Hellobee

Hello! I’m Julie. My husband and I are the duo at Duet Letterpress. A few months ago, Mrs. Bee contacted us to design and letterpress print her Hellobee business cards. We’ve worked with her before on several other business card projects, and we were super excited to take on this project as well. Today, I thought I’d share a little bit of the design + printing process with you.

After chatting with Mrs. Bee and getting an idea of what she was looking for, we got to work on design options. She was looking for a stand-out card and was really open to different sizes and unique options. And, she wanted thick paper. Here are the options we presented her. Edge painting, a wrap around label, glassine envelopes and super thick 236# cotton paper.

She chose option 3, so we got busy bringing that design to life. We started out with edge painting in her custom yellow ink color. Edge painting is tricky. It’s time consuming. But the results are so worth it!

Next, once the cards were dry and inspected, we printed the honeycomb pattern on the backside. It’s actually supposed to be a blind impression, or no ink, but in order to actually see the pretty pattern, we used a very, very pale gray ink. Adding just a touch of color visually separates the pattern from the paper.

After the pattern dried overnight, we made another pass with grey ink and letterpress printed her information on the back. Again, we let the cards dry overnight. Then, we printed the front of her business cards in a custom sea glass green color. It was a lofty amount of ink coverage and we were really happy with the results.

Once the cards were again dry, we tucked each card into its own square glassine envelope.

These Hellobee cards were ambitious + we enjoyed working on them so much! Thanks, Mrs. Bee for the opportunity! Enjoy!