What We Do

Our latest print, which has also been added to our online store, is a poster created for the 6th installment of Poster Offensive (a bipartisan political poster show that happens every two years, coinciding with elections) which was hosted by Big Table Studio in downtown St. Paul this past November.

The poster measures out at 13″ x 20″, with four inks (three beautifully overprinting and a fourth offering some sage words of wisdom) letterpress printed in our Minneapolis studio on Crane Lettra Pearl White 110 lb cover.

Beautiful Blind Impression

Based out of San Francisco, Passing Notes designed this beautiful stationery system for Muhs Home, an online store retailing elegant home furnishings and accessories. Refined typography utilized two inks alongside chic illustrations. Since the illustrations were printed with no ink, what is referred to as a blind impression, we used a thick Crane Lettra Flo White 220 lb cover stock, allowing us to really go deep with the impression while reducing show through.

Other projects we have produced for Passing Notes include this Aphro Chic system and Patti Schmidt business card.

Nara Business Cards

More and more clients are starting to request split fountain printing, where we put two ink colors on the same roller to acheive a gradient. Craig Duffney, a longtime friend of Studio On Fire, designed these cards for Nara, a web personalization tool. In this instance, the pink to purple split fountain is a direct callback to the gradient background of the Nara website. After two passes through the press and duplexing back to themselves, the cards were finished with a custom rounded corner diecut.

Letterpress printed on Neenah Classic Crest Solar White 200C.

Ilumini Photography Arts Business Card

Utilizing their existing logo, we designed and produced these cards for  Ilumini Photography Arts, a wedding and fine art photographer based out of Hawaii. After creating a type lockup for the contact information we designed a custom diecut that would elegantly frame the ornate “I” logo.

Letterpress printed with metallic silver ink on Neenah Classic Crest Solar White 110C and a tonal varnish on the Wausau Royal Complements Eclipse Black 100C, these stocks were duplexed after printing before receiving the final diecut.

Must-have Mustard

With Memorial Day weekend staring us in the face, it only made sense to share this bbq related project. If you live in the Twin Cities you have probably come across the stylish orange Natedog’s food cart, stocked with quality wieners, tasty hand crafted mustards, and manned by the friendly proprietor, Nate Beck. We were lucky to have him at our open house in February and recently letterpress printed the labels for Nate’s honey-spiced mustard, now bottled and available for purchase.

Holmberg Design Co, who we most recently worked with on these Dogwood Coffee labels, is behind the Natedog’s identity and label design. Letterpress printed with two inks on an existing label stock, these were kisscut after printing with a custom made die that mimics the bottle shape.

CBS recently ran a nice feature of on Natedog’s that can be viewed here.

Kate Arends Wedding Roundup

We’ve had the pleasure of printing several wedding suites designed by local Minneapolis creative Kate Arends. A full-time designer over at Cue, Kate also freelances and does a beautiful job curating her blog Wit + Delight.

Sized to fit in preexisting #10 envelope, the first suite is printed with three inks on Neenah Classic Crest Natural white 165C with a flash of metallic gold edge coloring. No checkboxes in sight, the RSVP is cleverly designed as one card perforated down the middle–allowing the guest to respond with a hearty “YES” response card or use the alternate “Regretfully Decline” postcard.

We love the bold graphic nature, humorous wording and great use of an inline font on this second suite. Printed on French Poptone Sweet Tooth 140C, the invitation card scores twice to z-fold into the envelope. Though the cards use only black ink, the fluorescent green envelope, Mohawk’s BridteHue in UltraLime, adds a punch of color.

Update // See Jon and Alecia’s entire wedding over on 100 Layer Cake.

Lastly, there’s a wedding suite and save the date Kate designed for an Australian bride out of Adelaide. Filled with elegant typographic lockups and textured backgrounds, this was printed with gold ink on French Poptone Whipped Cream 140C .

Letterpress Open House // Black Arts Warm Hearts

New SOF website with expanded shop!

You may have noticed on your way to purchase a 2012 Studio On Fire Letterpress Calendar that studioonfire.com has a completely overhauled look! We’re pretty proud of the new site and have plans to add more features in the coming weeks.

Being the paper-oriented people that we are, our friends over at westwerk design handled the creation of the site for us. Not only were they were great to work with, but their studio is conveniently located just upstairs from our basement workspace.

Along with the new site is additional merchandise for the store! All of our classic items are still available, as well as the 2012 calendar and several new posters.

Above: Artisan Activist Poster, Crane Lettra Flo White 110C, 13″ x 19″, 2 Color Split Fountain on 2 Separate Plates + 1 Tonal Varnish

Above: Sunshine Poster, Crane Lettra Flo White 110c, 12″ x 16″, 3 Color Split Fountain

Above: Matter Into Spirit Poster, Crane Lettra Flo White 110c, 13″ x 20″, 2 Color Split Fountain + Blind Impression