LEONHARD KURZ 's traditional Christmas cards are more than just embellished end-of-year greeting cards. This year, the card embodies the fusion of art, craftsmanship and innovative technology. The details of the three-dimensional card were worked out with a lot of passion and care. We take you on a journey that begins with the first idea and ends with the embellished greetings card.
Every year, LEONHARD KURZ looks for an artist with a regional connection to Fürth to design the greetings card. This year, the KURZ team worked with the artist Ortwin Michl, who has been creatively dealing with the theme of ‘clouds’ for many years.
There is something fascinating about clouds. They are always moving, constantly changing their structure and continually forming new shapes. Ortwin Michl has processed his fascination with clouds in his paintings – on a two-dimensional surface. With this year's greetings card, he breaks out of two-dimensionality and ventures into three-dimensional space. By combining art and technology, he has succeeded in creating an impressive symbiosis between artistic vision and the KURZ transfer embellishment. If you turn the greetings card, the different viewing angles give the impression that the clouds are moving.
KURZ wanted to industrially replicate the structure that Michl had created using a hammer and nail in a silver-coated cardboard shape. The rawness of the indentations, the strong blue surfaces and the strict geometry in Michl's concept inspired KURZ in the choice of materials, the embellishment and the embossing, to go beyond the limits of the load-bearing capacity of cardboard that would normally be observed. To do this, KURZ literally broke open the material in order to approximate the manual crafting process on an industrial scale.
Exciting interplay between nature and technology: When implementing the project, the focus was on the contrast between the strictly geometrically folded paper object and organically soft forms. The surface of the paper was given a striking structure through manually created perforations, which is overlaid with a cloud-like shape. The additional application of color creates the impression of clouds moving when the card is moved.
The subsidiary of KURZ Hinderer + Mühlich offers a wide range of stamps, embossing wheels and embossing tools and was responsible for the unique haptics of the greetings card. The aim of the embossing was to exceed the load limit of the material and thus create deliberate breaks and cracks in the cardboard.
The silver surfaces that were intended in Michl's design were transformed into a metallic structure that is broken up by cloud patterns. As a contrast to the geometric embossing, a frequency-modulated random pattern was incorporated, which is reminiscent of clouds. The finishing of the blue, solid-colored Gmund Colors natural cardboard (300g/m² GMUND Colors matt shade 55) was implemented with DT-H Cold Silver using a DIGITAL METAL® application. The flat embossing was carried out with LUXOR® 420 and blind embossed in the last step.
What would a greeting card be without the personal words? For the font color, KURZ has used the tried-and-tested LUXOR® 385, which enables particularly filigree two-sided hot stamping on the 300 g/m² Magno Matt paper.
With our Christmas greeting cards, we want to inspire you as usual at the end of the year and show you the design possibilities our technologies offer. At KURZ, we think beyond boundaries and always offer our customers the best possible solutions for surface decoration. If you are looking for further inspiration and are interested in our surface decorations, please visit our website.
We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
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