Where did the name of your studio come from?

Hmmm, it's been a while so I'm not sure if I remember the exact reason. When I was in college for printmaking, I had a friend who operated under the name One Ton Press and used an anvil as his logo. I needed to come up with a name for what I was doing, and I think it was something about the idea of the hammer and anvil representing our individual efforts on a single project. Also, I feel like it sounded good at the time.

Who is on your team, and how did you come together?

Right now, We have 8 people at the shop including myself. We have 3 printers who schedule their projects in coordination with our designers, our wholesale managers, and our shipping staff who keeps track of wholesale inventory. Most of the year, we all tend to be juggling between busy times for our wholesale business and busy times for our custom printing business. We also have a fairly large storefront in our studio, so we have one person who manages and staffs that on a full-time basis. We all tend to wear a few hats and do what we can to help each other in the shop. It's a pretty casual environment with sounds of machines, good music, lovely smells and super nice people. And there is usually beer.

How did you get into design and letterpress printing?

I initially became interested in the letterpress aspect of things while studying at the Kansas City Art Institute in the early 90's. I didn't really have any experience in design so to speak but knew what I liked when I saw it. Most of that was based on record cover design or some variation of poster/ flyer design work I had seen. So, I basically just emulated things I was seeing until I found some sort of voice of my own, which honestly always changes. The design aspect of the business has grown to involve other people who joined the team with their own set of skills and opinions.

Where do you find inspiration for your designs?

Man, that's such a hard thing to answer anymore. There are things personally that I will always look at and find inspiring (old postage stamps, matchboxes, weird labels and packages, very old travel books or travel post card sets, record covers, etc.) but there are so many things to look at that can inspire you and those things change constantly. Lately, I find things that are totally outside of what we do inspiring - textiles, ceramics, space design, etc.

What kind of press(es) do you use?

We have two Vandercook Universal 1 presses that we print larger work on. Most of our cards are printed by our very talented press operators on one of our three Heidelberg Windmill presses. We also still print a lot of work on our two hand press Chandler & Price letterpresses.

Which press was used to print the Nicely Noted cards?

Heidelberg Windmill