Centuries-old printing technique makes a comeback
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E-mail chinadaily.com.cn, November 20, 2019
Letterpress-printed business cards made with stylish designs are favored by those who want to showcase their tastes, Peng added.
"The letterpress printing spices up the designs of wedding invites, giving our products a competitive edge over the conventional ones", said Sun Yang, owner of letterpress studio iloovee.
Letterpress-printed wedding invites, priced roughly at 15 yuan ($2.15) apiece, are gaining traction in recent years as the younger generations pay more attention to the design and quality of the goods they buy, Sun explained.
"Both the design and texture of the invites are so beautiful that they have added much color to my wedding," read a buyer's comment on Taobao, China's largest ecommerce platform.
"Delicate and elegant! Every aspect of the invite is perfect except for its price," wrote another buyer.
Unleashing greater potential
Besides printed ephemeras such as wedding invites, business cards, book covers, letterpress-rendered replicas of paintings -- a popular genre of the cultural and creative products, are also in vogue on online shops.
For instance, the LeTian LetterPress Studio from Taichung has replicated a famous painting The Great Wave off Kanagawa by 19th-century Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai, using the ingenious multicolor letterpress printing, a method innovated by the studio's founder Huang Chung-tang, a former architectural 3D modeler for Google Earth.
Also, Huang is working with artists to help letterpress-print their original artwork.
Accordingly, art aficionados are warming up to the letterpress-printed replicas, charmed by the fine texture added to the original work.
The letterpress technique makes the painting replicas more fun, creative and affordable, said Liang Jiong from Beijing Institute of Graphic Communication.
"Everything of our time is pretty much online and ecological benefits are increasingly valued, which leads to a notable decrease in the overall printing volume," said Liang. "Despite the decline in production, the general printing market will remain robust as the need for personalized printing is still growing."
Although the popularity of letterpress printing is in the offing, "good designs are urgently needed for domestic letterpress studios. Many of them are imitating, if not pirating, designs from their foreign counterparts," Peng Junzhang said.
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