Say "Hello" To Your Wedding Invitations

I'll admit. Before I met Chris, I never knew what letterpress printing was. So, I'm glad I was able to have him come on the podcast and drop some knowledge! Chris Tipton from Fresh Impressions Letterpress Studio pulls back the curtain on a printing process that utilizes antique equipment to create what most people would associate with wedding stationery.

We got to chat on what he enjoys about the design process, how much time you should budget for letterpress printing for your wedding invitations, as well as what the coolest invitation design Chris has ever created!

This Highlight Weddings & Events Podcast was edited and produced by DropHouse Voiceover Production Studio and Tony Tee Neto, Voiceover Artist & Audio Producer. For more info on branding elements, editing, and post-production services, visit http://drophouse.com. 

The intro and outro used for this episode is Crush by https://audiohub.comLicense: CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Transcript

DJ Josh: This is Episode 8 of Make Your Wedding a Highlight. My name is DJ Josh, owner of Highlight Weddings and Events. My guest today is Chris Tipton, owner of Fresh Impression Letterpress Studio.

Tony Tee Neto, from Drophouse: If you’re getting ready or are already in the process of planning your wedding, you’ve come to the right place. DJ Josh, owner of Highlight Weddings and Events, interviews other local 30a wedding pros to offer insight about how to make your wedding a highlight.

Josh: Well, hello again. Thanks everyone for checking out Make Your Wedding A Highlight. I am here with Chris Tipton, the owner of Fresh Impression Letterpress Studio. How are you doing today, Chris?

Chris: I’m good, man. How are you?

Josh: Ah. Can’t complain. It’s a little warm but it’s summer in Florida. So, describe your business a little bit. What do you do?

Chris: I own specialty printing, basically. It involves letterpress printing, foil stamping, embossing, debossing, die cutting and all that fancy stuff. It’s done with antique equipment. They don’t make equipment these days that will do this. Basically, all this equipment stopped being made around the 80s. Primarily the equipment in-house is around like the 60s to 70s. They’re big fancy machines, almost like engines really.

Josh: Cool. Now, what makes the equipment you use special? Why would somebody be interested someone as yourself do printing for them?

Chris: When you hold it in your hand, there’s just a difference, a tactile difference. When you print with this method you are essentially manipulating the paper. So you’re giving it texture either raised or pressed into the paper. Additionally, foil stamping, there’s a lot of stuff that can be done there other than just adding gold to the paper. You can use holographic oils, a reflection dye, can emboss that foil. If you’ve never held it in your hand, it’s kind of hard to describe, I guess. But once you do, you’re going to be like “I’ve gotta have that for everything!”

Josh: Gotcha. So what brought you into the world of printing? How did you get your start in printing?

Chris: Ok. So, I don’t even know what year it was. Let’s see. It might have been in ‘97. No, I’m sorry. 2007 or 2008. So, I come from web development, graphic design and web development. And, I was leasing a space inside an office building. They had hired somebody just straight out of FSU and we kind of became friends. And he was telling me about letterpress printing. I was like “Oh, man. This is pretty cool.” He took a class at FSU on it. And that was my first introduction to it. And, from there, I was like “Hey, man. There’s a press on ebay right now that is not too far away. If I buy this (and I didn’t have the space at the time, and he and his wife just bought a house.) If I buy this can we put it in your garage and just tinker with it?” He said “Yeah! Totally.” 

So that’s kind of where it started. Of course, he went off and moved out of state and everything I kind of just took it over and moved it into a different space and grew it from there. A lot of experience and it’s just cool. It’s tactile and different.

Josh: How has your web design background helped to kinda create your own style going from digital to paper?

Chris: I think that might be why it was so enjoyable for me, right? Because you go from making things on a keyboard and mouse to making thing with your hands in the real world. I think that might be one of the tweaks for me. It’s helped me, I guess because I don’t have to hire anyone to do my own website and stuff.

Josh: There is that. What’s your favorite part or do you have favorite parts of dealing with wedding clients or couples?

Chris: I would say. Well, my favorite part is when they come to me with a lot of time and it’s not rushed. That’s my favorite part. The second part is when they’re not seeking out trends. When they want to specialize it to them, customize it to them, make it very personal. That’s a fun design process I think. Because you have to sort of dive into how they’re designing the wedding, what their wedding planner’s putting together, the colors, what you’re wearing, all that kind of stuff. You pick interesting details from their life, maybe how they met, where they met, stuff like that. That’s cool. It’s very personal and it feels good to be a part of that I guess.

Josh: How did you start being involved in weddings?

Chris: Being in the specialty printing business, it goes hand in hand. Specialty printing has long been the tradition for letterpress wedding invitations, so that’s kind of a given.

Josh: If a couple is interested in working with you, how can, or what can they do to make their experience a highlight with you. And you mentioned having time and also being more personal but can you go a little bit deeper into how can they make sure that when they look back on working with you they’re like “Oh, man. That was the best. Chris was awesome!”

Chris: I’ll just be blunt about it. Sometimes they allow too many people in the process, right? And then you toss out a draft and then it bounces back between 20 different people and the idea and the specificity of things gets a little misconstrued a little bit. I would say try to limit your feedback and maybe present some ideas that you like. Let’s develop that idea and picture first and try to not deviate from that.

Josh: Who would be good people for the couple to bounce ideas off of when they’re in the initial design stage?

Chris: I would say themselves. Typically, it’s usually the bride. The bride comes in and they have ideas right, they’ve been building a pinterest board or something. And that’s fantastic. Other times they come in completely blank slate and they say “This is important to me, this is important to me, and this is important to me.”  I find that the ones that are blank slates tend to work out a little better. I think with any type of creative situation, you’ve gotta be a little less rigid on what you want. I think when you start to restrict that creative process, things start to maybe not come out quite as polished or something.

Josh: There’s also that aspect of you don’t have necessarily clearly defined expectations you’re more open to things you may not have thought of initially. It allows the design to be more organic instead of trying to force it in a direction that may be what they’re asking for but it may not look as good as it could have been. 

Chris: I get a lot of people that will go to another website and screenshot it and they’ll say “I want this.” And I’m at the point where I really focus on the custom stuff here. Beyond that, my business prints for other designers, so I don’t build a library of stuff. Because of that, if someone brings me a design and they say “I want this,” I tell them straight up that I’m not going to rip off somebody else’s design. If you really, really like that design, go buy it from them.

Josh: What are some options to couples if they want to make their wedding one-of-a-kind? Let’s just say a bride has heard from a friend “Oh, you gotta incorporate letterpress into the invitation or the save-the-date.” What are some things that couples may not be aware of. The capability that you have or things that you know that are really cool that people may not be as aware just because they’re not in the same space as you.

Chris: So I would say consistency, right? I think a lot of times, and it’s simply because there’s so much to do in a wedding. From the save-the-dates all the way to the day of the event. Having consistency not only with the printed elements and how they’re printed but with the design as well. I guess the only exception to that would be if you just need to get your save the dates out. That’s not too important. You can just get a little photo card and send it out. But if you have the time I think consistency in the design space makes a huge impact on the overall experience of the wedding. That doesn’t mean that you need to have everything letterpress printed because it is more expensive. But, just the design overall for every aspect takes it to the next level.

Josh: That actually made me think of the couple’s wedding branding. To make that all uniform so it’s all cohesive and really builds on what you had already presented sort of thing.

Chris: I think one of the downfalls is that it may start typically with the wedding invitations. I feel like the design process should start before that.

Josh: Ok, so in your ideal world, how far in advance should a couple consider reaching out to someone that does letterpress printing?

Chris: I guess the standard is you want to send your wedding invitations out anywhere between four to eight weeks before your wedding date. And of course, the higher end of that is if you have a destination wedding or something like that. If everybody is near and close, four weeks is pretty optimal. And to add to that, you’re looking at at least 2-3 weeks for printing. That does not include transit time if it has to be mailed to them. That also doesn’t include your finishing time, so like stuffing, stamping, addressing the envelopes. That type of stuff You might as well add another week to that. In addition to that, you may want to have at least 2 weeks to design it and not be rushed through the design process. If you know exactly what you want, you can typically bang something out in a week but two weeks is probably a comfortable spot. Any more time than that is fantastic. That’s about 12 to 16 weeks.

Josh: I would say most weddings in the 30A market, they would afford enough time to allot that budgeted time unless they’re doing an elopement or a last minute type of destination wedding.

Chris: But, it is also very, very common that people come up and are like “Oh, my gosh! I need to send out wedding invitations next week!” Yeah, Don’t do that.

Josh: For a frame of reference for me as a DJ, I like to start working on song choices about 4 months out. Because, what I’ve experienced in the past. I’d send an entire sheet to the couple and they’ll either be like “Alright we’re gonna get it all done now” or it’s like there are so many songs that we have to pick, we’ll just do it later” and then a month out I’m following up with them saying, “Hey, we still need to decide the songs.” So I want to make it so that they’re gradually, progressively getting the songs decided. I don’t want to have it add more stress to the stuff they’re already going to have going on anyway.

Chris: Absolutely, man. Because as that date approaches, they spin off into so many detail oriented things they have to cover. It’s so helpful to have stuff taken care of before that frenzy hits.

Josh: Absolutely. The closer you get, the more things pop up. And if you already know that you needed to take care of things beforehand, you might as well get it gradually knocked out like eating an elephant.

Chris: It’s easy to change a location, a date, a time on the invitation. Stuff like that. The hard part is getting all the design work done.

Josh: Chris, you’ve been using a lot of different terminology that I don’t necessarily know what they mean. Can you kind of give a little bit more clarity about the different things we’ve been  talking about like embossing and what other things couples may not know a lot about printing. It’ll help them kind of understand what their options are. What kind of things you can do with letterpress.

Chris: Totally. So right out the gate, there’s letterpress printing which is done with ink, spot color ink. Typically we are working with the pantone solid uncoated color chart. You don’t have to have that. You can send me a color. You can even go to like Lowe's or Home Depot and pick up a paint swatch and I will try to match whatever to that. So that’s letterpress printing. It’s done with pressure into the paper. So, anywhere that it’s printed, it’s actually pressed into the paper. So it gives it a nice tactile feel. Then there’s a blind impression, which is essentially the same thing but without ink, so you get a tonal look with paper. 

Josh: So it’s sort of like shading?

Chris: Sort of like shading but think of shading that you’re creating it with shadows because of the way light hits.

Josh: Right! So the letters are raised up from the paper.

Chris: Well, they’re pressed in with letterpress. Raised up is actually embossing. Embossing is done with a quarter inch thick copper or brass plate with a poured hard counter dye. Essentially it squeezes the paper in between that and molds it into whatever shape or design that is and it raises it up from the paper.

That’s usually pretty nice for monograms. Maybe their names in a nice script font or serif font or something. But you can also do sculpted embossing which is very very cool, It’s like an actual engraved image, like a 3d image. So you could do like a building, a goldfish, a hummingbird. It’s an image that’s in the paper and raises up. You can do that image either blind, so it’s just the paper color you see, or you can do it as a foil stamping with gold, silver or whatever.

Foil stamping is a where a piece of metallic film is pressed on the paper with heat and then the image is transferred with the foil under the paper. That’s also adding  tactile difference to the paper.

Then there’s a heated blind which is the same thing as foil stamping without the foil. It’s done with the same copper plate as foil stamping, so it’s more stout than an ink plate. And then you add heat to it. So you get this very sharp and crisp deboss into the paper. So it’s also a really elegant look.

Beyond there, you have dye cutting which is essentially cutting the paper into any shape. Basically, shape, box, whatever. There’s so much you can do. You can do the nice elegant outline sort of like a filigree of the paper. You can make windows. You can do cards, enclosures. Lots of possibilities with that.

Last but not least is paper. Which is actually the most important thing. You start with a good paper. Typically on wedding invitations using a 100% cotton paper and it can be duplexed into custom thicknesses. Duplexing is just a fancy way of saying gluing sheets of paper together. Between all of that, you can come up with some really interesting design features and make some really nice stuff.

Josh: So, I know that you mentioned that you weren’t really big on couples looking to follow trends.

Chris: Yeah. That’s just me, though. There’s nothing wrong with trends.

Josh: Are there any trends that you’ve noticed like things that are popular now versus a year ago. Are you noticing a shift in the taste for couples nowadays?

Chris: Yeah, I am. So trends in wedding stationary move so fast. Oh my goodness. And then they kind of circulate for a little bit. And then it’s like another chapter comes. Watercolor is pretty popular still but it was on fire a year ago or a year and a half ago. And now it’s kind of like being used for more highlight pieces rather than like the whole thing.

People are starting to choose more natural, subdued colors right now. From natural greens, rose colors, dirty rose colors. It feels like it’s rolling into a sophisticated type phase which is actually great because it goes hand in hand with what I do with specialty printing. For awhile there, there was that one specific cursive, script font. Trends fly in this interesting, dude.

Josh: That is so interesting because I would think that since it’s paper, it would be more concrete or stagnant but I guess because it’s visual there’s that element of, especially because you have Pinterest and you can go and look on boards and be like “Oh, I like that.” And just the way different fonts and that kind of thing. It allows for, I guess,  a more diverse pallet to pull from. 

Chris: Yeah. Totally. And the reason why I say that I don’t like trends. I’m not knocking trends. I’m not knocking designers out there. I say I don’t like trends because it’s your wedding invitation. You know, well first of all it should match your event right? If you just pick a trend that you like, the chances of these things meshing are kind of slim but then when you look at it years later, are you going to like it or is it going to look tacky? So I try to make those personalized, timeless, classic pieces for people. Honestly, I think most designers who get to do that type of personalized experience, I think that’s what they all shoot for. That’s why I say trends are fine for what you’re going to wear and stuff like that. I just think that something like your wedding invitation shouldn’t be the hottest trend.

Josh: Ok. That makes sense. What’s like the coolest design? When you think about the different clients you’ve worked with, what were your favorite ones?

Chris: There’s been quite a couple. So, ne always comes back to me when you ask for fancy, crazy, unique, or whatever.  It’ll be a little to describe and explain it but I’ll do my best to paint a picture in the people’s minds.

Basically, they were having their destination somewhere in Arizona or New Mexico. Some type of big cliff with a glass deck. I can’t remember the location but it was a super cool place. And so they wanted the wedding invitation to have a photo of the location, this cliff. Think grand canyon. Maybe it wasn’t the grand canyon. I can’t remember to be honest with you. What we did is we took the photo and printed that on a sheet of paper. On the back of that, it’s duplexed to this wood-grain paper. It’s got this wood-grain deboss into it. And then we printed gold text on that. And then we actually printed on about an eighth or three thirty seconds of an inch, but basically a decent thickness of plexi glass (acrylic).

Josh: That’s COOL!

Chris: Yeah. Foil stamped the monogram we made for her onto that plexiglass and overlaid that on the photograph. Then used four gold screw posts. The photo has the canyon and stuff at the bottom and most of it is sky and cloud. It looks like the logo is just floating there and the sky shadow casted. It was cool. And the whole suite was that wood grain and cotton paper and we had a nice little gold enclosure. Definitely unique.

Josh: that’s really, really cool. Alright, so now that we’ve talked about Chris  the wedding pro, do you mind if we dive into a few personal questions?

Chris: Sure, man. Hit me. What you got?

Josh: The first one, and it’s my favorite. One I’ve used in every podcast so far, what’s the best compliment someone has given you?

Chris: Ever given me? At any time ever?

Josh: Sure. Either professionally or personally. However you want to take it.

Chris: I guess a referral, right? They loved it so much they’re willing to say “Hey, you gotta go work with this guy.” That would be the best thing.

Josh: Those are really nice. They’re very rewarding.

Chris: That and “Oh my gosh. I love it!”

Josh: Yeah.

Josh: What did you want to be when you grew up?

Chris: Well, I sort of am being that, right? This is a really cool business. I’m trying to grow this one. And, it’s going to sort of peel out from in a little bit in a related category. So, yeah. I’m doing what I want to do.

Josh: Nice.

Josh: Since we are kind of on the tail end of the coronavirus, I figured we’d touch on that briefly. Because I think the cool thing about COVID-19 is that everyone has experienced it but everyone’s experience has been slightly different. How have you been impacted by COVID-19?

Chris: Complete brakes. Everybody in my industry was still able to function and operate but I think all of the businesses and individuals. Of course the weddings were all cancelled and postponed and bumped to next year or something. Even just other businesses, they just pumped the brakes because it was just a moment of uncertainty. Nobody knew what’s going to happen, when it’s going to be normal, that kind of stuff. Complete, total brakes.

I think now, since it’s early June, things are starting to roll back around. Businesses are starting to get active again. So that’s good. I can sort of relate. We just went through Hurricane Michael. And, that was complete and utter devastation. And it took about the same amount of time before things started moving again. And now we’re looking at that on a whole everybody. National, even globally. There’s more than one country that’s going through this.

Josh: I think the big thing is it’s similar to the flu but it’s something we’ve never experienced before because of how easy it is to transmit and a lot of people are asymptomatic. It’s just one of those things where, and I remember this when the press conferences were coming out every three hours. Some new information was coming out. It’s just like “What is going on, what’s going to happen?” And there’s still, to a point, we really don’t know what we’re doing yet. 

Chris: It seems like all the information from day-to-day it contradicts itself.

Josh: Right! It was like “Wear masks” and then “Don’t wear masks” and then “Wear masks again.”
Chris: And then today we currently have the WHO and a couple of other organizations saying that you don’t need to wear them unless you’re treating someone with COVID and then we have the CDC and someone else just came out either today or yesterday saying that you do still need to wear masks, so it’s wild, man.

I think it’s just proof that nobody really knows and everybody’s flying by the seat of their pants trying to figure it out. I don’t think anybody’s fault. We just gotta figure it out so we can address the next one better. 

Josh: There are reports that we are, Florida, is dealing with a second wave but we haven’t really been hit hard here, though, in Okaloosa, Walton, or Santa Rosa County. I think it’s primarily been down south. 

Chris: Yeah, it is primarily down south. I keep seeing record cases after Memorial Day Weekend but I don’t ever see it by county off that. It just says Florida.

Josh: Alright, so my last question for you is if a couple is interested in reaching out to you what is the best way for them to get a hold of you?

Chris: Hit the website: filetterpress.com or you can shoot me an email directly at chris@filetterpress.com. The website is currently being redone so it it’s not up to date. Instagram is a little more up to date. That is @fresh.impression. I do answer on Instagram and Facebook messages and stuff as well. Pretty much anywhere. Just reach out.

Josh: Well, Chris, I look forward to the time where we can all get back together as wedding professionals and meet up with you. Or even when they open up coffee shops for hanging out. We should grab a cup of coffee.

Chris: I gotta be honest. I’m missing my coffee shop sessions. I like going to the coffee shop and doing my emails and my quotes and stuff. I don’t know why. I just do.

Josh: It’s a nice smell and it’s kinda nice to have the cacophony of sound going on in the background: the espresso machine and the roaster and just people talking. Alright, man, well, thanks for taking time to stop and chat with me for a bit. I hope you have a great weekend. 

Chris: Thank you. You, too. I absolutely enjoyed it, man.

Josh: Thank you. Well, I’m glad to hear that. And for all you listeners out there. Thanks for stopping by. If you are interested in your printing needs. Get up with Chris, he is a great craftsman. Here’s to all the happy couples out there. And here’s to making your wedding a highlight.

Tony: Thanks for stopping by and checking out the podcast. If you like what you’ve heard, please subscribe and leave a review. It will help other couples just like you find it. For more resources, including our helpful blog, check highlightweddingsandevents.com. And make your wedding a highlight!