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A Division of UnderConsideration

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2009
–
2017

Back in 2007 Chris Dreyer purchased a couple of presses and taught himself how to use them. Having set up shop in what used to be a walk-in freezer in an old warehouse he has been printing for himself as well as for clients — one of which is Doma Coffee. For the last 18 months or so, he has been producing anywhere between 2,000 and 4,000 bags (in various sizes) a month, often working late into the night.

The real joy has been designing and printing the holiday bags for DOMA, where the design prompt is generally little more than make something cool. For the Valentine’s Day bag this year, the prompt was Plaid’s kinda cool, huh Chris?, which is very fortunate because the only other idea I had kicking around my noggin was a yeti with a heart shaped stomach, and I was having the hardest damn time executing it…

I decided to cut the shapes out of paper with an X-Acto knife. The lines for the plaidwork were added in Illustrator with a mindnumbing barrage of clipping masks. I designed this to have super-precise registration between three colors and an epic amount of overprinting, which is always a bit of a wildcard, especially on kraft brown stock. Printing on coffee bags is always quite the teabagging hassle, as they do not lay fully flat — you just have to pack up the low spots with bits of scrap stock. I mixed a bit of opaque white into the pink to get it to pop off the kraft a bit, too. I was quite pleased with how precise I was able to nail the registration, and the overprinting of colors worked out nicely too.

I suppose there is a challenge in being the designer and the printer on a single project, where bargaining for time, effort and difficulty is found on a very blurry line of satisfying the ultimate desired product.

Garage Book and Poster

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Valentine’s DOMA Coffee Bag

Production Method

Design

Chris Dreyer

Printing

Dreyer Press