we designed in-house, because that’s what we most like to do. But these cards turned out so great, and fit so perfectly into this blog post, we couldn’t resist sharing. Like the wing on the Dragonly cards, Jenn’s initials are printed without any ink. And we used Lettra cover again. Click on the image to the right to view a larger picture of the cards, along with the photopolymer plates we used to print them. If you’re thinking about getting new business cards or calling cards, you can read more about our design and printing services by clicking here.

Lunalux in the Downtown Journal

Lunalux owner Jenni Undis is featured in the March 30 edition of the Minneapolis newspaper Downtown Journal. Look for Jenni in the bi-weekly column “From the desk of” – the story includes a photo of her desk, along with little factoids about some of the clutter you’ll see on said desk. The Downtown Journal is a free newspaper, available all over downtown Minneapolis. You can also click here to read the story on the newspaper’s website. You can also browse the Luanlux blog archives to read more about press coverage we’ve been receiving in other newspapers and magazines.

Studio store makeover, phase one

Next time you come into the Lunalux studio store, we hope you like the new way we’re displaying our selection of fantastic greeting cards. This weekend, we installed a custom-built wooden card rack. Gone are the dusty wire racks (“spinners” in gift-industry speak) that have served our card-display needs since we first opened our doors in the early 1990s. Instead, the cards are arranged in long rows in a shallow wall of shelves. This picture offers a pretty good view, but it’s best enjoyed in person – visit soon, before the nice smell of freshly finished wood fades away!

This picture, taken in February from roughly the same angle, shows how the store looked before. Installing the card rack resulted in a cascade of changes to the store. We lost some shelves on the wall just inside the door, a couple of tables, and most of the afore-mentioned spinners. But we added a nice wooden shelf that we’d been using in the back room (a hand-me-down from the old Hungry Mind Bookstore!), shuffled the store inventory a bit, and voila – store makeover! We hope to make more modifications to the store over the next few months, to make it a more comfortable and roomy shopping environment.