• Flickr
  • Twitter
  • RSS
  • Dribbble
  • Email

Categories

Inspiration

Design

  • Dan Stiles
  • Drew Melton
  • Riley Cran
  • Two Arms Inc.
  • DKNG
  • Anthony Lane
  • Ugmonk
  • Bandito Design Co.
  • Friends of Type
  • Kendrick Kidd
  • Jessica Hische
  • Sock Monkee
  • Scott Hill
  • Frank Chimero

Supplies

  • French Paper Co.
  • Process Type
  • House Industries

Printing

  • Studio on Fire
  • Mandate Press
  • Cranky Pressman
  • Threadbird
  • Vahalla Studios

Calendar Process

November 7, 2011 | Comment

spacer

Monster Time

This project has been in the oven for quite some time now. Chris and I started hashing these characters out in the middle of August 2011. After flipping a coin to determine what months we were responsible for, we traded off monster drafts from week to week trying to match themes with our characters in fun ways. I think right off the bat we both hit up the easy months like October and January. New Years seemed like a no-brainer and nothing really compares to Halloween for October.

spacer

I personally got stuck on September. I procrastinated the shit out of it until the end and it ended up becoming a favorite month of mine. Labor Man Steve for the lone holiday of September; Labor Day.

spacer

Production

The calendar production and printing was quite an undertaking for me. I didn't really realize it when we started. I did the math, but for some reason, a month of printing didn't seem like a big deal in the beginning. It became quite a chore rather quickly.

spacer

spacer

Specs and Math

The calendar is a duplexed booklet of 7 sheets. Which means that none of the pages make sense when you are printing them until the pages are put together and saddle stitched (like when you inbooklet something). This meant I had to make absolutely positive at every step of the way that the sheets had the correct monsters on the back of them AND they were facing the correct direction AND aligned to the correct side of the paper. Then to make matters worse, separations had to manually include creep for trimming the bottom edge. This coincidentally made all the pages look gradually more incorrect as the printing got closer to the middle of the booklet.

spacer

To make matters a little more tedious, duplexing screenprinted sheets is tough. For instance, let's say you print 3 perfectly good runs of colors for one page of the calendar. So that's one side completely done with the other side of the duplex sheet being half done. You start printing your last color for that sheet and you get three misprints in a row. That's a pretty big hit. You just lost 3 perfect 3-color prints in one pull. So needless to say, I had quite a few misprints.

spacer

Here is the production math:

100 sheets per color x 4 colors per duplexed sheet x 7 sheets per booklet = 28 individual screens / 2800 pulls.

This means if a squeegee pull was completed every 15 seconds (without stopping to washout, or expose, or prep) it would take 11 hours to print all 200 calendars. It took me a little over a month of printing nights and weekends.

This all sounds fairly dramatic but in reality it took this long because I don't have the means to print larger at the moment. If I could print 18x24 sheets, this would have taken much less time and labor to complete. Either way, I learned a tremendous amount from a production standpoint during this project.

For more pictures of the finished product or to snatch one of these up click here.

spacer

Posted in: