“It’s a lighthearted way of getting a message across. Print could do with a shot in the arm and we thought this was a nice way to do that this Christmas,” said creative director Trevor Stocks. “We want printers to shout about their trade to their customers – it’s a professional skill and we want to preserve it.”

The Leicestershire-based business designs point-of-sale and corporate identity branding for a range of sectors including travel and leisure, safety and software. All printing is outsourced and Stocks said he had recently had more requests for printed campaigns as some companies moved away from social media web campaigns.

“We’re seeing lots of companies reviewing their spend on social media advertising as they haven’t achieved the results they’d hoped for. Of course social media has its role to play so it is here to stay, but certainly within our client base we are starting to see our customers actually going back to printed campaigns, so we thought we’d pick up on that,” said Stocks.

Stocks said he created the ‘Stuff social media, just give me ink!’ logo using the masthead from an 1893 copy of industry journal The British Lithographer. He added: “I was given a bound volume of The British Lithographer about 30 years ago, which I came across recently, and I just thought it would be great to use it to shout about the trade and portray the history and skill of the industry. I did double check it’s not under copyright!”

The t-shirts and mugs, which are now available on Stocks Designs website, can be personalised and are aimed at printers looking for “something a bit different” to promote themselves to their customers.

Stocks said: “A lot of companies now discourage giving alcohol-based gifts and we thought this type of gift would be seen as amusing, not really of any intrinsic value, but could help a printer build relationships with those in control of the marketing purse strings in a more personal way.”