Hello, hello! Listen up, you don’t want to miss this one! We’re opening our doors this Friday, October 19th, for a special gallery event to celebrate Salt Lake City’s favorite holiday and the arrival of SLDW 2012. Our first curated show, all letterpress-printed in-house, features a wide variety of our very favorite local and national designers, illustrators, hand-letterers, print-makers and tattooers. Specifically, these guys:

Michael Bergfalk · Sky Bitzer · Travis Bone · Justin Nelson-Carruth · Spencer Charles · Dan Christofferson
Jon Contino · Thy Doan · Tyler James Densley · CJ Fishburn · George Graves · Elenor Heyborne · Gailon Justus
Zach Landrum · Colin Roe Ledbetter · Jake Miller · Gavin Potenza · Carol Sogard · Ben Webster · Keegan Wenkman

Each artist responded to a common theme of THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE. It remains to be seen whether these artists will lean toward philosophical, literal or paranormal interpretations of the theme but one thing is certain: you really should be here in person to find out! So come on down, check out our revamped storefront and partake in a night of pints and prints with The Mandate Press and Cathedral Tattoo Company. Print editions of each piece will be limited to 60 and will go on sale online at 6:00 PM that evening and show attendees can grab one at a discount that night only.

Once they’re gone, they’re gone.

11×17 prints $25 online / $20 at show

8×10 prints $20. online / $15. at show

Taxes are a universal no-fun zone. We can’t think of a single human that rejoices in doing their taxes, save for sadists, and/or masochists, maybe. However, since that inevitable time of the year is here, we’d like to sweeten the deal. From today, April 4th, until the end of the month we’re giving an EXTRA 10% OFF all CUSTOM ORDERS.

Yippie! This is in addition to our regular 10% discount for giving us 2 weeks on your order, so, if you give us the 2 weeks on your custom order + this tax day sale, you’re actually getting 20% off your order! This applies to all custom orders: business cards, wedding invites, note cards, envelopes, you name it.

So, request an estimate today!

*This sale is for custom orders only – it does not apply to our $95 cards.

We’re so excited and honored to have Kyle Durrie of Power and Light Press (Portland) stop at The Mandate Press! So here’s the short and the long about Kyle and The Moveable Type Truck: Kyle was a girl who loved two things, letterpress and road trips. So, in 2010, she utilized Kickstarter.com to fund a campaign so that she could launch a moveable letterpress operation, not just the type, but the whole shebang. Kyle got herself a 1982 Chevy step van and converted it into a fully functional letterpress shop. Now she travels the nation bringing the art and function of letterpress to a town near you!

We’re elated to have her park her ride at the shop and you’re all invited! We’re making a print for all of you who show up and crank a press.

When: April 2nd (Monday)

Time: 4pm – 7ish

Where: The Mandate Press 1077 South Main St. SLC, UT 84111

Why: Duh.

You can also stay current with the happenings of the event by joining our Facebook event.

We hope to see you all here and if you can’t make it to our shop, make sure to check out the rest of the type-truck tour!

Also, if you’re in Utah and you’ve been putting off submitting an application for Craft Lake City, have no fear! Some Craft Lake City peeps will be here too for you to learn more.

*some images courtesy of Kyle Durrie

Just thought we’d throw a post out to the world to show off what we’ve been up to lately. Spring is in the air and I think it’s showing in the jobs we’ve been printing. Color! There’s also been a trend of adventurous edging. A colored edge on your card is a great way to add some effect to a blind impression, especially.

Carl Richards is probably the one person you would love to have coffee with. Maybe even a beer. Or tapas. Well, quite frankly you want to be with Carl Richards anywhere that there is ready access to a cocktail napkin and a pen. Carl has created a name for himself in the world of finance and investing by being, well, it’s simple: honest and succinct. He makes financial concepts easy to understand with the quick gesture of a sharpie on a napkin. Which almost sounds like something out of a MoMA exhibition: *insert pretentious curatorial voice* Sharpie on Napkin. However, in all actuality, Carl is an artist. This is also where we get involved, in case you were wondering why it is that some lowly printers know such a prestigious being.

Over time we’ve been printing 8″x10″ prints of Carl Richards’ financial napkin concepts and they are now a show, Visualizing Finance, at the Kimball Art Center in Park City, Utah. We also printed a limited edition letterpress cover for his book, The Behavior Gap: Simple Ways To Stop Doing Dumb Things With Money (Portfolio/Penguin, January 2012).

So, if you’re in Utah, we suggest you take a stroll up to Park City to check out his show. If you’re not around this neck of the woods, lucky for you, Carl Richards is a regular contributor to The New York Times Bucks Blog. You can see all of his financial concept napkin sketches here.

Since it’s the first month of a new year (I suppose that’s a but redundant, whatevs) we are going to run a special. Especially if your own work bonus was lack luster. We’ll try and make it a feel like you got a little more than just a company mug for your hard work all year.

If you sign off on a custom business or calling card order – CUSTOM ORDERS ONLY – by the end of the day January 31, we’ll bump an extra 100 cards into your order. Hooray! So, if you order 250 cards, 350 will automagically show up at your doorstep. If you order 500, you’ll receive 600. And so on and so on. Pretty sweet!

Click here to request an estimate! Don’t forget to mention this post for your bonus!

Also, keep in mind that the estimating process goes much more smoothly when you have a clear idea of paper, color, and design. If you need help designing your card we can help with that too.

Happy New Year!

Okay, mind blown, maybe that’s an exaggeration. However, it’s pretty cool when the world of today can still dance with the world of yesterday. A perfect example of this is the use of QR codes with letterpress. It works! So, whether you have one for your business or perhaps a promotion, it’s pretty slick.

It’s December 1st, ok, well it’s technically the 2nd. We know, people all over the place are always astonished that yet another month has passed, and “how did this happen?” and “time flies” and…well, we’re pretty sure this is a symptom of age. When we were young, it was like the world and its time was the slowest moving thing. We waited, got ready 2 hours early for prom, waited for our parents to pick us up after school, it was an eternity the year we spent waiting to be 16, and Christmas and our birthday couldn’t come faster.

We’re old. Time flies, even when we’re not having fun.

So, it’s now holiday season. We want to get back to that place where we couldn’t wait to wake up early, unwrap presents, eat copious amounts of butter & sugar laden goods, and wrap ourselves in scarves and hats and still feel frozen. Bring on the nostalgia! (forget that some of us around here grew up in Southern CA)

We think that in our seasoned age, we need a tinge of darkness to reassociate ourselves with the glory of all things childlike. And, in some cases the darkness was just an inherent latency of all things child-like. Innocence, such a thin veneer. Think about Grimms’ tales – horrific, but our child minds only chose to see the straw, the coal, and the bean, as cute and laughable. Prime example: the master of dark, absurd, and slightly deadpan, Edward Gorey.

In our own sense of naughty & nice, we have some holiday cards available in our Seraph Store: www.seraph.bigcartel.com.

Happy December!

Sorry for the Skate or Die tangent. However, today we’d like to talk about a service we offer that is pretty radical: Die-cutting. Die-cutting can be a great way to create a custom card shape, hang tag, invite, etc. There are some limitations to keep in mind. Intricate designs can become too fragile for a die and we’d recommend the Leslie Harris card (shown in the gallery below) as an example of a card that is on the high end of the scale as far as intricacy goes.

So, if you have an idea for a custom card, don’t let its shape hinder your creativity. Maybe Rodney Recloose would want a mohawk-shaped card? Or maybe skate deck shaped?

A while ago we did a small favor for our friend Kyle over at Baltimore Print Studios. He so kindly repaid the favor ten times over by sending us some really great gems. We love it when the world works like this. You buy lunch today – we will buy lunch another day. We wish the world worked out so well all of the time.

Firstly, they sent us an awesome Birthday announcement (of sorts) of a fold-your-own Vandercook. Pretty sweet. We wonder if anyone that received one has actually assembled it?

They also sent us some radical, hand-inked, Clean Hands Make Clean Prints, prints.

Lucky for you, Baltimore Print Studios also have an online shop. So, if you want to grab a Clean Hands Print for yourself, you can. Also, Happy Belated Birthday to Baltimore Prints!