Chocolate printer
Choc Creator V1 £2,888, personalised Christmas chocolates £24.95
www.chocedge.com
Yes 3D printing is radically transforming manufacturing, enabling revolutionary applications like personalised prosthetic limbs, and democratising design. But what’s got us really excited is the idea of printing with chocolate. Choc- and print-aholics can now dispense with complex molding tools and create personalised chocolaty decorations using CAD technology and a Choc Creator V1 printer, purchased from Exeter-based company Choc Edge for the not-so-modest sum of £2,888 (you’ll need to smile very sweetly when requesting this one). Or, more within most people’s budgets, are Choc Edge’s 3D-printed Belgian chocolate Christmas creations, to which you can add a personalised message. Might we suggest: ‘This is the proof: print rules.’
Letterpress iPhone cases, water bottle and wrapping paper
From £8.50, £24.95, £13.95 per roll
www.zazzle.co.uk
“Do you, um, like letterpress printing by any chance?” your friends and contacts may well enquire as you slurp from your letterpress-themed water bottle and text on your letterpress case-clad iPhone. But don’t let them spoil your fun. Craft printing is back in vogue in a big way. And you’re sure to be seen as one of the ‘in’ crowd if you buy one of Zazzle’s letterpress-themed mugs or t-shirts to boot. In fact Zazzle boasts a whole range of gift ideas for the letterpress fanatic, including iPhone cases that can be personalised. And what better way to present them than in letterpress-printed paper. Lovely.
Helvetica perfume
$62 (£38)
www.helvetica-the-perfume.myshopify.com
In 1957, Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann set out to create a completely neutral typeface to enable the reader to focus purely on a message’s content. In 2013, founders of branding agency Guts & Glory set out to make money, sorry, “the ultimate Modernist perfume” in the form of a Helvetica inspired scent. Paying $62 for 2oz of distilled water might seem a bit rich, but the bottle is in fact printed with 24-carat gold so you can wear it as a necklace. And actually, the whole point is to not only create a perfume as ubiquitous as its namesake, but one which allows your natural human scent, or ‘Air. Water. You’, to come through. (“But darling, you smell so lovely without Gucci or Armani perfume on...!”) Disclaimer: PrintWeek cannot accept liability for turkey-on-head, flying-bottles-of-Baileys-induced injuries resulting from the giving of this perfume.
Low Tech Print by Caspar Williamson
£19.95
www.laurenceking.com
“For me, it is the low-tech and textural nature of printmaking that has led me to fall in love with these disciplines. I get an unexplained buzz every time I see that someone has made that decision to use a form of printmaking in their design, marketing or promotional material – people standing up and asking for more, not simply settling for what has become ‘the norm’ of a purely digitally printed product.” So says Caspar Williamson, founder of Flying Machines design and illustration company, and author of Low Tech Print, a book on contemporary design projects using handmade printing techniques. The book profiles more than 100 studios and creatives. Included is vertical screenprinting on windows and doors by Rotterdam-based Stefan Hoffman, the Peruvian Chicha posters made by hand cutting type and fixing to the screen (meaning nothing remains of the original design afterwards), and Sao Paulo Lambe-Lambe letterpress printing, a process much used in South America before litho printing. Each chapter also includes a step-by-step guide to the technique, and brief history of it.
Gutenberg printing press pencil sharpener
$6.95 (£4)
www.europeanpapers.com
Collectively parents will be splashing out over £3bn on tech gifts for their kids this Christmas, spending on average £243 each, according to a new report by comparison service uSwitch. Well that’s just bound to result in spoiled offspring and far too much time spent antisocially glued to a screen. Might we point you instead towards the much more understated and wholesome delights of this charming Johannes Gutenberg printing press pencil sharpener, complete with moving parts and a brief history of the man himself. You can even use the site vending the sharpener’s sell, when justifying the giving of said sharpener in lieu of, say, an iPhone 5s: “Just the item for booklovers, printers, and anyone owning a pencil!” you can exclaim. Cue much shouting.
Personalised letterpress cards
£4.90 for one, £24 for 10, £45 for 25
www.urbancottageindustries.com
Betcha never thought Christmas cards could be hip (NB: ones featuring family portraits or animals in stockings still definitely aren’t). But cooler than a snowman in American Apparel are these letterpress-printed cards from Urban Cottage Industries (UCI). Like the collective’s regular range of greetings cards, the designs for these hail from artists at east London-based Print Club London, and are then printed on UCI’s original Heidelberg platen presses. A message of around 16 characters is applied, using the company’s incredible Linotype and Intertype machines to create a metal ‘slug’. A particular favourite of ours is Ben Rider’s design of Breaking Bad’s Walter White, replete with scowl and Santa hat. Probably not one for Gran though.
Stanley Donwood screen prints
£399
www.faicahiioe.co.uk
It’s hard to get your loved-one something they’ve not already got these days (you’d think petrol stations across the nation would wise up and stock a wider array of original gift ideas wouldn’t you). A sure way to avoid this dilemma though, is to go for a beautiful, original screen print from the likes of Stanley Donwood, Radiohead’s in-house artist and recent exhibitor at The Outsiders Gallery. Still available are giclée prints of arboreal scenes from Donwood’s recent sell-out exhibition ‘Far Away is Close at Hand In Images of Elsewhere’, printed on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag 308gsm paper and 600x600mm in size. And panic not if you’ve really left it to the last minute this year. An alternative to Donwood are artists at Dalston-based Print Club London. The screen print collective is open right up until 12.30pm on Christmas Eve, and they’ll even pop in a free print when you spend over £100 (visit www. printclublondon.com). Sorted.
3D-printed Gutenberg bust
€19.90 (£16.50)
www.ego-3d.de
Well what better way to show your love of old Gutey. And what better way to add the finishing touch to a classy home décor scheme. With this 15cm-high 3D-printed Johannes Gutenberg bust perched regally on your mantelpiece, or possibly atop a faux marble column, you’ll always have a charming talking point for when entertaining guests. Even better, why not get a bust of yourself and family members so you can haughtily eyeball all who visit. You’ll just need to submit three photos of your gift recipient (though nothing’ll kill a surprise pressie better than getting someone to pose front-on, from the left and from the right, exactly 3m away). Then the clever bods at Ego3D will use software to generate a rough 3D version, with details ‘hand-sculpted’ digitally before the busts are ‘printed’ with mineral powder. You can even have a bust of your dog sculpted (it pains us to inform you).
‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ journal and The Pantone Fashion Sketchbook
£9 and £15
www.notonthehighstreet.com
Possibly not what your other half had in mind when she requested this racy title, (and unlikely to sell quite as many as 40m copies). Nonetheless this ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ journal should be good for a giggle come Christmas Day. You could even use it for a thrilling game of guess the Pantone reference, should you get particularly stumped for post-lunch entertainment. Perhaps likely to go down slightly better, particularly with budding Donatella Versaces, is this Pantone fashion sketchbook. The pad features 60 Pantone-curated colour palettes, 60 blank palettes, handy figure outlines (or croquis as those in the fashion biz call them, dahling), an illustrative garment encyclopedia and hints on using colour in fashion design.
Never again will you and your profession be cooler in your teenage daughter’s eyes.
Letterpress aprons
Adults’ £18.95, kids’ from £13.95
www.zazzle.co.uk
Okay, so you might not have got around to investing a couple of grand in a historic letterpress (not to mention the couple of years you’d need to restore it to working condition). But we’re all for aspirational present requesting around here (think buying the furry dice before you’ve bought the Merc). And these lovely cotton-poly blend twill aprons will serve just as well when you’re creating masterpieces in the kitchen. You can even get mini-you a matching one. Though might we suggest your kids use theirs for painting and play dough-type activities rather than working with hot type metal and one-tonne platens. Just a thought.
Personalised photo gifts
Mousemat £6.99, mugs from £7.99
www3.truprint.co.uk
Lunch box £10
www.tescophoto.com
If Facebook and the entry, this year, of ‘selfie’ into the OED are anything to go by, human beings will never tire of looking at their own and each other’s faces. Good news, of course, for all those involved in the burgeoning UK photo product market. (See p36 where our users put photobook software through its paces.) And good news for all those desperately casting around for suitably thoughtful Christmas gift ideas. The range of products you can now get Aunt Gladys and Grandpa Don immortalised on seems to have grown more rapidly than a post-Christmas dinner girth. Mousemats, mugs, lunch boxes, Christmas ornaments and keyrings – there should now be something to keep even the choosiest of gift recipients happy.
Leather book cufflinks
£23
www.notonthehighstreet.com
We’ve all been there. At an industry function when – Eek! – someone whose name has clearly been pushed out of your head by pub quiz trivia, greets you like an old friend. Well squirm no more. These charming 20x15mm book cufflinks do actually function as notebooks – perfect for noting important information, or your inspired (albeit concise) musings, on the fly. Handmade in the UK, the cufflinks are made from leather recycled from the motor industry, old Ordnance Survey maps for endpapers and Italian Fabriano paper for the pages. The cufflinks are available in black, dark brown, racing green or claret leather, and gold ink can be applied to the hand-torn page edges for a really vintage look. You just better hope your contact isn’t named after German typesetter Hubert Blaine Wolfeschlegelsteinhausen-bergerdorff, Senior, whose name, in full, was 746 letters long.
St Bride’s workshops
From £35 for an evening session, £90 for a day course and £245 for a two-day course; books start at £9.50
See www.sbf.org.uk for more price details and 2014 dates
Sick of servers? Tired of TIFFs? Worn out by workflows? Then drop some hints that what you’d really like from Santa this year is to reconnect with more hands-on print techniques. With its 120-year history of serving the local Fleet Street print community and archiving such treasures as a recently discovered 1400BC Book of the Dead papyrus, the St Bride Foundation is the perfect place to have a go at traditional printing. On offer at its extensively equipped workshop are a whole range of courses, including Getting Started with the Adana, Introduction to Metal Typesetting and Letterpress Printing, Introduction to Wooden Typesetting and Letterpress Printing, Exploring Letterpress and Linocut and Introduction to Lino Cutting (Relief Printing). Or get your loved-one to swing by the St Bride bookshop to pick up an interesting print-related tome. Sure to keep you out of trouble (and the sherry) come Christmas Day are titles including The Compositor in London, Reinventing Letterpress and The Pleasures of Printing.
