The Questions You Never Thought You Would Have To Ask - Blog | Letter Press

The Questions You Never Thought You Would Have To Ask

There comes a moment for you as an engaged couple, after you have done the important things like choose your partner, fix a date and book a venue, when you realise you need to get your invitations printed – otherwise, who’s going to come to the wedding? And that is the moment you find yourself confronted with a bewildering lexicon of printer’s jargon, unholy words that nobody in their right mind would use – do you want fly cards? Should they be plate sunk? Hot-foiled or letterpressed, flat or raised? 330, 490 or 600gsm? Here at The Letter Press in Cirencester we are entering our 30^th year of printing wedding stationery (which, by the way, is spelt with an ‘e’ – stationary isn’t going anywhere); and over the years we have got used to the sort of questions which most worry our prospective customers.

First of all, the different methods of printing, all of which have their own place and attraction. Humble Flat Print is just what it says it is, the most straight forward form of printing and also the cheapest. This is what you use for information sheets, table plans, place cards and reply cards; all areas where practical legibility and reasonable economy are your priorities. Save your money for the stationery which really matters, the wedding invitations and the invites to any evening party, the orders of service for the church and the menus which will enhance your place settings. Here you have a choice of the following methods of printing:

Raised Print

Raised print is also known as thermography, because it is by heating a resin on the surface of the wet ink that the type is raised. The resulting raised surface adds distinction to the job and is similar to the effect of engraving, widely regarded as the smartest form of printing but nowadays prohibitively expensive. For many peoplethe first thing they do when receiving an invitation is to run their finger over the print to see if it has been raised.

Letterpress Print

Time was that if you were a young letterpress apprentice, wet behind the ears and generally gormless, you would have been given an almighty bollocking if you printed with so much pressure that your type left a deep impression in the board; type, an alloy of lead, tin and antimony, had two distinct characteristics: it was soft, and it was expensive. Printing with so much pressure would wear out the type very quickly, as well as leading to an equally speedy exit from the printing trade.
Nowadays, however, we print from photopolymer blocks which are thrown away afterwards, so piling on the pressure presents no problems, making it possible to achieve a tactile and visual effect which is quite pleasing: the lettering digs into the board, which has been chosen for qualities of softness which best display the effect. So at The Letter Press we choose watercolour boards which we call “Impression Boards”, and we recommend that our customers choose these for their letterpress wedding invitations.

Hot-foil

Hot-foil involves transferring a metallic pigment onto the board by means of heat and pressure; the metal block sits on a heated bed in the letterpress machine, reaching temperatures of about 130c; between the block and the board runs the foil (like kitchen foil), and the combination of heat and pressure transfers the pigment onto the board. In contrast to ink, the foil is a solid skin, which means we can use it to print onto dark coloured boards. Gold and silver are the most typical foil colours used, but there are many other colours, either gloss or matt, available. At The Letter Press we foil in white onto Colorplan Smoke board, which looks very striking and smart:

Our website, www.letterpress.co.uk, shows many different examples of wedding stationery using the methods above. Typically people looking for wedding invitations spend a long time researching, with multiple repeated visits to the site before their order is placed. Whether or not you should just get on with it is dependent on when you feel you should send the invitations out, and this is another question we are often asked: how much time before the wedding should I send the invitations? Traditionally invitations were sent out six weeks before the event; but that was in the days when weddings were celebrated in rather grotty tents borrowed from the WI where you were served with triangles of bread coated with something generically termed “Meat Paste”. Weddings today are somewhat grander affairs than those of the post-war years of austerity, and having laid on a good show you do want to make sure you get the guests on your A-list. Eight weeks is now the standard time before the wedding that you send out the invites, more if your guests are coming from the jungles of New Guinea or some similarly far-flung place. So in that case, the next question: how long will the printing take? Well, it shouldn’t take a month, but it’s best to allow a month, so in other words, you should order your wedding invitations a full three months before the day: you don’t want to end up paying express charges to get your printing order pushed up to the front of the queue.