We were asked to letterpress the certificates for the Art Directors Club of New York Grandmasters Award ceremony held in October, 2008. The Club is an important organization for those of us in the design field and it didn’t hurt that Ray was getting one of the awards.

Originally, we thought we would use high quality inkjet printing for the multiple frames image. We like printing interesting projects for good designers as it often provides a great ‘push-the-envelope’ experience, so we decided to take the opportunity to print the whole thing slowly and patiently via letterpress.

This is the original image photographed by Craig Cutler Photography and provided to us by the designer, Lizzy Ferraro.

Tray Nichols posterized the image in four tonal stages (#1 was the lightest to #4) to capture the dimension and detail using Illustrator and Livetrace. Ray was in charge of the printing and some serious resolution issues. Jill was the ink mixer.

Below you can see the image for plate #2.

Photopolymer plates were ordered from Boxcar Press in Syracuse, NY.

We purchased PMS871 ink which is listed as the lightest metallic yellow-gold. In our experience, it is much darker and appears more like bronze with a heavy patina. We cleaned the press, added gold powder. Nope. Cleaned the press and then tried adding base tint. Nope. We decided to go back and start with yellow and build the image in color without worrying about the metalflake issue.

The first run of plate #2 looked OK, but it is also hard to tell where you are going with this kind of image after one run. So, we printed plate #3 to see a bit more of the image. The overall quality was better working from a base of yellow, but still lacked some snap. So we printed plate #4 followed up by #1. The image was still just OK and still without the snap of the reflective gold in the original image. So we put plate #2 back on and ran yellow with a bit of base tint to help the first run show through. An additional problem at this point was that we had cut off the registration marks (we were being cheap, not wanting to pay for all that blank area of the 10″ x 12″ certificate) so getting the registration aligned was much harder the second time.

The second layer of yellow helped a lot. Then we did the same thing with #3 (same issue of having removed the registration marks) and we had an image that was pretty accurate to the original. It had taken us 6 letterpress runs spread over two days.

After three more runs (logo, text, and calligraphy), the resulting certificate (below) came close to the original.

Below is a close-up of the lower righthand corner of the frames to show how the posterization looks. The width of the image on the finished certificate is 2″. Interestingly, until you feel the surface of the frame image, most people don’t realize the image is letterpressed, too.

We started with eighty sheets of Stonehenge printmaking paper and the goal of having at least three copies of each of the five certificates (a set for us, the designer, and the Art Directors Club), plus about 20 samples in the end. We ended up with 22.

This has us excited again about a project we would love to do — print a visually exciting diploma for a high school. Maybe a charter school or an art-related high school would be a good target. We’d love to be able to work with the students at the school and have them design the diploma.

Now, wouldn’t that be cool.

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