The Great Printing Debate: Flat Printing or Letterpress?

You are finally getting married and are in the process of creating the amazing wedding you have always dreamed about. Yet now that you are actually in the middle of it all, you might be feeling a little overwhelmed by all of the options and decisions to make. This article will hopefully help eliminate one of those tough decisions by making it easy to pick a type style for your customized wedding invitations.

Letterpress

This beautiful printing style has long been popular for creating elegant wedding invitations. The printing process is slightly complicated, requiring the production of special plates for each piece of the invitation. Each plate can only be used for one color. Therefore, invitations using two colors require double the amount of plates, while those using three different colors call for three times as many plates. The plates are inked and pressed into high quality cotton paper, all done manually. This somewhat tedious process pays off, however. Letterpress invitations are truly works of art in themselves, beautiful and elegant.

Source: http://www.bellafigura.com/images/designs/deveril-letterpress-sample-1.jpg

There is one downside to letterpress printing and its effect is significant. Due to all of the labor of creating plates and manually printing the invitations, as well as the extra high quality paper that is used, the cost of letterpress can be substantial. Many brides feel that letterpress invitations simply don't fit in to their budget. Thankfully there is another beautiful option.

Flat Printing

This printing option is fairly self explanatory. Rather than creating plates and pressing the words on to the page, ink is applied to the page and soaks in to the paper. When you touch the words you cannot feel the letters as they are not raised off the paper. With the right colors and font styles, however, the invitation can looked engraved. Flat printing makes it easy to include colors on your invitation without upping labor and cost. No special plates are needed, eliminating another big cost of letterpress. The effects can be very elegant, especially when the colors and fonts are carefully chosen.

Letterpress, while beautiful, is costly. If you can afford to use it you should certainly consider letterpress. For those of you on a stricter budget or who prefer to use the money for another part of the wedding, flat printing is the way to go. No matter which printing style you choose, you can be sure it will result in beautiful invitations.