DESCRIPTION True Story 2010 Calendar CLIENT True Story DATE December 2009 DESIGN CREDITS True Story Design: Eric Wagner PRINT CREDITS Letterpress: Rohner Letterpress TYPE CREDITS Berthold Akzidenz Medium

QUANTITY PRODUCED 200 PRODUCTION COST Letterpress: $400 Silkscreen: $200 PRODUCTION TIME 2 weeks DIMENSIONS: WIDTH × HEIGHT × DEPTH 8.5 in × 11 in PRINT METHOD Letterpress and silkscreen PAPER STOCK 59 pt Binders Board NUMBER OF COLORS Letterpress: 1 Spot Silkscreen: 3 Spot OTHER Rounded corners and hole punching

Every year True Story will sends out a holiday greeting to client and friends, and this past holiday was no exception. The one thing they changed was the durability of the greeting, by providing a year-long calendar that people could reference year round.

In keeping with our print identity, there is only type and color — no imagery or decoration. These limitations challenge us to create compositions that are interesting or dramatic based entirely on contrast and tension between the elements. For the calendar, we arranged and cropped the numbers of 2010 to focus on the beautiful form of the Akzidenz Grotesk numbers. We tried to balance between abstraction and clarity, providing enough information so the recipient could decipher what is says.

Having some experience in production helped the team determine some of the main characteristics of this project:

The size was partly chosen because Rohner, the printer, had an existing die available so we could save a little money. We used 59 pt. gray binders board (used to give hardcover books their rigidity) which proved to be a tricky surface for letterpress since it is both soft and toothy, sponging up the ink, but it was a great surface to silkscreen on. The mailing also included a note slip on French Speckletone Chocolate and Kraft Stay-flat envelopes. 

The days/months portion was printed by letterpress, allowing the type to be as crisp as possible at a relatively small size — past experiments with silkscreening fine type usually resulted in plugged screens and broken type. The silkscreen portion was printed in-house over a four-day period. The order of colors printed was gold, blue then white. The white screen contained both the big 0 and the spelled-out Two thousand ten, but after printing the first two colors, it wasn’t possible to precisely register the big number on top and align the smaller type on bottom, so we blocked off the screen and printed the white art in two separate runs.

And if I wasn’t keeping this project nicely protected and filed as part of the FPO archives, I would happily display — and use — it be it at home or in the office.