DESCRIPTION Baby Girl On The Way Invitation CLIENT Family member DATE June 2010 DESIGN CREDITS Heavy Metal Letterpress PRINT CREDITS Heavy Metal Letterpress TYPE CREDITS Dollhouse Fink Heavy LHF Fairground

QUANTITY PRODUCED 75 PRODUCTION COST $125 PRODUCTION TIME 2 weeks DIMENSIONS: WIDTH × HEIGHT × DEPTH 3.5 in × 6.5 in PAGE COUNT 2 PRINT METHOD Letterpress (C&P Old Style 12 × 18 Letterpress) PAPER STOCK Crane Lettra Fluorescent 110 lb Cover NUMBER OF COLORS 2 Spot BINDING Sewing machine

Whenever babies and design collide I fear the worst. I am weary of your typical baby designs with the cute little bears or ducks or ponies or whatever. And the colors! Oh, the pink-or-blue colors. Which is why I was immediately drawn to the baby shower invite that Miguel Castro designed and printed for his sister-in-law.

When I first approached this project, I did some research on some previous designs and noticed that many of the invitations out there were usually one page either A6 or A7 size. I wanted to do something a bit smaller, and have a more custom feel to it. I also wanted to introduce some type of sewing technique to the paper, to help give the “craft” feel to it. One thing I wanted to try was doing a reveal style crease to the front of the card, and found that sewing it would be a great way of attaching the cards together. The overall design objective was to do a fun and cute illustration style. For the front I introduced some trees and rolling hills into the design, that represented her hometown which her baby was going to be born. For the back, I kept it very simple, but wanted to keep the pattern from the front into the back so that it merged nicely with the overall design.

And now for some of the technicalities and technical issues faced:

I used a creasing matrix on the press, which was pretty easy to do. I did run into some issues with having it not ink in certain areas, so there was a lot of make ready to do beforehand. I ran into some headaches with this project, but overall am very happy with the outcome.

And very happy is what both designer/printer and mother-to-be should be with these invites.