Fine Print | Meticulous Ink

To put pen to paper is the very nature of Meticulous Ink, the quality stationers are dedicated to the fine tuning of letter press printing, a technique that dates back to the 15th century. For a company that was founded on a table top in Bath, Charlie Cumming and Athena Cauley-Yu have succeeded in making a name for themselves, collaborating with Anthropology, Heal's and a forthcoming range of Christmas cards in the pipeline for Fortnum and Masons. 

What was the first design you ever printed?

The first design we ever printed was a little motif onto cotton board for our original correspondence card sets - a little vignette of the outdoors, a countryside hill and some trees and a freshly ploughed field. It was very simply printed, in black on our first press we had which was a 1870 Model no.4 letterpress. This was the start of our box sets, and a design that is so popular we still produce it today.

What influences your design work?

I find inspiration can come from very different places a lot of the time, influences vary from being in a different city for a few days, taking a trip to a library or museum, searching through old antique books to try and find something that might spark an idea - or even just trawling through blogs and feeds online. A lot of the time we are trying to create something functional and so the design is really just accompanying the functionality of the product we create - for our notepads we wanted to make something that people would enjoy using and that would work well, with the addition of a letterpress printed cover and a coloured glue binding. It’s these little touches that we hope will enhance the aesthetic of something that might be used for everyday.

Do you have a favourite style of Typography?

For me, I enjoy a lot of the older typefaces, probably Caslon Italic being one of my favourites, but then a lot of new typefaces are also very beautiful. I suppose I prefer serif typefaces mostly, there’s a lot of good stuff coming from Lost Type, such as Klinic Slab. Hoefler Frere Jones (now Hoefler & Co), have consistently produced excellent typefaces, Gotham is a typeface we use within our brand regularly.

How many Printing Presses do you use at Meticulous Ink?

We mainly use our two Heidelberg platen printing presses, one is set up to print in ink only, as it was originally intended - and the other we have converted so it can print with foil using a built in heat process. We started using two table top, hand fed presses which worked well at the time, but as we got on to higher quantities we found that we needed to find machines that were capable of printing larger quantities at higher speeds.

What is your design background?

I personally don’t really have a huge design background, I’m actually trained more in music - but have illustrated all my life. I learned all my skills and techniques through doing, I have worked at screen printers and from other printers. The letterpress world in particular is very close, and if you ask nicely you will usually find someone who is more than happy to teach you the basics for the methods and techniques involved.

Do you both have a similar aesthetic?

Athena tends to design with type in mind, for the majority of the time. She specialises in creating bespoke stationery, so words with type a lot - naturally when she comes do design a product she will approach something with a typeface or look in mind. Personally I tend to approach something with pencil and paper - I love to create characters, scenes and designs in a hand drawn style, even when it comes to type I prefer to design a hand drawn typeface from scratch, perhaps with a little inspiration from an exhausting typeface. I tend to design with a slight edge of humour, something not to specific, something different and sometimes very silly.

Are you keen on running workshops at your store in Bath?

We already do! We started our workshops in Bath last year, and the popularity of these workshops inspired us to take them on the road - it’s lovely to be able to offer these courses to people outside of Bath and the response is always fantastic.