We wanted to add a new series to our blog entitled "things we love". Our aim is to highlight gorgeous design outside of the letterpress world that gets our hearts racing. Sometimes we find inspiration in really unusual places.So we're kicking off with an introduction to the illustration of Edward Gorey.

Gorey was a prolific writer and illustrator whose work was both elegant and sometimes macabre.

We love his whimsical drawings and we are always taken by the way he puts colors together.

Here are some more examples of his book covers...

-

- Jana

It has been a wonderful summer and part of the Sesame Letterpress team (me) was lucky enough to spend a great deal of time in my lovely hometown of Marblehead, MA.

Swimming in saltwater, sailing, boating and eating a great deal of ice cream and lobster inspires the nautical themed stationery we love to print.  It was therefore especially fun this summer to design this invitation stationery for a Maine wedding, in collaboration with a very sweet bride.

We love the crisp navy stripes with the bright red accent type.

We hope you have had a restful summer as well!

-Breck

Finally, here are some photos of the wedding invitations that we designed and printed for my own wedding! It's always difficult to come up with a design and motif that feels like it completely sums up the couple, but for us, it was a little more straightforward: as we were planning our wedding, we were also planning a cross-country bike tour! So we knew we wanted to incorporate some bike illustrations on our stationery. You can find out more about our bike tour at www.honkforfreedom.com. Meanwhile, take a look through the photos of our invitation suite:

We printed this text-based invitation for a lovely client of ours. We adore the shadow effect created by the font and use of color. It's also really refreshing to see a design that fills the entire card. It's contemporary while also being extremely classy!Congratulations Lauren and Chang!

Show your dad how awesome you think he is with this card. It's almost like giving him a medal for services to fatherhood! We love the bright red and blue motif and the fun design.

We wanted to share some images of this really pretty invitation we printed for Chris and Roma. You may recall that a few months ago we printed business cards for Roma. We were lucky enough to also be asked to print their wedding invitations. Phew - they were pretty busy planning a wedding and a new business venture!A friend of theirs had done a wonderful illustration of some Brooklyn buildings and rooftops and Chris had incorporated this into his invitation design. Together with the couple, we decided to go for a small card rather than the standard 5" x 7" and I think the results were perfect:

Because we spend our days working on machinery from the 1880's we're a little romantic about real books with beautiful covers and crisp paper pages.  In honor of the old fashioned book, we've created a line of letterpress printed bookmarks.  We have seven designs, all inspired by belongings one might find on a bedside table (along with a good book).  We're particularly liking the perfume bottle and the mysterious glove...

Just a few weeks to go until Mother's Day and we have designed a really lovely card for the occasion! We love this bouquet and we think it looks particularly pretty printed in bright sunshine yellow and pink.

And here's a detail of the floral imagery: