All That Glitters

Sometimes it’s not gold. Sometimes it’s a really, really, gorgeous paper stock… And a few tricks of the trade.

With that being said, we’d like to introduce you to one of our favorite paper manufacturers, Legion Paper.

About Legion Paper

Legion delivers a tactile quality to their paper, inspired by artists, that’s intended to help them imagine the unimaginable… and then to create it.

“We want to enhance the art works of creative people, whether it’s a photographer, painter, designer or printmaker. We are proud to have designed papers that have enabled artists to create what they were limited in creating before.” – Ginsburg

Legion traveled the globe to study paper. Studying cultures, papers and techniques that have proven their value through time. They traveled to all of these mills, not to bring back what already existed but to make what was needed. What was needed to deliver the quality techniques of the past to the artists of today.

The Coach Gala Invitation

All of this, and more, is the reason Legion had the perfect stock for producing this gorgeous invitation and envelope for The Coach Gala.

A Look at The Invitation

When you see a full stack of these invitations together, the glitter is seamless. Moving from the edges of the paper to the face of the invitation as if the invitation was made out of a block of glitter itself.

But that’s not necessarily the case. The seamless beauty is by design and by the magic of production.

So let’s dive into how we made this happen.

Stock: For the paper, we used Legions Mirri Sparkle. Mirri Sparkle uses an extremely smooth and amazingly sparkly metallic film that is laminated to a white box board base. The thickness of the stock holds a tactile definition of quality in itself. When you hold it, you’ll know.

This paper was perfect for the over-the-top sparkle that was needed for the Coach Gala invitation.

Gilding: Believe it or not, this invitation is not made out of a solid block of glitter. The face of Mirri Sparkle paper stock is gorgeous, but it’s laminated onto a white board stock, so when it’s cut there’s a white edge by default.

This is where our gilding techniques really sparkled. We first spray painted the edges with a silver base to mask the white the edges, and then we dipped the edges in glitter. To create an absolutely seamless wrap of edge to edge sparkle.

Print process: At our shop, it’s rare that the printing process is the simplest part of the design, because of all of the capabilities we have available. But this piece needed nothing more than a one color black offset run to perfect this job. The paper stock and gilding did most of the heavy lifting to make this job a real stunner.

Coach Gala Envelope

Simplicity at its finest.

The overtop sparkle of the invitation was complemented by the beautiful blind embossing of the logo on the Miri H Gunmetal Metallic custom built envelope. 

Stock:  For this stunning envelope we looked to Legion yet again. The envelope was produced in the gunmetal color from their Miri H line. The line is defined by its bright metalized mirror-like finish and laminated to a white stock base. 

You can see gunmetal featured between the gold and copper metallic colors in this swatch book.

Process: The only process on this envelope is the blind embossing on the face. This kind of paper is absolutely perfect for blind embossing. The metallic nature of the paper causes the light and reflections to define every curve, every indent and every highlight to make this logo look as amazing as possible. Giving the logo the effect of being jewelry in itself.  

Process: Blind Embossing

Construction: Envelopes like these aren’t typically for sale in bulk, neither is the ability to emboss a logo on the face of a pre-made envelope. We made these envelopes ourselves from scratch. 

The paper gets passed through once flat for the blind embossing and then a second time for die cut and scoring. Once the envelope was embossed, cut and scored we put our gloves on and put these together by hand. To then prepare these for hand delivery. 

Accompanying Items

Insert: This invitation was sent with a vellum insert to accompany the invitation with a list of the chairs, benefactors, patrons and supporters of the event.  The velum insert provided a soft overlay to the sparkle texture already defined by Mirri.

Vellum overlaid over invitation and envelope.

Reply Card and Envelope: Along with the invitation and insert, was a simple black offset reply card and envelope in the Mohawk Superfine Ultrawhite line.  The white stock with black ink paired well and was perfect for the practical application of the reply card intent. 

Alternates

If a hand delivered and hand constructed envelope are not in your projects plan, there are so many alternative options to make some of these techniques practical for your next project. 

For instance, while blind embossing on the face of an envelope is only available for hand constructed envelopes, we can blind emboss on almost any back envelope flap of premade envelope. 

Need custom addressing too? A lot of times we see clients build invitations like this and send them in an outer envelope. This outer envelope is perfect for custom data merge addressing. The outer envelope would also protect your product from some of the inherent wear and tear that happens within the mail process. 

Inspired?

Let us know! If you love this piece and want to incorporate some of these techniques into your next project, give us a call or contact us and we can talk about how we can make your next project really sparkle.