Best of Letterpress Business Cards: 20 Designs

The letterpress business cards featured in this post are a great example of how effective letterpress business cards can reflect you or your company. The stylish and elegant look of letterpress printing combined with the luxurious quality of the paper used will surely make your business card and yourself stand out from the rest.  Letterpress is traditionally used for printing old-school stationery and wedding invitations. However, it is  lately finding its way into other personal printed assets such as business cards, often combining traditional and modern graphic elements.

(For those who are not familiar with letterpress printing…) Letterpress printing is actually a technique in which a plate containing all the graphics and text elements of a design is physically  cut, then mounted into a big mechanical contraption and then rammed into thick soft stock or paper, leaving not just ink, but depth on the card’s surface.

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But because somebody has pointed out that my own non-technical simplified definition of letterpress is not accurate, here’s a more politically correct way of describing how a letterpress printing works. According to Wiki, letterpress is a term for the relief printing of text and image using a press with a “type-high bed” printing press and movable type, in which a reversed, raised surface is inked and then pressed into a sheet of paper to obtain a positive right-reading image. It was the normal form of printing text in the West from its invention by Johannes Gutenberg in the mid-15th century until the 19th century, and remained in wide use for books and other uses until the second half of the 20th century. In addition to the direct impression of inked movable type onto paper or another receptive surface, the term letterpress can also refer to the direct impression of inked printmaking blocks such as photo-etched zinc “cuts” (plates), linoleum blocks, wood engravings, etc., using such a press.

In the 21st century, commercial letterpress has been revived by the use of ‘water-wash’ photopolymer plates which are adhered to a near-type-high base to produce a relief printing surface typically from digitally-rendered art and typography.

If done right, it can look absolutely gorgeous. However, the hipness and respect that you can get from owning a letterpress also come with a price (at a dollar per card or more). So if you are frequently handing out a lot of cards, then you would be thinking twice before getting a letterpress business card.

20 LETTERPRESS BUSINESS CARDS

If you happen to like this post, we recommend that you also check out some of our related posts about business card designs:

• 40 Best Business Cards from Around the Web
• 35 Inspiring Typographic Business Card Designs
• Business Card Designs that are Simple Yet Elegant
• Free business card template designs you can edit and print
• Free Business Card Templates You Can Use to Design Your Own Cards

SIMILAR POSTS:

• 35 Inspiring Typographic Business Card Designs
• 45 Sleek White Letterpress Business Cards
• 6 Free Business Card Template Designs