Hot off the Press

This spring, I got the amazing opportunity to work with a local independent printing press, Igloo Letterpress.  They commissioned me to do a series of greeting cards for their wholesale line.
We started off with a long list of holidays and occasions that we could create cards for: Weddings, anniversaries, birthdays, graduations, Christmas... the list goes on.  So I began sketching out ideas.

"Good Talk" began as a couple talking on a park bench.  Sort of a "thinking of you" type of card.  I thought a guy talking to a bird was a lot funnier and so did Allison at Igloo.

The person sitting with the cat evolved as the weeks went on into a series of cat and dog images.

"Your age does not compute" didn't make the cut.  At one point, we saw a lot of animals emerging in my idea pile and decided to cluster the cars around an animal theme, making them a little more unified.

"You'll go far" made it all the way to the end, only getting cut because of time constraints.

The nice thing about working with a local company is that we could meet and discuss in person, make decisions together and figure out where things were going.  We ended up with seven ideas that would be taken to finished cards.  Igloo usually works with more graphic illustrations than what I do but wanted mine to be washy so they'd stand out.  My cards would be 2 color prints, so I worked in layers, traditionally, with ink.

 

Igloo ended up using halftones to simulate the washes, and I love the result.

 And here are what the finished cards look like:

So you can find these cards (along with a bunch of other really great ones) on Igloo Letterpress' website and in their store in Worthington Ohio.
Follow Igloo on Facebook and Twitter.

And speaking of Twitter, I am going to give away a full set of these seven cards when I get to 200 followers.  So follow me here: @MarkCEberhardt