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.

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Mobile testing

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

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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.

The Move to Digital Pt. 2

I’d like to continue talking about the move to digital media and the reactions I’ve witnessed in others.

Most prevalent in my mind is a woman at work who has clearly been working with silk screening for a long time. She really knows her craft, but feels threatened by the new technology and makes things more difficult based on her knowledge of being phased out.

Now, I should explain that part of my job is to make sure that the digital files sent to us can be printed as required. Sometimes these images are still being silk screened, so we need to set up these images by separating all the colours being used and also adding registers to certain sides of the images for the people who are physically doing the screen printing.

This makes total sense to me, that the people actually printing the image layer by layer would need a quick and easy to see marker to ensure they are setting the image up correctly, but there are many variables I’m not aware of. This woman is so unused to dealing with digital media – though she can prepare artwork on her own quite effectively – that she is unable to explain to others the reasons for her requests. This becomes very frustrating. I have no problem setting files up in a way that is more efficient and makes everyone else’s life easier – but simply telling what I’ve provided is wrong is not helpful. As silk screening is not my trade I need these things pointed out to me.I'd be glad to know that based on the way the screens get set up on the table putting the registers in a certain location sets them at an appropriate line of sight for the people in production.

All I’m getting at is that the looming shadow of digital is real yes. But I’m not trying to make anyone else’s life harder. Certainly not, in fact the technology should be making things more streamlined. But people need to understand that they can work with the technology, and if they articulate their needs clearly, then the technology can be easily manipulated to serve them, rather than push them away.

Real Updates

So its about time for a real change around here. For those of you who know me well, you're aware that illustration was never my real passion. From about my second year at OCAD I knew that it wasn't really the right program for me, but that I should stick it out and finish the degree. My hope was that somewhere along the way I'd figure out what exactly I was really interested in doing.

I feel like I may have found that now, to some extent. About a month ago I finally managed to pull myself away from the fine art world of galleries, which was all well and good but again not where I wanted to be working, I found myself with the label of Graphic Artist.

Now, I can tell that it'll be easy for me to be derailed from my train of thought here, so bear with me. My goal for months was to get a job in graphic design. I felt like there was a set of rules there I could understand, and a technical aspect I could really get in to. So after applying to who knows how many graphic design positions, I found my current employer.

This is a company who specializes in printing on fabric. During the World Wars they produced items like life jackets and flags and were quite prosperous. But as time went on they sort of fell out of the loop, their print process is messy and time consuming, it uses all sorts of nasty chemicals which reek of health hazards.

But they want to change. They are aware enough to know that they are falling behind the times, and while they might not fully understand why that is, they have realized that digital is where things are heading.

And that is what I really like. I find people to be very turned off by digital art and design but it just makes so much sense to me. I always fall back on my thesis year when I try to explain this to people; one of my friends at OCAD, and many of my classmates were enamoured with silk screening. Our instructors thought it was just the coolest ever and wanted us all to try it. But it is expensive, dirty, and takes a long long time. I was often helping my friend wash his screens out, or buying new colours of ink.

I realized very quickly that I knew how to produce the exact same effects but on the computer. And my photoshop versions of the silk screening process were so convincing that people still have a hard time believing its "faked." They want to touch the page as though it has more texture than it does. Which was exactly my goal, that and staying clean, healthy, and under budget.

So now I have found a really excellent niche for myself in digital print production that I think is not only very important to this company, but also to the way in which we create goods generally. With digital technology we can save a lot of resources, we can make a smaller carbon footprint, we are free to make mistakes without waste (aside from the electricity used, for the most part). And while it is by no means a perfect system - it is moving forward in ways that will be truly beneficial to us if people can step away from their distaste of what is new to appreciate what is happening.

I have a fair amount to say on this topic still, but I think this has been a good introduction. I'll return with more shortly, and probably this blog will begin to reflect this evolution from traditional methods to digital in a more serious way. Or at least a more direct one.