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We believe the album is the highest form of art. It’s got it all:  visual artwork, tactile engagement, and most importantly music. Creating striking album packaging is what got us sucked into this whole printing game in the first place. As the music industry goes through its current state of flux what is slowly becoming clear is that those of us who continue to have a passion for the physical incarnation of albums do so because of the packaging. For those looking to do things on the cheap we have a variety of standard dies for paper-and-glue style jackets and our house stock is the brightest white 100% recycled paperboard we can find. For those with a more indulgent concept we have access to a wide variety of different stocks and our shop is equipped for a number of printing and finishing processes, most of which you can read about below.

Books are a very close runner up to albums in our favourite things hierarchy. A small block of paper bound together will always be a desirable object to hold, flip through, and engage with. Again speaking of this new ‘digital era’, we agree with the predicitions of GUY where drab mass produced books-as-commodity will be replaced by the inventively crafted book-as-art-object. Creative use of spot colours, foil-stamped covers, alternative printing processes, leatherette wraps, tipped-in illustrations, toothy uncoated paper stocks, and elaborate bindings that are as amusing as they are frustrating; these are the type of books we are good at making.

We have the capabilities to make a wide variety of paper products. The usual suspects include posters, business cards, stationary, calendars, pocket folders, promotional pieces, packaging, wedding invitations (no bridezillas please!), pamphlets, postcards, etc. That’s just the tip of the iceberg as we can do a lot more than we could ever list on the site, so if you don’t see what you are looking for please get in touch as we love a good challenge!

Simply put, offset lithography is by the far the most common printing process used today. If you look up away from your computer right now we can almost guarantee that there’s a piece of paper near you that has been printed using the offset process. Other sources can better describe how the process itself actually works, but basically it’s the one that uses a big cast-steel machine filled with thin aluminum plates, yummy-smelling viscous ink, a little bit of water, and pulls paper through itself really fast while putting multiple colours onto the sheet in one pass. Offset litho can be used to make the simplest 1 colour business card to a massive full colour  magazine. It can reproduce small fine text, line art, illustrations with gradients, photographs, you name it.

It’s the work horse of the print industry. At least for now. Admittedly, digital and inkjet are making big advances these days, but the quality still isn’t appealing enough for us. That will change in time, but we aren’t there yet.

For those who aren’t familiar with them, Risographs are basically mimeographs on steroids. For those aren’t familiar with mimeographs, which admittedly is most of us, they are machines that utilize a stencil based printing process. Think of them as inhabiting a world in between photocopying and screen-printing. Instead of using toner they use actual ink which is stored inside a circular drum and is pushed through a screen that the machine makes internally and wraps around the ink drum. Artwork is imaged onto the screen using a thermal print head similar to those found in photocopiers and hence can print with higher line screens than is typical from most screen-printing setups.

So, what the heck does it look like? If a photocopier is low-fi and an offset press is high-fi, think of risographs as mid-fi. Text looks really crisp in a very unique way and gradient-based images such as photographs have a wide range of tonality but you can see the halftone dots pretty easily if you look closely. It is also a fundamentally spot colour based system. This means that you can’t print full colour with them, instead you print with specific separated colours in single passes just like screen-printing. The results are very unique.

Let’s just get this out of the way now: sadly, we do not currently offer letterpress printing. However, notice the operative word there: currently. We recently got our hands on an auto-feed die-cutter that originally had letterpress printing capabilities. It’s going to take a lot of after-hours work, but we hope to one day restore it to its original glory. Trust us, we’ll let you know if and when we get it hissing ink again.

For those who don’t know, letterpress printing has been around for a very long time. It most commonly utilizes either metal type, engraved or etched blocks, or photo-polymer plates, all of which have a raised surface that ink is rolled onto and then paper is squeezed against. Not too long ago it was the most prevalent commercial printing process with its own skilled trades and production systems, but was abandoned for more ‘efficient’ processes which was a shame and completely logical. It is both the coolest form of printing and the most insanely ridiculous form of printing.

Foil Stamping is very similar to letterpress printing but instead of using ink foil stamping uses heat and pressure to transfer foil onto the substrate. Though people are most familiar with the metallic shades, foil comes in a wide variety of colours, finishes and effects. Think glossy green, clear, holographic, wood grain, and of course shiny gold.

When contacting us for a quote please make sure to let us know the dimensions of the artwork you wish to stamp as the magnesium dies used for foil stamping are priced by the square inch.

Another process related to letterpress printing, embossing use a female counter die in addition to the standard male die and a lot more pressure to produce the effect of the artwork/text being raised up from the paper. It’s produces a great textural and visual effect. It can be done in register to printed elements (this is know as wet embossing) and on it’s own (you guessed it, dry embossing). The inverse effect where the image is sunken into the paper is also possible and is known as debossing.

When contacting us for a quote please make sure to let us know the dimensions of the artwork you wish to emboss as the magnesium and polymer dies used for embossing are priced by the square inch.

We have a wide variety of house dies for making various shapes and patterns of packaging for CDs and vinyl. You can find templates for them on this page. We can also make custom dies for either an original packaging idea or to cut out a specific artwork shape out of a substrate. We can also use our die-cutter to score or perforated.

Dies for cutting are priced by machine time and the complexity of bending the blades, so we’ll need you to provide with a mock-up of the pattern when requesting a quote, ideally as a vector file. Generally speaking, simple shapes and patterns can be very affordable whereas complicated shapes like text or illustrations can be quite expensive.

We have a number of capabilities to bound pages together to make books. One of the more popular ones is perfect binding which uses glue to attach and wrap a cover to the book block (this is what the inner pages are referred to as). Think of every paperback book you own. We can also do saddle-stitching, which is the fancy term for staple bound. We’ve been playing around with centre-sewn which is similar to saddle-stitching but instead of using staples it uses thread and runs the full length of the spine. We are currently investigating smyth sewing which uses a machines to sew multiple signatures (this is what multiple pages gathered together and folded are called) together to create the block. It is how the block of hardcover books are traditionally bound but the really exciting use of smyth sewing is when there is no cover and the spine is left bare to reveal the signatures and the thread.

A recent favourite acquisition in shop is the magical pair of sheet-gluer and roller press. Using these two machines we are able to apply a thin layer of glue onto almost any kind of substrate and wrap or mount it onto pretty much anything else. What would one use these machines for? Here are some suggestions: wrapping a linen material onto the cover of a book, wrapping the shell of a record jacket in black leatherette, board games, or placing an image printed on a smaller textured stock onto the cover of a book printed in a colour stock. The effects possible are infinite, especially considering how limited the availability of different colours or textures are in thicker and heavier stocks; mounting allows you to take any thinner paper (of which there is a great deal of variety) and paste it onto a thicker stock.