Maas Modern: Sleek, Sexy, Ultra-Moderne Black Business Cards With Gold Foil for Interior Designer

Dallas interior designer Sheryl Maas is best known for her perfect, inspired interiors, sleek lines, stylish furnishings and polished, contemporary combinations. She is one of Dallas’s top designers for both residential and commercial properties. We helped her decide on the name Maas Modern and designed her new logo, which, of course is very chic and simple and less-is-more, with sans serif font letterpressed in gold foil on super-thick black paper.

 

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Fabulous and Chic Letterpress Business Cards for Meier Ferrer, LA Furniture Designers

Meier/Ferrer designs contemporary, modernist furniture that has been featured in a slew of national and international magazines. Their look is clean, hip and ultra-chic, which matches perfectly the design Andrew Cinnamon did for their business cards, and which Studio Z Mendocino printed on our venerable 1952 Heidelberg letterpress. It’s that meeting of the centuries that I love so much: the Twenty-first to the Fifteenth, to be exact — Thank you, Mr. Guttenberg for giving us the means to impress all these five hundred years.

We printed deeply the hard-edge typeface Andrew adapted for this purpose onto super-thick 600 gram Lettra paper. Dense black ink. One side only. And let the typography tell its own story with no fanfare other than its own audacity. We also made script cards for them. Four by nine cards that fit into a #10 business envelope or can be paper clipped to a sheaf of design mock ups with a little note. Love love.

 

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“Getting to Know Me” : New Interview About Me and Letterpress on Chaviano Couture!

I love love love Annette Thurmon’s wedding dress designs. They are sooo dreamy and gorgeous, and I am lucky to say that Annette is also a dreamy and gorgeous client of mine.

I got to work with Annette when I did her business cards a while back, and today she posted an interview with me on her beautiful website: Chaviano Couture.

I hope you will go see her beautiful designs and read my interview!

xo Zida

 

 

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Fabulous New Branding for Danny Kash Photography: Edge Painted Letterpress Business Cards, New Logo Design from Studio Z Mendocino

Danny and Loreta Kash are the principles and great talents behind Danny Kash Photography, which operates out of Connecticut and is available for worldwide destination shoots. It was an incredible experience working with them to develop their new brand because they were so specific about the tone they were looking for, and at the same time so ready to listen to my ideas and inspirations. It was an ideal collaborative experience. Loreta was amazing…she sent me a kind of vision board to work from…showing colors and passions and attractions, moods, and just things that made her heart beat faster. She is so organized and creative at the same time. Look how fab:

It was always fun to confer with them on the phone, always excitement, curiosity into the mysterious process of creation. When I sent them this design, we all just KNEW: this was IT. They definitely wanted this gorgeous pale Caribbean blue-green color, and there were other accent colors we considered, like a sunny orange-ish shade, but in the end we opted for a charcoal gray as the second color.

We deeply impressed the type into 600 gram Cranes Lettra, with the contact information on the back to keep the brand really pure and important. This is my favorite way to make a card really sing. The edges were painted in the same watery-green-blue color, a little accent that pulls the WoW factor up several thousand notches, as we all know.

O, EDGE PAINTING!!!

And yummy shots of the business cards by Danny.

The flowing lines and swooshes of the “dk” monogram set an elegant, celebratory mood behind the classic-yet-slightly-quirky Roman typeface. It’s a fresh, distinctive look for two very special people. And it is always a big treat for me to participate in redefining a company’s graphic look from the ground up. An honor, and a super-fun and exciting adventure. I love the creative trance that brings me to a finished product like this. Do you like it?

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Super-Adorable Letterpress Baby Shower Invitations

Three color letterpress folders: gray, black and papaya colored inks on 300 gram white Cranes Lettra . Papaya envelopes with a jazzy stamp. A fabulous menu and guest list.

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Large, Luxe, Letterpress Business Cards for Photographer Leo Druker

The great big “L” monogrammed  on Leo Druker‘s oversized letterpress printed business cards strikes as bold a statement as the Washington DC photographer makes with his work. Leo came to Studio Z Mendocino with his logo already designed. We conferred with him about the best materials to use, how to give the cards their majorest WoW factor possible and came up with these beauties.

Printed on a 2.5 x 4 inch sheet, and weighing in at 600 grams on super-thick Cranes Lettra luxurious stock, these are not cards to fool around with. They mean business. We printed them in two tones of charcoal gray ink, then, to put the upper cut into the already big punch, we edge painted them in the darker of the two grays. As Leo has told me several times in emails: they “are getting rave reviews from every person who looks and/or touches them.” Well, we are not surprised. They are stunning.

I wish you could feel them. Substantial. We love strong beauty and these are that.

If you really want to make an impression that lasts when you leave, you could not choose a better vehicle than cards like these. You will not be forgotten easily.

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Coast Village Design: Extraordinary Letterpress Business Cards for Interior Designer

Coast Village Design Group‘s Wendy Carpenter contacted Studio Z Mendocino when she decided to re-brand her interior design company. Wendy is one of the most meticulous people with whom I have worked, with very definite ideas that, combined with her concurrent openness to collaboration, perfect sense of timeless style, and down-to-earth personality, made this card an incredible experience for me, with an extraordinary outcome. They perfectly reflect Wendy’s creativity and design sensibilities.

Printed on super-thick, cream colored museum mount stock that takes the impression of letterpress like nobody’s business, Coast Village Design Group’s cards were printed in a very pale cream color for the decorative flourish, a deeper khaki colored ink on the back, with rich charcoal gray for the type, and set off in gold foil for the script “V” on the front, and “Interiors” on the back. The back design was inspired by this ancient window arch:

We printed the back outside border around a hand drawn arch in this gorgeous khaki color. The pressure of the border visually popped the interior of the arch up, giving the cards an opulence of textural interest.

We feel very proud of the inventiveness and craftswomanship in these small, powerful pieces of art.

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“Beautiful” in Greek is Pronounced KALLIMA — Letterpress Business Cards that Fit the Translation

Ben and Rebekah Hood of West Palm Beach, Florida named their photography company for the Greek word that means “Beautiful”: KALLIMA. They brought their BEAUTIFUL, edgy logo design to Studio Z Mendocino to transform it into a business card that would further intensify the branding for what they do: Beautiful Wedding, Engagement and LifeStyle photography.

We printed the image and contact information in black ink onto extra-large (a four inch square), extra-thick Cranes Lettra 600 gram paper. Here are their own words about the process and finished product:

It was a three or four-month process…getting everything perfectly designed and laid out, uploaded, ordered…and working with Studio Z Mendocino out of california was so easy. They were so helpful and really aided us in coming up with our final product…our new business card. Studio Z does business cards for some really talented people: Ben Chrisman, fred egan, and Poser Image to name a few. When Erik Clausen of Poser Image referred them to us, we were immediately hooked.

Introducing the new, fabulous business cards for Kallima Photography!

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Letterpress, Foil Stamped, Super-Thick Black Business Cards for Enchanting Planting Garden Design, in Orinda, California

Enchanting Planting, a garden and landscape design company in Orinda, California, has been my customer for decades now. I designed their logo back in the 1980s and we all have really loved it through numerous reprintings. Recently they came to me for a reprint of their business cards and also needed new stationery and envelopes too.

Prepared to reprint with minimal changes — adding the URL and email address were all they wanted added — I sent some new paper samples down to them because their old paper had been discontinued from the mill. While I was at it I threw in a few other samples of business cards and other work we have been doing at the shop, just to let them in on what we have been up to recently, which, if you follow this blog, you know has been pretty thrilling.

Well, imagine my surprise when they called back completely gaga over everything, especially the very thick black cards with foil stamping. They didn’t even know anything like that existed in the world. WELL! You have to know how I love to bite into something like this. A complete updating of their look was in order all of a sudden, yet they did still lovethe motifs I had used initially, which you can see below.

This is, you know, a conversation. To redesign or design from scratch a new logo and branding requires some introspection…What do you love? What do you want to ditch? What’s different about what you are doing now as opposed to what you used to do when the first logo was created. What is the mood you want to set up with your cards? Who are your customers now? What are they like? What should the color palette be? Etc., etc….These questions guide the direction of the logo design process.

We chose to keep the happy image of the flower basket, but to put it on in a gleaming apple green foil. We chose to use thick, thick Museum Mount black paper instead of the former cream colored, much thinner stock, and to lose the jungle patterned border. I redesigned their logotype, too, using a more modern font. This, and the contact information, we stamped on in gold metallic foil. And I put the phone number is a swoopy, romantic type that calls to mind the movement and grace of leaves in a breezy garden. Then, the coup d’gras — EDGE PAINTING in the same apple green. Look:

It’s quite clear that there is NO garden design company in the world with cards that look anything like these. As distinctive and gorgeous as the work Enchanting Planting does all over the Bay Area, they now have business cards that set the stage for what they stand for and what they create in people’s homes and yards.

It’s so much fun to work with my clients, many of whom have been with me since I opened in 1984, and who feel like old friends to me. I’m always so happy to hear from them again and again over the years. They are clients AND friends. Makes my life very grand. Knowing they are proudly passing out the work we have done for them here at Studio Z Mendocino and helping them to get their names out in the most elegant, edgy, beautiful way…why does that give me such a thrill? But really, it does. I love them and I love the work we get to do for them, and they are excited and proud of their printed things…it’s such an interesting, engaging, creative relationship. How much better could it possibly get than this?

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A River that Looks Like a Tree Branch: Ellen Anon’s Extraordinary Black Letterpress Business Cards With Holographic Foil

I have been wanting to show you the business cards we did for photographer Ellen Anon for a while now. There is just no way to describe them or even to photograph them, though, that can really impart the amazingness of these beautiful objects, although Ellen’s photo above comes close. What doesn’t show is the way the color pops off and morphs as the angle of the card changes in relationship to light. This is because … well, let me start from the beginning:

Ellen called me one day out of the blue and wanted me to do some business cards for her. She is an award winning photographer who travels the world incessantly and takes the most staggeringly gorgeous photographs of the natural world and had stumbled onto my blog. I felt like I had known her all my life after the first phone call. We just clicked. It turns out Ellen is also the author of six books about photography and Photoshop, gives workshops all over the place and is interviewed for her expertise in these subjects.

We dug into the project immediately and it was the most fantastic collaboration. She started sending photographes to me and I was looking at them with a graphic designer’s eye for line, color, something that would give me that physical hit I get when I just know something is right. With letterpress printing, you really can’t have a four color image, at least not one you would be happy to look at. Photography and Letterpress Printing are two art forms that are in different galactic systems in terms of how color is laid down and of course many other factors, although there are many intersections, too, in the way we approach our crafts and how we perceive things.

Letterpress printing, particularly, with its deep impression into soft, non-shiny paper seems at odds with how a photograph can be interpreted. But that is the charge we set for ourselves. I wanted to incorporate one of her images into the design and logo, but it was going to have to be done in some very unusual way. I had recently finished Elizabeth Perkins’s business card that used a photograph of a grand stairway in England, turning it into a negative and printing that in white ink onto black paper. It was a very successful experiment and I thought I could use that experience to advantage for Ellen’s project.

Looking through her galleries was a great pleasure and of course an equally big puzzle. We looked at many images from all over the world together… wildly colored agricultural steppes in China, drama-queen trees, a crazy geyser in Nevada…all mind boggling, but when she sent me a picture of a river in Iceland that looked like a big tree branch, I just stopped everything.

This was IT.

So, how to turn a full color photo into something I could make into a letterpress image?

Yes…quite a question. Ellen went to work in Photoshop and so did I. We were burning up the airwaves with various iterations, nixing and mixing, then suddenly, there was this duotone…I said, what would happen if we turned each of the two layers into its own foil die? Then there was a moment when inspiration went out of control and I said, OK, the foils are going to be PEWTER/SILVERY and HOLOGRAPHIC TURQUOISE that turns into every shade of blue in the spectrum. That was also IT. We decided to put this glowing idea on black, super-thick Museum Mount paper for even more dramatic impact.

There were a lot of experiments that went back and forth to Pennsylvania — holographic blue with pewter, pewter and copper and even copper and holographic foil. They were ALL gorgeous! Everybody concurred. They were a big hit.

Because Ellen was hanging out of a plane high above an Icelandic landscape, trying to keep her camera from blasting out of her hands in the intense wind in order to take this shot, the many trials and errors, extra Skyping, and much discussing of ins and outs about the designing and printing of this image seems like almost, ALMOST, a piece of cake. Can you imagine? She is my hero.

Above, you see the original photograph and below, what we did with it to make it into her new logo and business card. Sheesh.

It was a very exciting and fulfilling project that got me and Ellen into the Friend Zone. There were a few doubts about whether the whole crazy idea would even work, as I conferred with our fabulous printer Rhea…the tension mounted and then…it did work and it is gorgeous.

We are all kind of gaga about the cards and the incredibly intense experience of working together toward such a satisfying ending. This is something, I am pretty sure, that has never been done before in the world. How cool is that?

Please go see Ellens work at ellenanon.com. Totally worth the trip.

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