Wedding Invitations

Our wedding invitations just went out last week and while we think the design is pretty amazing and we love every part of it, the process is even cooler. My dad's friend, Eric, made our invitations. He also made my parents' in 1998. He has a printing press and has devoted much of his time to printing invitations, letterhead, cards, you name it, the "old-fashioned way." From what I understand, this is how a printing press works: type is arranged into pages and is placed in a frame. The type, then, gets inked and the paper is held between two frames, which are folded down so that the paper lies on the surface of the inked type. Then, a lot of rolling and clinking and reinserting occur, which eventually results in a printed sheet.

I've recently gotten into graphic design and typography, and the more research and browsing I do, the more I notice a backwards trend towards vintage type and the like. So learning about Eric's process of making these invitations has really helped me appreciate the process and art of printing...the unquick and undigital way. It's quite a beautiful (and tedious) process. I'm not sure if I'm getting this right, but I heard that Eric's arm passed through the machine over 4,000 times to make these invitations!

Fortunately, my mom was able to snap a few iPhone photos of Eric at work: