Every year around December we design and print the Book Book New Year Cards. Beyond wishing our clients and friends the best for the upcoming year, these projects are opportunities to test new printing techniques or experimental plate imaging processes.
Five spot colours require five different films and five different printing plates. The first step after exposing the film is to register them all.
Choosing a suitable colour combination out of Pantone and HKS spot colours, which we acquired as new or mostly as used half-empty tins.
The final print result using five spot colours.
Rubber plates, cut quickly and roughly by hand, form the final printed result.
Going freestyle: printing with no crop or register marks means measuring while printing.
A good example of how transparent offset inks create new colours when printed over each other.
This was the first test of the special dissolved laser toner technique, which we later used for the Robert Gallagher project.
Every year, the cards are printed in a limited edition – a playful jab at the tradition of mass-mailing New Year cards.