Two outlines were created; one to print and one to create a gutter for the ink.

The Kerning, Tracking and Size tools were used to set a Warp Arc effect in the athletic font.

Compare the original file on the bottom of the screen with that which was rebuilt. The eagle on top was smoothed out by using the Pen tool in Photoshop. The fill colors were set to none and the stroke to the desired color.

As we made it through another graduation season across this great U. S. of A., it occurs to us that one of our daughters will be throwing her high school cap into the air in just one more year. Wow! Makes us feel old and just a little weepy. But we digress (yet again). As with many in this industry, this time of year puts us to work on graduation projects galore. Over the last several years we worked our tails off to earn some of the business with one of the larger high schools in the Denver-metro area. We have been printing the school’s graduation bandanas at a very aggressive price point for the better part of a decade in hopes of earning more of the other work schools have to offer. While it’s never enough, we are finally doing more business with these folks. But it didn’t come easy. Nothing worthwhile ever is, as they say.

 

For as long as we can remember, the theme on these bandanas has remained the same—text reading “Eaglecrest” on the top, its raptor mascot in the center and class of the given year on the bottom. The first time we did this job, the image was printed in red and black ink on white bandanas. While printing bandanas presents some issues from a size perspective and because the material is generally very thin, printing on white is really not that big of a deal overall. Of course, it’s never simple. What began with white migrated into black and finally red bandanas. Yikes! That means opaque white ink on black and red 50/50 poly/cotton oversized, very thin bandanas. Fast forward several years and we think we have figured out the best way to handle this type of project. So let’s begin at the beginning... where else would you start?

 

Diploma-worthy art

We began by finding the mascot. This one happens to be a raptor; a pretty cool mascot, we must admit. Years ago, we started with a clipart eagle head used by the Philadelphia Eagles, combined it with many other bird mascots and then took the neck feathers and morphed them into an E for Eaglecrest. Clever eh? 

 

We pulled the school’s logo from its website—you know, those 72 dpi 1" X 1" gif files that are so nice to work from. Not! Once again, we begin with the digital equivalent of a hand-drawn bar napkin. Even our wonderful Live Trace tool in Illustrator won’t do much good when we blow up the icon to six or eight inches. 

 

Instead, we started from a new template with the image selected and Layers Palette open. With the opacity set at 50-ish percent and the new layer locked, we were able to see the new lines as we drew and recreated the image. We did this for both print colors on separate layers and built spot colors using the Swatches Palette by choosing red and black. Using the Pen tool from the tool box, we set the fill color to “none” and the stroke color to our desired colors. The point of the beak would be our first anchor point, then others were set around the shapes until it was built around the mascot’s colors. This way, when the fill box would fill in the shapes with color, it would be ready to be output to film on the inkjet.

 

We chose our font and size and typed in the top and bottom solutions separately. We used the Kerning, Tracking and Size tools to set a Warp Arc effect in our athletic font. To make it easier to print, we created two outlines, one of which we would print and the other to serve as a a negative space (gutter) between the two inks. 

 

Using a burnishing tool more traditionally used in vinyl application helped speed production and save the press loader’s fingers. Platen peel would also need to be changed twice during the run to solve ink buildup caused by printing the thin material.

Commencement

We decided to print two whites and a black on the red bandanas. The first white would be exposed on a 156 tpi mesh at a tension of 35 N/cm. This film would get an eighth-point overall choke to compensate for any gain we may get on press. We set this screen up first, followed by a flash and cool station (or open head). 

 

The next screen would be the black, prepared on a 230 tpi screen at the same tension. The higher mesh count would print only a very thin layer of ink, which would be sufficient since we have no opacity issues with black. 

 

The spot white would be printed wet-on-wet through a 196 tpi mesh set to that same tension. Because of the very thin nature of the low-cost bandanas, it was critical to keep the ink on the surface as much as possible. These tensions were important to this mission by minimizing the off-contact distance and squeegee pressures. Even with these techniques, platen peel would need to be changed twice during the 1,200 piece run as the platens would ultimately build up with ink. 

 

Over the years we figured out that we minimized dye migration associated with the lower-cost poly/cotton blends by switching to a 100 percent cotton bandana that has more stable dyes at curing temperatures. They cost a little more but we get far better results in the end.

 

With a run this size and the nature and difficulty in loading the bandanas where they would be completely flat, we were looking at almost a full day of production on the automatic. Thanks to this task, over the years our loaders would end the day with bloody fingers. Okay, not really, but the red bandanas made our fingers pretty raw and quite red from the dyes in the fabric. Thus, we came up with an easier way to load by using a burnishing tool traditionally used in vinyl application. It keeps fingers from getting torn up and speeds up the process considerably.

 

Ultimately, we take this on year after year because nobody else wants to do it. The samples we have seen before we took over were, quite frankly, awful—very thick inks and terrible bleed problems. And to be honest, our first couple of runs turned out okay, but not great. Years later we think we have it down and the product looks awesome. Bonus: we even figured out how to make a little money on these bandanas. It’s a good thing—we have a few years to make up for.