DESCRIPTION Thanksgiving Card Promotional Piece CLIENT Suka DATE November 2009 DESIGN CREDITS Link Suka Creative direction: Brian Wong Design: Matthew Carl PRINT CREDITS Offset: Artale Graphics Letterpress: Press (NY) TYPE CREDITS Based on Interstate Black and 22 different leaves

QUANTITY PRODUCED 300 PRODUCTION COST $1,200 PRODUCTION TIME 7 days DIMENSIONS: WIDTH × HEIGHT × DEPTH 7 in × 5.125 in PRINT METHOD Offset and letterpress PAPER STOCK Mohawk Genesis, 100 PCW White Smooth, 160dtc NUMBER OF COLORS 2 spot inks OTHER Vellum envelope

More and more I notice designers and firms choosing an alternate holiday in which to contact their clients. Be it the traditional December celebrations, Chinese New Year, Valentines Day or as in the case of Suka, Thanksgiving.

One thing that I had never done before, but wanted to try, was printing on clear plastic. This would allow me to play with the transparency of the inks in some new creative ways. My first idea was to design a single fold card, that when closed would read as one message and when opened revealed another message. You know, kind of like the secret decoder rings that you get in a Kracker Jack box. After tons of exploration and in taking with my creative director Brian Wong, he suggested using a colored vellum envelope and making the card more like a postcard rather than a greeting card. It took a lot of trials and errors to find the right colors that would create the “secret message” effect but still have a Thanksgiving feel to them.

When it finally came to sending the card to the printer, we wanted to do little something to make the card special, but still stay with our budget. We explored a few different printing techniques such as debossing, embossing and guilded edges but we ended up using letterpress and offset. It proved to be a nice balance between style and price. We had done pieces with offset and letterpress before, but we had never done something with registration that was this tight. The printers were confident that they could do it but I did have a bit of anxiety about the registration. I went on press for the offset and letterpress process and everything went very smoothly. One thing we learned from this experience was, if you going to print offset and letterpress in tight registration it’s better to print them as one up on a sheet, rather than two up on a sheet. Our offset printer had already run the cards as two up and so our letterpress printer tried doing the letterpress as two up, but it lead to an uneven impression and registration. This wasn’t a huge problem, but they just ran the cards as if it was a one up sheet. They split two up sheet into two separate runs.

And I am thankful for those designers who spend the time testing and exploring ideas that will translate into beautful items I want to hold in my hands and share with those around me. And if you want to share in thankfulness, email info@sukacreative.com and you might be able to get a card to call your own.