We bought some nice slightly textured off white paper from Paper Source in Porter square (Lux cream, I think), then worked out our designs in Illustrator.

Label Design

I don't have small caps on the PC and my real type sets a bit wider than the Garamond on the computer, but its pretty helpful for general layout. Also we didn't bother to color in every tiny bit of the graphics, I forgot I don't have a % sign, etc. Anyway, here is what we came up with:

For the NH fermented batch

For the MA fermented batch

Earlier that week, I had selected some cuts from Briar Press and also sketched up some icons myself, then sent these to a platemaker to get turned into mounted metal blocks. The block for Empty Orchard is from an EPS off of Briar Press, and the Bare Branches block was drawn by me, scanned, and vectorized to EPS via Adobe Streamline.

Where is that E?

I've only got one font, and not even that many sizes of it. That is definitely a constraint on design, but in a way it focusses your mind and stops you from wondering which of your 1000 fonts would be best to use. The Monotype Garamond I've got is pretty general purpose and has nice renaissance proportions that work well in most situation. Of course I have small caps and hanging figures!

Real Type is Metal

We used pantone 418 for the text and 7534 for the graphics, since I had tins of those inks sitting around left over from Becky's brothers invitations (and they work nicely together). Letterpress tends to print these colors several shades darker than they show up in the pantone guide, but its still ok if you pay close attention to putting barely enough ink on the press. John Barrett from Letterpress Things says the VanSon Rubber Base Plus I'm using isn't really true letterpress ink and will inevitably print darker. Probably I'll try to compensate for that next time by ordering a shade or two lighter than the one I want.

The text got printed first, then we cleaned the press off and went to bed. I did the graphics prints the next day while Ben and Alexis were bottling.

Looking Good

Labels Complete