Today we're thrilled to bring you our friends from Hammerpress! Hammerpress is a design studio and letterpress company based out of Kansas City, Missouri. You may remember our delightful tour of the Hammerpress studio earlier this year. The crew was enormously kind and showed us a fabulous time. We love their mix of vintage and modern and their cozy, woodsy designs. They offer tons of cool cards and paper goods in their shop, perfect for any holiday gift! Keep up with their blog here for updates on new products!
What inspired your design for the holiday collection?
Our inspiration for this project was, with all of our work, to create a collection that we like and feel good about. The unique thing about this project was not being quite so limited with color since it was not being produced in house. All of our work is letterpress so we typically don't have as much freedom with the amount of colors. Also, there are some things that just would not work on press here at the shop that we can do digitally. Also, working with Hello!Lucky wasn't too hard to swallow either.
What are you currently working on?
We are fortunate to have many different kinds of projects going at all times. We are currently working on some identity work for a new soda fountain / coffee shop project here in Kansas
City. We've been involved in the project in a very hands on way ( i.e. demolition and finding materials, etc.) so it's a great a joy to work on the back end of the project as well. Currently we've got a lot of return customers for holiday mailers which is great. Some of them we have been working with for years. We just finished a large project with Boulevard Brewing Company here in Kansas City. Boulevard is a highly respected brewery and has continued to grow since there impetus in 1989. We have had a lot of their beer so it's an honor to work with such a great company. As usual, we are also constantly working on new card ideas and larger print work as well.
What influences your style the most?
I think we have a lot of influences here at the shop, we all look at different things. Primarily our ideas stem from ephemera and design work from the past. Anything from postage stamps and matchbox labels ( we just bought a huge collection of 300 or so Indian matchbox labels ) to broadsides, rodeo posters, ticket stubs, old faded signs, found photos, you name it. We have a lot of stuff laying around.
What's your favorite holiday tradition?
Spending time with family and friends. We usually have a Hammerpress dinner party and I really like that.
Best holiday memory?
My best holiday memory would have to be when i was 8 or so. I woke up and ran upstairs to the tree ( why our tree was upstairs I don't know ) and found not only the Hot Wheels mountain race track set but also the giant Godzilla action figure with the handle that made what I think was a plastic flame come out of his mouth. That was just too much to handle.
To see the entire Hammerpress holiday collection for Hello!Lucky head here!