OUGD603: Christmas Joy- Research

Before I jump into designs and ideas I want to research into the practicalities of production and find what form of stock and printing would be suitable affordable as well as easy to replicate and hopefully as environmentally sound as possible.

Stock

I want to produce wrap, cards, tags and boxes so I need a form of stock that will look good as all three, match and also be environmentally sound. So I chose to look into brown recycled card and paper, they are usually cheap, have a socially good benefit and also come in many different forms.

I've started by looking on online stores for paper.

It appears that recycled brown roll will work the best for my purpose although in a lot of places it seems to come in 450mm width rolls at quite a reasonable price too. A2 size finishes at 420mm width but I don't think this should be an issue, it's good to have some overspill and I should be able to trim it down. This type of paper is also environmentally sound and also looks really nice when printed on (it's the stock choice I've used for my two previous years).

For the ease of printing (digital or screen) it would make sense to take the roll and cut it into A2 sheets, these can then be rolled up again or folded if being packaged.

The card to be used for the cards I found a very similar looking card to the paper, 50 sheets for £13 which isn't a bad haul. With the cards being a4 sheets it will make it easier to print either digitally or screen based, and then fold them into appropriate sizes after.

I also found (courtesy of Amazon) these tags. I think these are wonderful because they are recycled but come in a variety of colours so it may be worth not printing onto the tag and simply finding the colour that matches to create a set, I'll most likely do the same thing with the envelopes. 

Ink

I have heard of soy based inks before but on close inspection and a quick google search it appears these are only suitable for textile and fabric printing so it seems that if I were to screen print I would have to use the standard inks.