For $295, Kathy Carrier of Uncommon Goods will turn your bridesmaid dress(es) into a gorgeous quilt; one that stands a much better chance of getting multiple uses than it would have in its original form. Of course, a wittily written (and well-printed) card telling your bridesmaid she’ll never have to feel guilty about not wearing the dress again would make a great bridesmaids’ gift. These quilts could look beautiful with the great combinations of colors so many couples are choosing for their attendants.

I can also see this working as a great gift for a planner to give her bride, too. I have no association with the artist or Uncommon Goods. I just thought this was something you’d like to know about. Head on over to Uncommon Goods to purchase one.

“If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it”

-Albert Einstein

It’s certainly not for every bride, but it’s perfect for some. Far better than anything else available.

There are more photos (by my esteemed collaborator) to be seen and words to read on the album’s portfolio page.

A lot of the wedding albums on the market today leave me cold.  Many of them  don’t reflect the sacred experiences, a signpost near the beginning of a great journey, that their pages capture.

My friend Matt tells some beautiful stories. He captures the soul of some very lovely and inspiring events. We were discussing one day the need to share with his clients an album that reflects the carefully crafted experience of their day and a seed was planted.

From that seed grew this. A journal of sorts, chronicling the atmosphere of each couple’s passage into marriage, celebrated with friends and family. Reminiscent of a seaman’s log or a traveler’s journal,  this leather-clad album has no cover (though the back is mounted to bookboard) and is bound by posts to maintain an air of a work-in-progress, ready for the next page at any moment.

A wedding’s a great day, but it’s only the first of many in a marriage.

This album is an exclusive of Matthew R. Photo. If you’d like one for your wedding day, contact him for rates and availability.

If you’d like to embark on a different kind of bookbinding project with me, send me a note describing what you’re looking for.

(photos by Matthew R. Photo)

]]> http://afinepress.com/the-album/feed/ 1 http://afinepress.com/hipster-what/ http://afinepress.com/hipster-what/#comments Fri, 16 Mar 2012 15:08:48 +0000 matthew http://afinepress.com/?p=1082 Have you seen Hipster Branding? It’s a neat little tumblr (only 21 posts as of now) that reimagines the logos of well-known companies under the tagline Holding up a mirror to the artsy community. Frankly, a couple of them are pretty uninspired and  derivative (it’s parody, after all), but a couple stand out as pretty inspired. Here’s a sampling:

Have you noticed the shift to cleaner, simpler branding lately? To branding that enhances the story instead of shouting LOOK AT ME! like everything we try to forget about the 1990s? I think it’s nice. There are a lot of people more concerned more with aesthetics and narrative than grabbing your attention at all cost and that’s amazing.

Here’s the thing.

I know it’s in jest, but it just rubs me the wrong way that this cool little project is called Hipster Branding. I’m really surprised to see this whole “hipster” thing still breathing. I was at a conference last week where one of the speakers was talking about how anthropologists used to measure cultural trends in thousands of years and then by the century. After that, it was the generation and now…Now we’re measuring cultural shifts every five years or so.

Contemporary hipster culture has certainly traversed that 5-year hill and is on the decline, but it won’t let go.

A 2011 New York Times article explained that the halcyon of the hipster era was reached in the 2000s during the time of the housing bubble. A New York Magazine article showed that following the late 2000s recession signs of a backlash began to emerge, with many, including the CEO of American Apparel declaring the hipster was “of a certain era” and “dead.” The article also states, “The hipster moment did not produce artists, but tattoo artists. It did not yield a great literature, but it made good use of fonts. – Wikipedia

The problem as I see it is that a lot of really great macro cultural shifts away from the maladies of the 20th Century have been associated with Hipster culture and, as it follows, may fade with them. Take this from Portlandia:

Yeah, yeah – I’m gonna dig it because it references straight razors. But to a bigger point:

Remember in the 1890′s when the economy was in a tailspin…unwashed young men roamed the streets looking for work and people turned their backs on huge corporate monopolies and supported local businesses?

Are we really going to pin this tail on the Hipster donkey? Is the idea of buying local or the 3/50 project or of communicating your message clearly (without shouting) a hipster ideal that will fade just as fast as waxed moustaches and granny glasses?

I sure hope not.

Hand-Eye Supply has definitely done a great job of that with this. Hand-Eye is the company that made my new printing apron and, as it seems, I’ve been placed on their fine mailing list. You can imagine my delight when this arrived in the mail this weekend:

I have no interest in Hand-Eye Supply other than being a new and eager fan. Do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of this newsprint publication .

These amazing photos by Justin DeMutiis represent the beautiful idea of having a wedding or event whose food and decor are crafted from locally-sourced growers. Seeing as we’re based in Florida, citrus and strawberries made perfect sense!

Please visit Eco-Beautiful Weddings for more information on this fun shoot and our Portfolio for more images of the invitation and its accompanying menu.

Of course, if you need any of the following, click through to these great businesses that I have the pleasure of knowing:

Flowers | FishHawk Weddings

Dress | Anglo Couture

Hair & Makeup | Michelle Renee

Desserts and Sweets | Chic Sweets

For this photo shoot, I created a storybook wedding invitation, bound in a handmade Italian paper and finished with a brown cotton bookcloth. Its twenty-two pages tell the couple’s story, outline the weekend’s activities and share a beautiful love poem by Rumi. One of my favorite features is the incredible pop of orange from the textured flyleaf paper that you can see peaking out from behind the deckled edges. The book was given its own burlap sleeve and sent in a coordinating brown box.

I also created a matching menu on panel clad in the same Italian handmade paper and wrapped in burlap.

These photos were taken by the incomparable Justin DeMutiis for publication in Eco-Beautiful Weddings . Please visit that blog post for a list of all the great vendors involved in this project.

The tips range from the obvious (Make it Memorable) to the quixotic (Say it Loud), but there are some real gems in there. Two of my favorites are Stand Out in a Crowd and Expect Its Story to Evolve. 

Stand Out in a Crowd

It may be no surprise to find out that this is one of my favorites. You may not think it obvious, with a name like A Fine Press, but I’m a firm believer in setting yourself pretty far away from the rest of your market. (My name may be a little status quo, but wait till you see the new visual identity I’m working on!) How many photographers do you know named “Your Name Photography?” Or event planners that go by their own name?  There aren’t many ways to say you’re an event designer or a lighting company, so why use your name to say it at all? A few standouts in my mind are The Last Forty Percent (photography), RSBP Events + PR (Her name is Brooke Palmer – get it?), and Sharkpig (Videography – whodathunkit?).

That’s not to say that there’s anything inherently wrong in having a more traditional name; it’s all a matter of the clients you’re trying to attract. If you come to me for a full re-brand, though, expect some pushback on more standard names and some pretty out there suggestions; I really believe in the power of differentiation.

Expect Its Story to Evolve

This one’s incredibly important to me – particularly as I’m watching my own brand evolve. If your name is “So-and-So Wedding Films,” how do you add corporate work to your offerings? or video photo booths? If you’re “Such and Such Letterpress shop,” how do you incorporate design work and consulting?

The article points to Virgin as a perfect example. When Richard Branson started a record shop, he probably had no idea that he’d be lending that name to an airline and mobile carrier. That was four years before the first commercially available cell phone! Things would be a lot different if Branson felt he couldn’t attach the name of a record store to the more than 400 companies he now has a stake in.

 Is it too late?

Of course it isn’t too late. Heck, you don’t even need a full-on re-brand to give your name some new life and a little bit of breathing room. Maybe it’s time to name all of the smaller things you do under the larger umbrella of your company name. Name it all! Your services, your processes, your water bottle, rename your cat!

OK – maybe I went a little to far with that. But the idea is that people will attach a name to something in order to help them categorize and remember it. Be in control of what they call you and use it to your advantage.

This new endeavour  is probably not much of a surprise to most people that know me. I’m a bit different than most people around me. You can usually find me in suspenders and some sort of gentleman’s cap (though I can’t remember the last time I wore a baseball cap). I wear blue glasses and write with fountain pens . I play jazz and operate a hundred-year-old piece of cast iron print ephemera. Yeah. I’m not normal.

When I write a list like that, it’s easy to assume that I’m just nostalgic or of a different era (save for the blue glasses), but I don’t think that’s the point of it. See, I’m no technophobe and, while I do love jazz quite a bit, I’m rather fond of quite a bit of music that could never have been made thirty years ago. I’m thankful for many modern conveniences, perfectly content to be alive in the 21st Century.

But I do think that modern life is missing something.

See, they call me a Millenial. I’ve been in denial about it for a while. I mean, I grew up with stonewashed denim and My So Called Life.  How can I be a part of a generation that includes people who have never used a tapedeck? But, alas, my generation includes people between 12 and 33 years old.

So here we are,  me rambling and you wondering what in the world all of this has to do with weddings.

Here it is: My parents’ generation and their parents’ generation spent a whole lot of time and money trying to eliminate ritual from their lives. They created fast food and TV dinners. Traded their fountain pen and Blackwing for a  rollerball and mechanical pencil. They invented cartridge razors that seem to add more blades with each year. It was an era of convenience that was supposed to free us from the bonds of mundane tasks and free us to be the me we wanted to be.

But it didn’t do any of that.

Instead, it impelled us to accept less flavor and lower quality. No one cared that McDonald’s was killing us and tasted mediocre – at least it was fast and consistent. We dealt with razor burn in exchange for a quick shave; disposable tools from the big box instead of things passed down from father to son, mother to daughter.

And we lost our rituals.

These things that I do are primarily about introducing ritual back into my life. The simple (slow) joy of filling a fountain pen or working up a hot lather. These are things that force me to slow down. Contemplate. It’s these rituals that help me discover more of who I am and who came before me.

I also love the artifacts that accompany these rituals. Artifacts that I can pass on to my children (how many items that originated from our parents’ generation will  be worth handing down?) and share with them. Articles that have even more ritual associated with them (care and maintenance). Artifacts that may even have been used by my great grandparents and those before them.

And here it is:

These rituals and artifacts are sacred additions to the fast-paced, disposable world in which Millenials live. If they (we) are valuing them in daily life, how much more so during the most important moments of our lives?

That is why, I believe, we’ve seen an increased interest in letterpress invitations and greater groom involvement in the past years.  These rituals and artifacts are connections to a past that somehow seems  so much more meaningful than the trappings of today.  Liene talks about how DIY is here to stay and about the fact that it’s not necessarily about saving money. I believe that we’ll continue to see more interesting and meaningful rituals added to wedding ceremonies and the things that surround them. It may feel like a free-for-all  (think Unity Cocktail and  this attendant  arrangement), but I think it’s part of a new paradigm.

That’s what gets me excited about this industry. Every new project is a chance to help a planner and his/her couple tell a story incredibly and uniquely them. I’d love to be a part of your story. If you or your client are looking for invitations that help tell your story in new and interesting ways, email me.

And in case you were wondering…

Only one minor nick and a relatively close shave for my first go  ’round. What an incredible feeling of accomplishment and connection. This new ritual is just another way for this Millenial to find meaning.