When it came to wishing clients seasons greetings, design studio Fuszion made its list and checked it twice: no Santas, no fir trees, no snowflakes. Instead, Fuszion wanted its holiday card to be something that was handcrafted, elegant, and a treat for the fingertips. That meant two things that make every designer’s heart beat just a little bit faster: nice typography and letterpress printing.
They also took this opportunity to share some of their love and knowledge of typography with their clients: here a baseline, there a serif. Here a cross bar, there an X-height — you get the idea. All printed on a 1950s Vandercook letterpress on soft and sumptuous Reich Paper Savoy, this card only has one color prominently printed. Yet it required two passes through the press: a blind run, meaning no color but just the plate was used to get that nice deep impression, and a second one for the red highlights.
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Wanting to be involved every step of the way, the Fuszion team not only watched the plates being made and the ink applied to the rollers, but they also tried to help load the paper. They were so hands on, in fact, that they finally got kicked out of the press room. Now these are my kind of creatives.
Sabine Lenz is the founder of PaperSpecs.com, the first online paper database and community specifically designed for paper specifiers.
Growing up in Germany, Sabine started her design career in Frankfurt, before moving to Australia and then the United States. She has worked on design projects ranging from corporate identities to major road shows and product launches. From start-ups to Fortune 500 companies, her list of clients included Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Deutsche Bank, IBM and KPMG.
Seeing designers struggle worldwide to stay current with new papers and paper trends inspired Sabine to create PaperSpecs, an independent and comprehensive Web-based paper database and weekly e-newsletter. She is also a speaker on paper issues and the paper industry. Some refer to her lovingly as the "paper queen" who combines her passion for this wonderful substrate called paper with a hands-on approach to sharing her knowledge.