There are many different printing methods available to make your wedding invitations beautiful and unique, and one of the most popular – not to mention one of my favorites – is the letterpress printing method. Just in case you are not familiar with letterpress, we wanted to give you a quick overview of the process and what makes it such a beautiful printing method for your invitations.
Letterpress is the oldest printing form, dating back as far as the 15th century. This printing method was originally done with wood and metal type that had to be hand-set into the press machine to create the desired design, so printers would have cabinets and trays filled with a myriad of signs, symbols, and letters in different fonts in order to make different layouts and designs. Nowadays, letterpress printing has evolved into an industry centered around the polymer plate, giving printers the freedom to print a wide variety of designs in numerous fonts while keeping the old charm by continuing to manually print with old machines and mix ink colors by hand. Each piece is printed one at a time, giving you a one-of-a-kind, handcrafted paper product. How cool is that?!
Here is a snippet of the printing process
First, we mix the ink by hand
Then, we apply it onto the ink disk. The rollers even out the ink on the disk and evenly applies it onto the polymer plate on the way down. Check out this video!
And then, the finished product 🙂
Something to consider…there are certain papers that are not best suitable for letterpress printing due to texture and colors. Letterpress ink is translucent, so is not very noticeable if you use a dark paper stock such as navy and black.