business card paper.

Davina, at this point it’s been really hard for me to beat good ol’ 110 and 220 Lettra.  But don’t limit yourself just to the soft, open sized papers.  During my last workshop, I had my student run a copper add cut of an 1890 Old Series C&P ATF catalog cut as part of her prop card design.  We used the usual 110lb Lettra, which was

. . . nice. 

Then I had her use some of the hard surfaced card stock we used as barrier stock when we cut up the Lettra – I knew what was gonna happen, the student did not. 

Whoa!!

She stopped the press!  The difference in the image presentation going from Lettra to a hard surface stock was stunning!  Much, much more contrast.  The image fairly ‘popped’ from the page. The cross hatch shadowing on the cut rendered much finer articulation.  And when I said she stopped the press, she literally did just that.  It was a show-stopper. 

Needless to say, we are running our prop cards now on harder (and easier to be had) card stock, and saving the Lettra for the stuff that needs to be debossed.  You can take that fine articulation and ultra contrast to the next level by trying gloss finish.  On that finish, you not only have remarkable articulation, but you also have a surface difference as the gloss sheen is interrupted by the matt finish of the ink, and an ever so slight deboss. 

Experiment!  Don’t tie yourself to what everyone else is doing.

-gary

http://www.gjohanson.com

Thanks Gary!

This is great advice! Its amazing (and frustrating) the difference stock makes. I agree, the finish the plain non-cotton stock makes is awesome. It seems to make the ink so much brighter! I even prefer the way metallic inks look on plain old kraft (they look like nothing on lettra) its always a surprise seeing how everything interacts in subtle ways!

I just posted some photos on my blog, with you and also some of the gals from Letpress in mind. I’ve been around the block a few times with Letterpress, and something that I try to do is get folks to explore the other virtues of Letterpress, so it will not be totally defined by deep deboss.  That’s only one dynamic.  I find that the detail capabilities of Letterpress often go un-noticed.  In fact, back when we shot negs for imaging on offset plates, in the early days of photo typesetting, we had better results printing text on Krome-cote with our 12×18 C&P, drying the print, and shooting a neg from it and stripping it directly onto the goldenrod.  Extremely sharp imagry, and 6557 Lithofilm “don’t lie”. <grin>

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