When it comes to being a creative, you can’t beat the feeling of finding a material that behaves as you always hoped. For those working across book covers, luxury packaging, stationery or brand collateral, that often means hunting for paper you can rely on.
Colour that reads the same at 135 gsm as it does at 350 gsm, no matter what the print process. Coloursource, the dyed-through uncoated paper range produced by James Cropper in the Lake District, has quietly built a reputation for being exactly that material.
Now, in its next chapter, Coloursource is going global – with Swiss paper and coverings specialist Winter & Company taking on worldwide distribution and bringing the range to designers, publishers and brands through a new dedicated webshop.
From mill to world
James Cropper has been manufacturing on the same site in Burneside, Kendal, since 1845. It’s a family-owned company with deep roots in the English Lake District, and based at a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Coloursource is one of their most distinctive ranges: 50 colours across three matched grammages (135 gsm, 270 gsm, and 350 gsm), all uncoated and dyed through, meaning the colour runs through the entire sheet rather than sitting on the surface as a coating. It means designers working across multiple formats and weights can maintain colour consistency across a project without switching suppliers or wrestling with unexpected shifts in tone.
“Designers want colour that stays true, and paper that behaves predictably in production,” says Paul Barber, MD at James Cropper. “Coloursource is made to deliver that reliability, with the look and feel people expect from a dyed-through, uncoated sheet.”
For Winter & Company – a 130-year-old business trusted by leading designers and global brands for premium cover materials – distributing Coloursource felt like a natural fit for a partnership that’s been running for 50 years, with the same number of colours in the range itself. With subsidiaries across multiple continents and regional hubs designed to keep service local, Winter brings the range genuinely closer to designers wherever they’re working.
“The launch of Coloursource has been a great success,” says Paul Davinson, MD of Winter & Co. UK Ltd. “The support from our customers for premium dyed-through paper, manufactured in the UK, is a strong driver for this. As we enter the next phase we will sell Coloursource through a dedicated webshop, meaning we can get product to market even more efficiently.”
Paper as raw material
To mark this new phase, Winter commissioned photographer Susan Castillo to create a series of paper sculptures using Coloursource. Castillo, who previously shot the striking floating paper images for the original Cropper campaign, approached the brief with the same tactile rigour she brings to all her work. The sculptures are made entirely by hand: no CGI or digital trickery, just a talented artist working directly with the material.
The images capture something easy to overlook about paper as a medium – its physical weight, its capacity to hold form, the way colour shifts as light moves across an uncoated surface. Shot with Castillo’s characteristic attention to light and composition, they make a compelling case for the aesthetic potential of a material that’s usually treated as purely functional.
Alongside the sculptures, Castillo visited the James Cropper mill to document the papermaking process itself – giving a rare glimpse into where the material comes from, and the craft that goes into producing it.
Printed by hand
The campaign also features work by screen printer Dan Mather, who has collaborated with some of the most respected names in graphic design, including Marina Willer and Matt Willey. For this project, Mather has produced a set of limited-edition posters printed entirely by hand on Coloursource, demonstrating the range’s performance in one of the more demanding analogue print processes.
Screen printing requires paper that can take ink cleanly and hold it true. Watching Mather work on Coloursource makes the case for the material as viscerally as any specification sheet could.
The campaign and its sculptures, screen-printed posters, and everything in between make a compelling case that paper handled with the right care and craft is a creative medium in its own right.
