Holiday card for Marpac Construction
2023.11.30Every year, local Seattle CID construction company Marpac Construction sends out holiday cards to customers, collaborators, and members of their community, and the company works with local Beacon Hill letterpress studio Day Moon Press to get them printed. This year, Marpac’s communication coordinator Gina approached me to design their card. I carved my design into linoleum blocks and Day Moon Press owner Tess LeNoir used those blocks to print the final holiday cards.
I proposed three different ideas that met Marpac’s design direction. The chosen design incorporated three zodiac animals representing the previous, current, and following years. It included a visual reference to the architectural exterior of Uncle Bob’s Place (a Marpac project), as well as references to the trusses of construction cranes (carved into the blue rectangles). The card was a two-block design, with the two colors overlapping and mixing in a manner that’s unique to the blockprinting and letterpress printing process.
I carved the two linoleum blocks by hand. I’m especially proud of the sharpness and precision of the Marpac wordmark – carved in reverse so that it prints in the correct orientation. I proposed several different color combinations, and this red/blue combo is the one we decided to go with.
At Day Moon Press, I picked out Pantone swatches for the two-color design as Gina picked the font. Tess printed up a couple of samples that I checked for carving and alignment errors.
Tess invited us back to the print studio on the day they started printing so that we could see the press in action and do a final sign off on the colors.
Gina and the crew at Marpac Construction were incredibly happy with the final cards; I was told they completely ran out of the ones they ordered because so many people wanted one!