Welcome to Print Lust. Celebrating the world of print design with a print design showcase, tutorials, free printables and lots more. We hope you enjoy!

Yikes! It’s all change for me as of today. For just over a year I’ve been running a company with some other designers, which has been lots of fun and I’ve learnt a lot, but now we’ve decided to part ways, and I’m going back to freelancing. I’m a bit (lot) scared, but mostly excited, and with lots of things coming up like Not On The Highstreet membership and starting a screen printing course, it’s definitely going to be busy (oh, and I’m also moving house in 4 weeks!). It also means I’ll be able to put a lot more time into the wedding invitation side of the business, which I’m pretty excited about. I’ve had a little rebrand of my old freelance company, ‘Lovely Cuppa’ so I thought I’d show you the logo, business cards and brand new website.

My website. 

And um… (shameless plug) if you need any design work, feel free to get in touch!

This is a super simple tutorial if you’re not very familiar with Photoshop, which can be a pretty daunting programme to use. You could use it to make a poster with your favourite lyrics or passage from a book, or to make a personalised greeting card. All you need is Photoshop and a pretty picture.

To start with, open Photoshop and create a new document  by selecting File>New from the menu.

Give it a name and set your paper size, I’ve gone for A4 landscape which is 297 x 210mm, you want 300 dpi and CMYK, if you’re going to print it.

Choose the type tool from the tool bar on the left hand see, it looks like a capital ‘T’. Click the curser onto your page and it should create  anew layer, then type in your text.

Set the font, size and leading etc in the Character panel (Window>Character). I’ve gone for a bold font so you’ll be able to see a fair bit of the image.

Centre your text, I have a very crude way of doing this which involves making a box with the selection tool and dragging it over to each side to check they are even. I’m sure there are better ways, but this works for me.

Open your image, I’ve used a stock photo of some lovely fields, you could use whatever you like. Drag it onto the window with your text in, again it should appear on a new layer.

Move your layers around so the image is the top one, you can do this by dragging them on top of one another.

Right click (option click on a Mac) on the image layer and select ‘layer mask’ from the options.

Ta-da! Your image will be inside your text, you can now move it about until you’re happy with it.

Enjoy! I’d love to see your creations.

I say this about a lot of fonts, but I really love this one, it’s one of my absolute favourites. I have a bit of a thing for chunky fonts and pretty swirly fonts, particularly together. This font is used a lot, I’ve seen it on menus and it’s even used by Cineworld on their ‘take me to another world’ intro. I’ve also seen it used in white against a chalkboard background on wedding invites, which looked particularly awesome. The best thing is it’s free for personal use! And you can download it here.

I made this print for my sister-in-law’s birthday last month. She wanted this particular quote and I added the vector image of Marilyn as well. The font is called Feel Script, and I’m loving it at the moment.

As always, you can buy from our Etsy shop.

kuler.adobe.com

I love this little site, it’s great for working out colour schemes and finding complementary colours.

We use this lovely font for our Milk business cards. It’s yummy and chunky, a bit like a Yorkie but in font format.

Even better, you can download it free from here!

A Yorkie

Chunk Five font

I stumbled across this on Twitter the other day and immediately wanted to buy one. 55 Hi’s produce greeting cards and various other stationery, many featuring inspiring quotes and pretty typography, so right up my street. You should definitely check out everything on the site, but I absolutely loved the ampersand collection in particular, which is a collection of 10 different prints from 10 different designers. I don’t know what it is about ampersands but they always look beautiful (you may have noticed it’s turned into a bit of a theme on the blog this week), and I think it’s the variation of styles between different fonts that make them so appealing from a design point of view.

This might be my favourite DIY so far, it’s really quick, fun and easy and the materials don’t cost a lot at all (some of them you’ll probably already have). Plus the finished result looks really good. Hope you enjoy!

You will need
Printable template
A4 Magnetic photo paper (I got this from The Range for £1! I believe they also sell it in Hobbycraft and Staples)
PVA glue
Lots of glitter!
Paintbrush
Scissors (you could use a craft knife but I found scissors much easier)
Plasti-koat clear (available from craft shops, you don’t HAVE to use this, but it’ll make the glitter stay put)

Firstly print out the template onto the magnetic paper, adjusting your printer settings accordingly. If you can only get magnetic strips that aren’t printable, you could stick the template onto these.

Cut out your frames around the edge and centres.

Generously apply PVA glue to the paper side using the paintbrush, then cover in glitter!

Carefully put the frames onto scrap/newspaper and spray with Plasti-koat.

Cut your photos to just bigger than the centres of the frames, and attach to a fridge or any metal surface. You can change the photos whenever you like. Ta-da!

We recently went for pizza (BOGOF – yay) at Cape n Nottingham, and I was rather taken by their menu design. It’s kind of retro 50′s with lots of lovely pastel colours, and even though they’re a South African restaurant that serve pizza and Corona, it all seems to fit somehow.

I can’t seem to find who designed them, so apologies for the lack of credit. But on a side note – I love food and we’re definitely available to create menu designs/restaurant branding at the Milk Shed (payment in pizza optional).

My mum bought me this cute little printing block for Christmas from the V&A, I’ve always wanted to get some printing blocks but never got round to it. I tried it out on a bit of thick cotton paper, a sample from my letterpress printers, and I love the effect. Apparently the was the only ‘a’ they had, but I quite like the fact it has a little hat on.