Folks, it’s a Christmas miracle: we’ve got our 2016 Letterpress Calendar up in the shop before the New Year! We’ve got a new crew of illustrators and fresh color palette to knock your socks off (it’s seriously bright).
Illustrators include longtime friend and contributor Brian Gunderson alongside first-time calendar collaborators: Jesse Lindhorst, Invisible Creature, Tom Froese and Bill Ferenc.
Studio On Fire chose the ink colors (a blazing take on the traditional CMYK palette, subbing a fluorescent pink in for the magenta and a dark navy instead of black) and paper colors before setting the illustrators loose on our theme for the year: Home. Normally we don’t expound too much on how we choose the theme, but this year with our big move we’re pretty excited to have a new place to call home (our very own building in St. Paul, just a few miles from our previous Mpls location), so we were excited to see what “home” meant to all of our contributors, too.
Papers are all from French: the pages are 100# French Poptone Sweet Tooth, while the stand is made out of a stock that we custom duplexed in-house using French Poptone Blu Raspberry and French Construction Nightshift Blue. All of the months, along with the outer wrap, were letterpress printed with four inks on one sheet before getting cut down and hand collated. The stands are letterpress printed, scored, diecut and hand assembled (note: “hand-assembled” is code for “time consuming handwork” that we have a love/hate relationship with).
Ben posted some great process photos on our Instagram, so be sure to pop over there if you’re curious.