People picture ink-stained hands when they imagine how a card gets made. The truth, at least at our end, starts with a stylus and a screen — and that's before the paper is even in the room.
It starts on a screen, not a desk
Every Design Smith card begins as an original hand-drawn illustration, built up in Procreate on an iPad with an Apple Pencil, one layer at a time. It's still drawing in every sense that matters — the same decisions about line weight, colour and composition a pen-and-ink illustrator has always made — it just happens that the paper doesn't turn up until much later. The advantage is that we can nudge a colour, resize a mark or try three versions of a title before committing to anything, which is the one part of the process that's genuinely faster than it would have been fifty years ago.
Getting from a file to a printed sheet
Once a design is finished, it goes to our printer in Kent as a print-ready file, and this is where a decision most customers never think about actually gets made: litho or digital. Litho printing — the traditional method, where each colour is applied from its own metal plate — is superb for accuracy and colour consistency, but those plates cost time and money to make, which only pays off at large volumes. Almost all of our cards are short runs, so they go through digital presses instead: no plates, no big minimum order, and modern digital print is close enough to litho on colour that most people would never spot the difference. It's the same trade-off a lot of small independent studios make, and it's the reason a shop can carry a card in a print run of a few dozen rather than a few thousand.
The paper is doing more work than it looks
The card stock itself is 320gsm Marquet, FSC-certified, and lightly textured — there's a faint grain under a thumb rather than the flat, glossy finish most cards default to. FSC sounds bureaucratic but means something specific: an independent chain of custody confirming the paper came from a responsibly managed forest or recycled source, tracked all the way from timber to finished sheet. We picked that stock because the texture does something a smooth card can't — it gets people to actually touch the thing before they've read a word of it. The envelopes are recycled kraft, which is as much a decision about how a card feels in the hand as it is about sustainability.
Folded, wrapped and counted by hand
This is the least photogenic part of the process and the one that takes the longest. Every card is folded, checked, and packed individually — there's no machine in this studio doing that part. For a while, cards went out in a plastic sleeve, the way most of the industry still does it. We've since moved to a vellum belly band instead, in line with a wider shift across independent card publishers away from plastic wrap altogether. We're also working through the range giving each design its own barcode, generated through the industry's standard numbering system, so a till in a shop three counties away can recognise it without a manual price check — not every card carries one yet, but it's where the whole range is heading. Only after all of that does a card get boxed up for a stockist, or for someone's own front door.
None of this is invisible when you're the one doing it, but it mostly is once a card's on a shelf, which is rather the point — a customer should just get to enjoy the drawing. If you'd like to see where all of that ends up, our cards collection is the whole family of them, printed, folded and wrapped exactly this way. If you'd rather not choose, The Slow Post does the choosing for you — five cards, curated and sent to your door every other month, made exactly the way we've just described.
