A Week Inside The Hungry Workshop!

This week we welcome Jenna and Simon from The Hungry Workshop! We are SO excited that they will be showing us the process of how they design a greeting card - from concept to the final product. What makes this weeks Guest Blog even more exciting, is that they are design a greeting card inspired by The Design Files - OMG! Tune in daily to see the progress before the big reveal on Friday! -Jenny x

Hello! We are Jenna and Simon and we are The Hungry Workshop. We are graphic designers and letterpress printers and we’ve been working away on expanding our range of cards. We thought it might be interesting to document our process and show you how we go about creating a new design for a greeting card. We’ll take you all the way from inspiration through to design, letterpress printing and the final product.

However, before we start any project, we require a good brief. We approach every job in exactly the same way, whether the project is a logo design, a letterpress wedding invitation or a new card design: the better the story, the better the end product!

The story for this week's project: A greeting card inspired by the constant stream of awesomeness that is The Design Files.

Once we have a good story we then need to turn that into a design idea, and for us that takes inspiration (and coffee, lots of coffee). Fortunately for us, we have a fairly comprehensive catalogue of books which we use as reference, some old and some new, some of which we’ve scoured from op shops across the country, others that have been carried home by friends travelling across Europe and far too many that have come from fancy bookstores.

Old books and fresh coffee

We are also very lucky to be so close to Kau, which makes the most delicious coffee in Northcote. They have a sweet little courtyard tucked away out the back where we can relax in the sunshine and let the ideas come to us.

At the top is our Heidelberg Windmill Platen and behind it, our Asbern Proof Press.

We’d also like to introduce our two letterpress printing presses. We have an ‘Original’ Heidelberg Windmill Platen, circa 1970s, which is our 1.5 tonne workhorse. It does all the heavy lifting and our medium to large run jobs. Our newest addition is a little older, an Asbern Proof Press. This press can print a larger sheet size and it’s a lot less of a temperamental brute compared to the Windmill as it is far less likely to bite you if it’s having a bad day.