About us

Cambridge Imprint is a small paper-making business in Cambridge, England, designing and printing patterned paper. We are known for our beautiful colours, our joyful illustration and typography, a lively, hand-drawn aesthetic, and meticulous attention to detail.

Cambridge Imprint seeks to create an authentic product, minimising or eliminating the dead hand of the camera and the computer from the design and manufacturing process. Hand-drawing, hand-making and other pre-industrial, pre-digital design processes create a livelier texture, a more living result. The spot-colour lithographic printing we use to make the paper sets a limit on the complexity of the images and the number of colours that we can use: constraints that we find a spur to our creativity. In general, our aim is to preserve the crucial quality of improvisation in our work, to maintain an environment where happy accidents can occur and be capitalised upon.

To remain agile and responsive, it helps to be small, and to work locally. We make our products in England, and source as many of our raw materials from England as we are able. Only by keeping our manufacturing nearby are we able to maintain the necessary attention to colour, texture and other detail. This strategy also minimises the distance travelled by our products and their components during the course of their manufacture, and means that we can be sure about the conditions in which our products are made.

Our paper is uncoated and printed with vegetable oil-based inks. It is therefore both completely recyclable and biodegradable. The stock we print on has Forest Stewardship Council certification, which means that it is produced from sustainable sources. Our wonderful printer is a long-established workers’ cooperative for whom environmental concerns are a key consideration. They adopted low-impact, environmentally-friendly protocols long before such issues became mainstream, and they continue to innovate in this regard. We use the minimum of packaging compatible with preserving our products from damage in transit, and we use absolutely no plastic of any kind anywhere in our product packaging. Some of our cards, labels and notebooks are protected by a fully biodegradable cellophane sleeve.