Letterpress printing is a go-to traditional printing technique for invitations, business cards and for designs that really make an impression!
We convert your PDF design into polymer plates creating a raised surface that’s pressed into your chosen card stock. The impression is then filled with coloured Pantone Inks, or left without colour which is known as Blind Letterpress or Debossing.
Letterpress printing is a technique that’s been around for centuries, and we perform ours on our lovingly maintained Heidelberg presses – check out our Socials to see our team in action crafting beautiful letterpress!
- Pantone Uncoated inks (PMS U) are mixed carefully by hand – you can order one, two or three PMS colours, each design counts as an extra PMS plate (see the examples below).
- Available on a wide range of our luxury card stocks, choose from softer cotton blend stocks (traditionally used for letterpress) like Gmund Colors Cotton or a crisper impression on a stock like Woodland.
- To get the deepest impression we recommend choosing double-thick (duplexed) card.
- Pantone inks are translucent which means you must choose an ink colour darker than the card to be letterpressed. You can’t letterpress lighter colours or white on to darker stocks.
| 1 PMS colour letterpress | 2 PMS colour letterpress (same PMS colour, two plates because it's double sided). |
| 2 PMS colour letterpress (two different colours, requiring two plates - one for each colour). | 3 PMS colour letterpress (clever design where the translucent inks overlap to appear as two extra shades!) |
A little bit of history for you: Traditionally, letterpress involved arranging individual blocks of 'moveable type' into a caddy, forming words from the combination of letters. All of the characters were molded in reverse, and the words had to be similarly arranged in reverse. Images could be included but needed to be etched in either wood or metal, making it a time-consuming process.
Thankfully, in the 20th century a new and much simpler process was invented, whereby digital text and graphics could be created on a computer and then produced using a flexible relief plate - this is how we create your letterpress designs today.
So, how do we do it?
Your PDF is turned into to a film (negative) this is exposed to a light-sensitive, water soluble polymer plate. The portions of the exposed plate harden, and what is not exposed, washes away. What remains is a raised surface in the shape of your design.
The letterpress plate is attached to a metal base locked into the press. The plate is pressed into your chosen card stock, piece by piece leaving an impression of your design to fill with ink, or left without colour (Blind Letterpress or Debossing).
Ink is mixed by hand - carefully weighed out to perfectly match the specific colour recipe of your chosen Pantone colour. Mixing ink is a finicky process and can take a number of test runs on the press to achieve the correct colour.
Letterpress printing takes time and precision to get just the right amount of ink onto the rollers (which varies colour to colour).
Each page is fed by hand, and each colour of a print job can be several hours on press from start to clean-up.
Differences in pressure and amount of ink can dramatically affect the printed colour, so adjustments are made throughout the print process and the press is closely monitored to ensure the colour and impression remains consistent.
The ink is then allowed to dry and the next day, the press is inked up in another colour (if your design consists of more than one PMS colour) and the process repeated, or prepared for finishing and trimming, ready to be checked by our beady-eyed QA perfectionists and lovingly packed to be sent to you.
Combining Letterpress with other print methods
You can create designs that use letterpress elements and hot foil press embossing as well. Make sure that you read and understand our Artwork Guidelines for each print process.
If your design combines Letterpress with digital printing, remember that there’s a small amount of movement with the digital printing (up to 2mm).
Don’t design the digital artwork to meet letterpress elements at exact points, OR have tight registration (too close together) between letterpress and digital printing due to this movement.
Guidelines
It’s easy to set up your design correctly for Letterpress – but it’s essential to follow our Artwork Guidelines or if you're not a professional designer, please click here for simplified instructions.
Correctly supplied designs mean we won’t need to come back to you, which might cause annoying delays. You’ll be wanting to get your beautiful Letterpress job in your hands ASAP!
Want to see more letterpress?
Letterpress printing doesn’t have to be just black! Peterkin’s Printery Perfectionists have created eight beautiful samples to showcase a variety of impressive effects with 1, 2 or 3 PMS colour letterpress combinations (plus a big sprinkling of imagination!).
Shop The Letterpress Sample Pack
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