Portfolio Invitation
Madison College Fall 2012 Letterpress Invite
Madison College Fall 2012 Letterpress Invite
Every semester the students at Madison (Area Technical) College who are in the Portfolio class get a chance to design the invitation to the big Portfolio show at the end of that semester. I was in the class in the fall 2012 semester and was lucky enough to have my design picked as the one that would represent my class.
The big show was at Olbrich Botanical Gardens and I tailor made the design to the location. I researched what different flowers meant in 'the language of flowers.' In the end I chose lupin, which means imagination, angelica, which means inspiration, and bougainvillea, which means passion. I felt these words represented me and my classmates. Plus, the fact that flowers, besides their hidden meanings, have the more obvious meaning of growth, this is the perfect representation of what coming to the end of your schooling means. The idea was that because of Madison (Area Technical) College, we had grown as designers, so when you opened the folded invite, the flowers would grow. Along with each invite a pack of lupin seeds were sent (originally we wanted seeded envelopes, but they proved too pricey).
Yet the main draw was that with this invite we could do it as letterpress. This way we could showcase our new Center for Printing Arts, through which I just took a letterpress class. Therefore, not only did our mailing list get an invite in the mail, but we were able to do everything on site at the school, even if it did take a lot of people a lot of work to get them in the mail on time, we still did it!
The big show was at Olbrich Botanical Gardens and I tailor made the design to the location. I researched what different flowers meant in 'the language of flowers.' In the end I chose lupin, which means imagination, angelica, which means inspiration, and bougainvillea, which means passion. I felt these words represented me and my classmates. Plus, the fact that flowers, besides their hidden meanings, have the more obvious meaning of growth, this is the perfect representation of what coming to the end of your schooling means. The idea was that because of Madison (Area Technical) College, we had grown as designers, so when you opened the folded invite, the flowers would grow. Along with each invite a pack of lupin seeds were sent (originally we wanted seeded envelopes, but they proved too pricey).
Yet the main draw was that with this invite we could do it as letterpress. This way we could showcase our new Center for Printing Arts, through which I just took a letterpress class. Therefore, not only did our mailing list get an invite in the mail, but we were able to do everything on site at the school, even if it did take a lot of people a lot of work to get them in the mail on time, we still did it!
The closed and opened invite.
My research and writing.
Initial sketches for the invite including how the fold would work.
The many revisions that needed to be made prior to production.
The metal plate that arrived of my artwork.
The plate set in the press bed ready to go into production.
The stacks and stacks of finished invites ready for hand scoring, folding, and mailing.
All the seed packets ready to go in the invites.
The final product!
