Available for Select Creators Only

Letterpress products offer a level of tactile quality that sets your stationery apart. The process has specific requirements that differ from standard digital printing, and following guidance closely is important to ensure a smooth customer experience and to keep your designs moving through our mandatory approval process without delays or rejections. 

Letterpress products are available to a select group of Creators due to the technical design limitations and printing process. 

Letterpress + Photo

Letterpress Photo Flat Card - for photo save the dates, holiday, or graduation designs. Designs without a photo will be rejected.

Core Concepts

Letterpress has a long history and it works very differently from digital printing. Modern letterpress is similar to a traditional book-press operation where an etched die, coated in an ink, makes contact with the paper.

The ink is spread onto the letterpress plate and the paper is pressed into that, depositing the ink into the fibers of the paper. This also leaves a small impression (a slight depression) in the paper where the raised areas of the plate have compressed the paper.

• The raised areas of the plate (die) is coated in a colored ink and then pressed into the card, impressing the ink into that region. For designs using multiple colors, multiple plates are used with the specified inks.

Solid Ink Coverage (Avoiding Mottling)

Large solid-fill areas will produce an undesirable mottled, "orange-peel" texture. This is a natural effect of the letterpress process and is one of the most common reasons designs are rejected. Solid ink areas more than ~5-10pt in thickness may show this effect.

Designs with a smaller, dispersed ink area produce a cleaner, more consistent letterpress result. Avoid large areas of fill when possible. 

The image below shows how the ink is not dispersed evenly across the element. 

Photographic and Continuous-Tone Elements

Letterpress cannot reproduce the subtle variations of photography and gradients.

• Incompatibility: Photographic elements and continuous-tone graphics (like gradients) are fundamentally incompatible with letterpress and will result in lost or inconsistent detail.
• Halftones: Even with halftone filters, subtle details will be lost.
• Rule: Do not use photograph templates or elements with tonal variations for any letterpress parts of your design; they will be rejected.
• Digital Exception: Digital photographic elements are acceptable only if you maintain clear separation from all letterpress elements.

Letterpress Alignment (Registration)

Combining two separate printing processes makes perfect alignment challenging. We must expect a registration tolerance of 1/16th to 1/8th of an inch.

Mandatory Gutter: To guarantee a quality result, you must create an empty space, or Gutter, of at least 1/8th inch (3mm) wide between all letterpress and digital elements. No overlaps are permitted.  

In the design tool, if you create a line from the "Elements" tab and set the border thickness to setting to 9pt, this is the size of the gap you’ll want to maintain between Letterpress and Digital elements.

Visual Example: Demonstrates a digital floral element (CMYK) and a letterpress 'Z' (blue).

• Leftmost 'Z': Elements overlap (will fail).
• Middle 'Z': Has a 1/16th inch gutter (acceptable but risky).
• Rightmost 'Z': Has a 1/8th inch gutter (mandatory/safe).

Image showing three versions of a floral pattern with a 'Z' in the center, illustrating overlap, a small gutter, and the required 1/8th inch gutter.

Mandatory Gutter: A minimum empty gutter of 1/8" (3mm) is required between any two separate letterpress elements. Overlapping elements are not permitted. In the Zazzle design tool, a 9pt border setting is a reliable reference for this gap size.

Minimum Detail and Line Weights

Very fine or densely packed elements will not print with perfect consistency from card to card. Small elements can work beautifully in letterpress, but some variation between prints should be expected.

For best results:

• Use stroke or line weights of 0.5pt or thicker (and no more than 5–10pt for fill areas)
• Keep line screen patterns below 30 LPI (lines per inch)
• Leave adequate spacing between fine details

 Example:

Fine details will come through, but letterpress printing is never an exact reproduction and is different from digital printing. Some variation is expected.

Typography and Font Selection

Typography is where letterpress limitations show up most. Bridging between letters and loss of fine detail are common, especially in script typefaces.

• Use larger, bolder typefaces wherever possible, particularly for Blind Deboss
• Use wider tracking and kerning to add space between characters
• To be safe and depending on the specific typeface (or font) being used, 9pt or 10pt is considered quite small, with 8pt being the absolute lower limit.
• Keep text to short phrases rather than dense paragraphs
• Avoid distressed fonts. Despite their visual similarity to letterpress aesthetics, they reproduce poorly in the process.

Color Offering 

A set of color swatches is available to help you compose letterpress artwork in external tools. These are close approximations, as actual letterpress ink may vary slightly from what you see on screen. 

*Note, we have removed previous Violet and Grannyapple colors from the Letterpress offering

Product Merchandising 

One more step helps make sure customers purchase your design exactly as you created it: restrict the Orientation option to match the orientation you designed in.

With most products, customers can enter the design tool to make adjustments. Letterpress is different. Because of its complexity, customers won't have that access, so all Letterpress designs must be set to "This orientation only."

This is a requirement for design approval.

Your templates will ensure that letterpress elements will not overlap digital color elements, typographic issues are resolved with templated text, fine-line details and spacing are meticulously handled, and letterpress photo/tonal elements are minimized or omitted as needed. 

Product Approvals

Your product will be posted for sale in the public store as soon as it has been approved by our Content Review team. You will be notified as soon as your product goes live. We make every effort to review all submissions within 4 business days.