Dauphine

McEvoy Ranch Limited Edition

Over the past five years we've been honored to create custom illustrations and hand-made letterpress labels for McEvoy Ranch. The custom illustrations included on each collector’s edition letterpress label for their Limited Edition Extra Virgin Olive Oil were inspired by different elements seen on their amazing ranch right here in Petaluma, California. These architectural and landscape elements were incorporated into the design, letterpress printed on 100% cotton papers and hand-applied to their beautiful glass bottles. The 2011 label included gold foil to commemorate their 20th year. Below is a retrospective of these gorgeous labels.

  
 

If you haven't tried McEvoy's delicious olive oils or used their sumptuous body products, you really must! Click here to see all they have to offer. Aren't the best projects those that delight multiple senses?

Spoiled Bitch - Logo & Business Cards

Suzanne Lavallee is a fantastic San Francisco-based web designer who has started a new site called Spoiled Bitch. Let's just start by saying, it's not what you're thinking..."Spoiled Bitch is a weekly email newsletter hopelessly devoted to keeping you fashionably informed about dog culture in the San Francisco Bay Area."

The site content ranges from secret training tips to Fido-friendly getaways to must-have new gear and upcoming events.

Dauphine designer Katrina McHugh designed the tennis ball logo as well as the looping leash illustration. Suzanne says:

"I want to thank all of you for helping to bring this to fruition. Creating such a stunning logo has not only garnered oodles of praise, but makes me so wildly proud. The darling icon lives proudly on Facebook and the logo and collateral pieces appear on the website and newsletter. As I've shared before, working with all of you was one of the most delightful experiences I've had: talent, timely and team work."

We want to congratulate her on the launch of her site and her new blog. Franny and Frijolito are all over it.

A Sneak Peek

After releasing two new album lines in 2009, we're busy at work behind the scenes on our next launch that will be available later this year. In the meantime, we have a few surprises up our sleeves that we'll be sharing soon!

As we do every year, we sent out a fun card this week to all the wonderful dealers we work with from coast to coast to let them know that we'll miss seeing them this year at the National Stationery Show, but we're preparing some exciting things to come at Dauphine Press – edge painting is just one fun finishing touch that we're adding to our repertoire!

Dealers on the east coast were treated to an interesting postmark on their "delight delivery" which were sent from the nation's first post office located in Philadelphia's Old City. Brides take note: this is the only post office in the country that hand cancels each piece of mail as a matter of course. The unique postmark bears the signature of Benjamin Franklin, the first Postmaster General: "B. Free Franklin." Even the postmark date is set in vintage form, including the abbreviation for the month of May.

This is also the only post office in the country that does not fly the American flag. Why? Because when it was established in 1775 we weren't a country yet, so there simply was no flag to fly.

Post office photo from here.

A Letterpress Calendar for the Overly Organized

Every autumn, just as wedding season begins to ebb, we perpetually work on a very interesting project that stretches our creativity well beyond graphic design and printing. Our wonderful client, Graphic Communications, came to us many years ago to commission a unique letterpress calendar as a year-end gift to their clients. Each page of the calendar includes three months, but with every passing month, the user changes the page so that they are always looking at the current month plus the two ahead. So instead of designing a simple twelve months, we design each month three times with no repetition of artwork or themes.

We collaborate with Graphic Communications each year on a new theme which often includes a liberal sprinkling of literary pith. For the 2009 calendar however, we all stepped down from our lofty laurels to create a Hollywood theme, replete with 36 caricatures of famous actors ranging from Woody Allen to Julia Roberts. Each head shot was illustrated by the brilliant Antony Hare. Then character was painstakingly separated and rendered into two to three spot colors by Dauphine Press designers Katrina McHugh and Heather Landry.

On the 2010 calendar, we decided upon cities of the world as our global theme. As in years past, the idea became a collaboration with several of us searching for 36 perfect quotes and images to weave through the calendar. I was thinking along the lines of New York, London, Paris and other obvious metros, but our well-traveled client had more off-the-beaten-path locales in mind. "How about Bogata and Damascus? Tripoli and Kiev?" The challenge then was to research and find stock images that were evocative of these more obscure destinations. The theme quickly evolved into a vintage travelogue which we think fit the project beautifully. Heather Landry continued the design with a beautiful airmail themed cover page that included vintage postage stamps from various countries. She also designed two vintage travel postcards that were included with each calendar to allow recipients the opportunity to voyage vicariously to these exotic destinations.