Tuesday 14 January 2014

Design for print: Production - Evaluation of pages.

I spent a lot of time within the traditional print rooms to produce all 7 original typographic pages, producing screens to expose, laser cutting plates, and cutting tiles in preparation. To produce each of the pieces I followed the instructions that I had written previously in my book. 

I exposed screens for the foil, flock and screenprint designs together. 

Producing the screen printed piece was simple, It was a one layer screen print, and therefore only took one session of screenprinting to produce which is great for begginers, opposite to a 4 colour screen print that would be too complex for a begginer and would take a lot longer to produce. 
I did expose a screen, however this turned out to be blocked in places and therefore not appropriate for use, and therefore one of the technicians managed to get my a new screen that had been left un exposed in the dark room. 
Therefore I exposed this screen and set it up to print the page. 



Once I had screen printed the page I noticed the large black blocks were slightly grainy which could have been due to the screen being emulsioned and not exposed for so long. However I felt that this really reflected the process that happens when screen printing. 50% of the time work does not come out perfect, but this is the result of using such an organic process.

Next I printed both the flock and the foil prints together by squeeging adhesive through a screen and placing both pieces with their relevant flock or foil into the heat press. I didn't have much ability to practice at flocking and foiling due to the texiflock and materials being quite expensive to buy (I had already spent a lot of money with the previous experiements I will hand in and that can be seen on my blog) 
The best outcomes from both processes had slight problems with them, For the foiling piece, the foil had missed part of the design and so paper had stuck to part of the design. 


I also had a small issue with the flocking of the page. A very small section of the design was missing, which must have been due to the adhesive not making contact with this part of the page. However this is not noticeably visible and does not affect the execution or message of the piece. 


Embossing was probably the most successful of my page designs at the production stage. The production of my wooden plate went no better than it could have which is what I think set me up for emboss which is what I think made the final outcome so successful. I altered the amount of pressure I used and newsprint packing until I got as close to a perfect emboss as I possibly could. 


Creating the lino print page was a lengthy process, that took a lot of work. In order to help with the start of the production of this page, I went to get the outline of what I wanted to do on the laser cutter. Therefore I could go in with the range of tools (different sizes) I needed to carve out the design on the tile. After a couple of days working on the tile It was ready to be printed. 


Once I had printed each of the traditional print pages, I collated these with the digital print ones in order to combine the entire content for my book. Other images of this are shown below. I took my final piece to the final crit to gain an opinion of my final product, directly from my target audience: my peers. 







The feedback that I got from my peers was as following:

- The book would be something that they would both like to borrow from the library and own there own copy.  However due to the notes pages, and the possibility of getting ink on the book in the print rooms I find that It would be more appropriate to sell the book to students. 

- The language/tone of voice used is appropriate for its purpose and audience. It is simple and instructive which is what you need when working in the print rooms, yet still friendly. 

- One piece of advice commented upon a few of the printing mistakes on the pages and suggested that I should reprint them. These concerned:
- The front page (wooden) as the print had turned out grainy and some of the smaller body copy (top right corner) could be slightly unreadable.
- The foiling page has some kind of paper adhered to it where a bit of foil should be. 
- the flocking page has some flock missing. 
- The mono print page has some excess ink around the main illustration. 

In response to this feedback I would have liked to reprint these few traditionally printed pages however I had already paid around £20 to create these on exposing 3 screens (£6) buying texiflock adhsive (£4) buying flock and foil (£4) purchasing wood for the front and back cover (£1) and the paper I had printed everything on was £1.90 a sheet (slightly smaller than A1). In order to redo these pieces of work I would have to re-expose the screens, and buy all new materials including a couple of sheets of paper, which is just not in my budget after experimenting alot with the print processes previously. 

However I understand that in production it would not be me creating these books and so in this way the problem would resolve itself.  




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