Design + Print: custom letterpress bookplates

Do you love the tradition of book plates as much as we do? If so, consider marking your biblio-territory with a personalized sticker. We’ve created a few recently and are excited to share them here. These bookplates (click on the image to the left for a larger view) were created for a friend who was recuperating from an operation – she’s part birder, part princess, so the pink birdie was a perfect fit. They’re letterpress-printed on 25% cotton wove-finish peel-and-stick labels, and trimmed to just 2 inches square.

Like everything that we create at Lunalux, bookplates can be customized in many ways. We have a vast library of images and typefaces to choose from, and can mix virtually any color ink. While Emily’s bookplate is girly and modern, Nick got something a more goofy and old-timey for his birthday. And while Emily’s were created specifically for her growing personal library, Nick’s bookplates are a little more open-ended in nature, so they can be placed not just in books but also on records or frisbees or anything else that might need to find its way back home.

Design + Print: this one goes out to all the ladies

Creating custom-designed letterpress-printed wedding stationery is a lot of fun because each project is unique. This one, especially so. It’s our first-ever wedding invitation for a lesbian couple. They read about the perforated invites we created last summer for my friends Laura & Ian, and wanted us to use that same format: invitation and RSVP on one card, 5.5 by 8.5 inches, perforated to fold in half and mail on its own, no envelope needed. The bride and bride, Gail & Marisa, purchased a bird painting and asked us to use that image on the invitations. I love the graphic, and had fun developing several concepts for their consideration. Click on the image to the left for a larger view.

After much e-mailing back and forth (they live in New York, but Gail remembers us from her days living in the Twin Cities), they settled on this design. We used brown and red inks on 110# natural white wove-finish cover, and created the pinhole perforations with our step-down perforator. Their return address, and a bit of Yiddish, is printed on the reverse. Gail wrote about their invitations on their blog – click here to read about how much they love them!