Making the best of it...

I certainly won't say its easy to make an apartment feel like home, but we're getting closer. 

I'm completely in love with my Pantone swatch pillows (and matching curtains) as well as our salvaged frames. The living room is doing rather well - the kitchen on the other hand has been a real struggle. So we've decided to paint the cabinet doors. The above photo is about halfway through the process but I'm feeling pretty optimistic. And brighter light-bulbs, I mean seriously - we should have taken care of that ages ago.

Invites

Hey! Since I can't really post anything work-related until the new products are released etc. I figured I'd give you a little taste of what else I've been doing. 

Some friends are getting married & I've offered to help them our with their invitations. They're still in a very preliminary stage but here is a sneak peek anyhow.

Packaging

I think the tedious process that is packaging design is nearly at an end for this season, and I will post a long and rambling explanation of how that went someday very soon, but for now here is what I've spent my morning on. This photo used to be red and blue, it is a long and horrible process to substitute colours from a photo, but I have done it.

C is for:

C is for Corvette. Should have done this AGES ago.

Alternatives

Since much of their product line is quite text-based this was my mock-up for a compromise. This they may come around to - the wedgewood idea is sooo fabulous for this product! 

Menu

So I dribbbled this the other day & while I wasn't thinking I'd post the full piece, here it is.  The story is, my boyfriend and I got sick of asking what the other wanted for dinner and not really having an answer. So I put this together as a fall-back. Don't know what we want? Well lets just check the menu. 

B is for

Boxter, Porsche

Colour Management

I haven't written much on here lately, but as far as work is concerned things are going well (aside from the terrible terrible noise of the printers which is driving me mad).

We got a new set of dyes in recently. The last ones were had issues with sublimation, leaving a sort of ghosted wash of colour on the white areas of a design as the fabric was treated post-print. The new dyes are high energy and do not have this issue at all from what we have seen in our testing so far. Most of the colour profiling has been completed. Which is teaching the printer what kind of ink it is using, and which colours. Now comes the human element of colour management, and it should be pretty interesting.

Most printers as you know are CMYK, and ours start out that way but we then have 4 other colours. Our acid dyes its CMYK, and then Orange, Red, Blue, and Grey (or 'Light Black'). The dispersed dyes we replaced were also set up this way with subtle differences, but the new ones are CMYK, Green, Red, Violet, Light Black. So we're expecting an interested first round or so of testing.

The woman I've been working with to profile everything is very good at this sort of thing, and I'm no slouch either - but I'm looking forward to seeing how exactly we need to reevaluate our colour mixing abilities to match our Pantone book.

A is for:

Atom, Ariel Atom.

Well here it is folks, the beginning of my Alphabet of Cars. Which will have to be given a better title in the near future.

Final

Realized I never put up the finished image. 

Mr Layton:

My mom asked me to do a simple orange poster for this quote.

Here you go Mom.

iphone 4 experiments

I saw a truly ugly university website from an American school and felt the need to toy around with this iphone 4 template from Teehan+Lax

Portfolio work

toying with possibilites. I think I prefer a sidebar navigation though.

Further web design

I haven't gotten any feedback re: my website design for work. It would appear there are too many other things going on. So I've been trying to learn more about html5, css3, etc and while that isn't going very quickly I create a new design that I'm going to try to get them to run with. 

The company colour is red so I'm pretty well stuck with that but I need to come up with something for the right-hand content section that isn't pink. The blue background I like but I haven't liked much of anything for the box on the right. Still, this is better than the last one. 

FOO!

have tickets to this show, which is bound to be fantastic, sooo I decided to mess around with some poster design. Certainly not finished but I think I like where its headed. I also really need to collect some new textures for my work. As lovely as this one is I've used it too much recently.

Evil Handbag

More from my Modalu obsession. 

Icon practice

Just trying to get some practice with this icon business.

Modalu Love

Work in Progress: I love these Modalu bags more than is reasonable, and since one of them was renamed for Pippa Middleton Im working on a series of Cinderella themed posters, evil stepsisters to come...

Reliant Robin

For those who love the BBC's Top Gear. No episode can top the Reliant Robin Shuttle and while I've submitted this to Threadless for their NASA themed challenge, even if it doesn't get chosen there you can be I'll be printing one of my own.  (and YES it is supposed to be upside down)

(obviously neither the NASA nor the Top Gear logo belongs to me).

CLICK HERE: http://atrium.threadless.com/nasa/submission/reliant-robin/ to vote for this design!

Learn & Play

I feel like this is almost spamming now, I've been updating so often - but I'm really just messing around trying to get the hang of certain skills and really, any feedback would be cool.

improvements

For work, this is still just a rough mock-up. Presentation is probably tomorrow though so any critique or comments would be appreciated 

Bean Me Up

Thanks again

I'm really enjoying dribbble.com - so pleased I got an invite!

Love to Hate

Some experimentation with icon design as well as type for the city we (Canadians) all love to hate

A Film by J.O. Incandeza

 I've been reading Infinite Jest for quite a while now, and it is a brilliant book. The father character has quite the filmography in listed in the footnotes and I've been inspired to create some art in reference to his amusing body of work. I have a few in the works but I wanted to show a little. I've really been trying to build up some more non-illustrative work so this little project should really help.

Back to Poly

Great news! Our polyester is good to go as of this morning. We had a nice little field trip with all the bigwigs to the colour department and got what was pretty much the go-ahead.

I feel really good about this, we've got a very promising supplier and we've taken care of the double-print / ghosting issue. Everything looks awesome so we'll be starting some sample production.

More on this soon!

website

New website layout again, highly simplified.

warm up

I've been a bit anxious and unable to get much done recently, but managed to set aside some of today to break apart that artist fear/block/what-have-you and I quite like what I've done so far.

Much Love

This was one beautiful weekend. <3

more work stuff

I don't get much opportunity to be creative at work, but I did pull this together a few weeks ago. It just got approved so I decided to put it up. Can't say I'm really proud of it, but its neat that we'll be printing it and sending it off anyhow.

Graduate Programs and Online Education

Recently I've become aware of new Masters programs at OCAD. They are strongly based in digital media, and have sparked my interest immensely.

However, I was disappointed with OCAD the first time through (this is not solely their fault I will admit). I'm quite wary of their ability to deliver what they promise, and I have what may be a romanticized idea of graduate school. Full of research and deep intellectual conversation. I'd also hoped for that in undergrad and its lead to my rather disdainful view of my first four years of university.

At some point in the future I may apply to one of these new digital media programs but for now I intend on taking a different path. Not long ago I came upon a political science major's website dedicated to how he learned everything his graduate curriculum would have offered, for a fraction of the cost. It was his thinking that in many fields the letters after your name aren't terribly important when set next to your world experience, so he looked carefully at what his program would teach him, and then went and sought it out on his own. Developing his own personal research assignments and travelling around to get more perspective.
This is my general goal, I know that art & design skills are gauged by your portfolio and so I've been looking around at what various design graduate programs offer and intend to self-direct my learning in these areas over the next couple years, while I work and develop my personal body of work in this manner.

So far its mostly been about research, I've got a nice stack of books at home I've begun to grind through to fill in the gaps left by my undergrad's light workload and if any like-minded folks out there are interested in joining me on this I'd be happy to work in a way that can help everyone out. In fact that would be ideal, given that the programs I would be most interested are about social and digital media, an online work group is right on target.

This feels like a good moment to mention Salman Khan again. This is a man with a fantastic idea. Not unlike Wikipedia it is his goal to make education more accessible, and he has begun doing this through youtube. He has posted a massive number of video lessons in all sorts of subjects and his concept for the future of education is this:
Students are given homework which involves watching his (or any) video lessons online, and they are then able to come to class the next day and ask questions and expand on the ideas with their teachers. Doesn't that sound ideal?

More possible designs

Hawksley2

Hawksley

yellow paper

rework

considering redoing my website again, here is what I've been playing with.

Pretty Unrelated

Awesome weekend sailing on the SL2 with the lovely Niki and the rest of her awesome bridesmaids.

Oh the humidity

Story of the week:

All this rain is not only making my hair unmanageable and frizzy - its destroying our printing also.
With Toronto getting 100% humidity for what at least feels like the last two weeks, our climate control of balancing AC, humidifiers and de-humidifiers is really struggling.

More than anything else the black ink in our prints is causing grief. While our room is mostly kept at a humidity that prevents the inks from bleeding out as they hit the fabric, the rest of the building is not so lucky. The lower levels, where the fabric is put through a chemical wash to make it light/colourfast is very damp and as a result we are getting a lot of rejected prints.

As of today I've cut out 5% of the proportions in the black, as per our colour guru - but we'll have to wait a day or so to see if that is enough to really fix the problem.

work stuff

Examples of what goes on at work. These designs come to us from the last time they were printed, which to say the least was before this company was doing any digital printing. Therefore the art needs to be redrawn in vector format and with Pantone numbers. Takes a day or so each.

static

watts

page loading

Mobile testing

Just trying to sort out how this blogging on-the-run thing works.

Sent from my BlackBerry® phone powered by Koodo Mobile®.

I am

Only

Patterns and Ink

Well its been a little while.
Work is pretty busy, but I won't get in to the specifics now.

We've been testing a new ink, and its working really, really well.
For anyone familiar with tattoos you might know that the black ink is "thinner" than most of the other pigments, in part because black is such a strong colour you don't need much of it to get a good line. This applies to our acid dyes too. Yellow is one of our best colours because its thin, it spreads well across the fabric and run smoothly through the printer heads.
Our blue however was a very heavy bodied or thick pigment and was almost constantly clogging our printer heads, forcing us to clean excessively in order to avoid those nasty lines often seen in digital printing.
Thankfully the Swiss have sent us some fancy new variant, and we can't get enough of it.

Aside from that I'm developing a real interest in pattern design, and have been watching Print & Pattern which has some fantastic work. We're slowing down a teenie bit at work which may allow me to explore this further.

Getting it right

Hello again!

I had an interesting thought on the weekend, in regard to how many things can go wrong during the print process and how paranoid and guilty I can feel about it.

I'm wondering now if maybe the aren't looking more closely than usual, and catching more errors because they know there are new people coming in that need to develop good habits. There have been a few things that I really get that impression about, and it helps me relax a little. I've been very very worried about getting everything right and if anything it makes things worse. The stress I create for myself in trying to double triple quadruple check everything seems to create more errors than not.

But when I really think about it there isn't a huge problem. I've been here just around two months and while I feel I know everything I've been told about rather well, the trick more recently has been trying to figure out what everyone else has forgotten to tell me. There is an awful lot of that too.

I'll get back to the entries about the tools and process soon, for now I need to concentrate on staying level and sharp. Tomorrow I go for a web dev. day-course though which could wither be really interesting or a total waste.

dizzy dizzy

So, there are about a million and one tiny details to remember with this job and I'm finding it pretty overwhelming at times. I made myself this image to have on my desktop and remind me to check EVERYTHING ALL THE TIME.

This is such a pretty font. Watch it get unusably popular now.

(and one of the 'details' here is that I grabbed the paisley from a twitter background. I did not make it)

The Move to Digital Pt. 5

Well this has been a pretty interesting process.

I’ve had time over the last couple of days to do more research, and I’ve got to say – I really didn’t realize how new this technology was. Or the knowledge hadn’t sunk in.

From what I can tell, as of 2005 only 9% of the world’s printing was digital. And that includes printing on paper. So who knows how much textile printing is done digitally but I expect it is a very small section of the industry.

Now, our printers are inkjet. Most people probably know what an inkjet printer is at this point, though the ones kept at home tend to have disposable cartridges rather than industrial level fixed heads.

We also use acid dyes. Now, this is interesting because acid dyes are sodium based organic acids and would generally be used on other organic materials such as wool, and even silk. But our only fabrics are synthetic; nylon and polyester (I’m told silk is in the works).

The reason (apparently) that acid dyes are used on nylon then is because like natural fibers, nylon is cationic. This is where I get really excited and all the fussy technical or scientific information pops up.

Cationic refers to an ion with fewer electrons than protons, giving it a positive charge, and allowing these acidic dyes to latch on and do their thing.

I’m hoping to learn as much about the chemical processes involved as I can, though for the moment the acid dyes are really the only ones we are using. The problems mentioned before with polyester keep us from getting in to how those dyes are reacting to the polyester. I’m sure we will get there. I’m guessing that the poly requires a reactive dye but the details will have to wait for a later date.

The only other thing I’d like to mention is the issue with keeping the inkjet nozzles clean. As they are used, ink dries around the edges and will eventually clog the nozzles. However, at this point it isn’t practical to build a cleaning mechanism into the printer, which uses a cleaning fluid. This means that the nozzles get cleaned by pumping more ink through, with the intention of pushing away the dried bits, and then using a small wiper blade (not totally unlike your windshield wipers) to clear the debris.

This means that every time you clean the nozzles, you are wasting extra ink. Now to be fair it takes about a month of constant use to produce even a few liters of waste this way – but it is still something that needs to be fixed eventually.

The only thing that is holy these days is efficiency right?

The Move to Digital Pt. 4

One of the real issues we’ve had at work recently is trying to print on Polyester fabrics as opposed to Nylon. The technology is available, as it is with Silk, but it is very different, and not as advanced. While our nylon printer uses Eight Colour Process (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black, Orange, Red, Blue, and Grey) the polyester dyes are of a completely different stock, based on what allows for light fastness etc. The polyester machine uses only Six Colours, sometimes called Hexachrome printing.

The Hexachrome does not have a red dye, and as a result we’ve found Pantone 199 impossible to achieve, amongst others. The 199 is such a powerful red that no combination of Magenta or Orange can create it. All the reds which are printable this way are either too Pink or too Orange. Until the technology allows for Eight Colour process the poly machine is very limited in the sorts of projects it can be used for. This is a real shame as people prefer the polyester, which can be made from recycled materials, and would be the “greener” choice.

So anyway, here we have an example of demand for a technology which has yet to be developed fully.

(If anyone has comments or questions I'd love to hear them. I'm really updating as I learn - so I expect there will be room for editing now and again).

The Move to Digital Pt. 3

Now I’d like to get away a little from discussing people’s negative reactions to new technology and discuss what exactly my work entails. To do that I’ll have to mention Pantone.

Pantone Inc. Is a corporation based out of New Jersey. They have, over many years become the people who tell you what colour is which. They have many colour books of varying types (lets say coated and uncoated with a finish of some kind, just to give you a taste). Each colour in their books is numbered, and while this may not seem very important or interesting at first, consider the flag of a nation for example.

Of course we know that the Canadian flag is red and white, and that the American is red white, and blue. But which red? Certainly we can all agree there is a difference between the red of a Ferrari for example and the red of a 1989 Buick. Some people would call these two reds Fire Engine or Cherry red, versus Burgundy, or maybe Wine red. But even these associations to other objects are ambiguous when you are dealing with the formulas of dye for printing.

At work our digital printers use eight colours in varying percentages to penetrate the weave of the fabrics we print on, to achieve a specific colour. Now, most printers use four colours which will make this easier to explain. Cyan, magenta, yellow, and black are in the printer you would use at home. The difference between a colour with 50% magenta, 5% black, 45% yellow, and no cyan whatsoever will be quite different from one with 60% magenta, no black, 35% yellow, and 5% cyan.(fig. 1)

So Pantone offers numbers to associate with each colour which become the absolute colour for any given logo or flag. Canada for example uses #199 for its red, where as Turkey, who also has a red and white flag, would use #177.

Again, this may should absurd – but when you are dealing with many types of printing process, such as silk screening versus 8-colour digital acid dyes . . . well some math can really come in handy. There are formulas for any given colour, and they differ from dye to ink, to whatever you may be using. Worth mentioning for those who aren’t aware – your computer and TV use red, green, and blue to produce colours with the light of the screen rather than the cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (CMYK) of pigments. Some televisions (Sharp) have recently added Yellow to their screens in order to create brighter, crisper images which are popular with HD and Blu-ray.

Probably anyone coming to this blog with previous knowledge of art will know a great deal of this already, but I’d like to chronicle the evolution of this company’s printing process and that requires some background information.