Since the whole world, including and especially our industry, has gone digital, the old ways of preparing screen-printing art and traditional separations have slowly dwindled away. Notice we said old ways, not old school. Old school is still okay, but you gotta do it a new way.

We used to get all kinds of original art from customers, and still do. Of course, we’d always request camera-ready art but usually get the traditional chicken scratches on a bar napkin. We ourselves were certainly guilty of this transgression, as many a great idea begins over a frosty cold Diet Coke or two or three or four. We used to draw out a design in pencil on whatever was handy, then scare up some good paper and redraw our key line with a Rapidograph pen. Then we would take a camera shot of our clean black line and make a film positive of that. Finally, we would cut our Rubylith overlays for each fill color creating our separations.

Halftones were created using rub-on sheets that could be cut and pasted onto individual overlays as well. Accuracy was, at best, completely dependent on the skill level of the separator and his knife. All this before screen making. An exhaustive process, to say the least.

Nowadays, there’s typically at least one computer in every home and business. Try several, anymore. And we all know what that means to us, don’t we? Sure, everybody is suddenly an artist too. Wonderful. Just what we need. Much of the original customer art we receive these days is just as pathetic as what we’ve always received . . . or worse. We might call it the 21st-Century digital equivalent of the soggy old cocktail napkin. Still, it sets us up for this month’s “Lon & Don Show”. . . .

Really handcuffed

The phone rang and we were able to catch up with a long-time industry friend over an extended conversation. This old acquaintance had apparently gotten back into the game and needed a quick-turn job. Just a couple of days as a matter of fact.

Well, that’s what we’re here for. Hey, this was an old friend so we had to hook him up. He said he had the file we needed and it would make this project easy. Boy have we heard that before. And this one was no different. Upon examination we found that the file was a huge full-color tif turned into a PDF and placed on a dark background with no editing capabilities. Yikes! We hate that.

Unfortunately, the short lead time and the fact that there is no budget for big-time separation charges really handcuffs us on this project. The image should be at around eight colors, but our customer can only pay for four. He gives us the old, “You guys are the bomb. You can do anything. Just make it work.”

Okay? And that’s what we did . . . or so we thought.

We went to our stock artwork library and found a two-color globe that was somewhat close to our customer’s logo, and laid out some similar type. It looked close. Not bad. We guessed. Then the logo was all built with spot colors in Illustrator so output was a snap. We had totally simplified this logo and were ready for press. Our customer laid it in our hands so we went to press and printed a very basic red, green and white image on royal shirts. The shirts were shipped to our customer from whom we received the following comment: “These shirts look terrible!” Oops. Not what we like to hear.

Questionable judgment

Should have known. This was really questionable judgment on our part. We allowed the timeframe and the budget to dictate our methods. Bad idea every time. Now we’re down to the eleventh hour and our customer hates the shirts. Of course we could have argued about whose fault this was. But that rarely accomplishes anything. So what can we do? We asked our customer to get us new shirts and we would get the print right . . . period. All on our ticket. We had to look at this as an opportunity to earn a customer’s commitment forever.

We took our file into Illustrator and rebuilt the entire image from scratch. It took us quite a bit longer but it was the way we should have done it in the first place. In the end we had a total of seven colors on each side. Left chest and full back. We took it all to film and then to screen, as we scrambled to get it all done.

Our white printer was exposed on 196-tpi stretched to 35N/cm2 to hold some of the fine halftones, and the balance of the colors were on 230s. The inks were fairly primary—royal, red, kelly, gold—and were not difficult to match. Print order was typical, dark to light and least coverage to most, followed by the highlight white to punch up the highlight areas. We allowed some of the royal of the shirt to serve as some of the blue areas in the logo as well.

A lesson learned

Ultimately, we ended up outputting 24 films, burning 24 screens and replacing 12 dozen shirts. The second batch of shirts was perfect and the customer was very happy. Yes, with the shirts themselves, but also with our commitment to make them right. This was a very expensive lesson but a lesson indeed. This customer will be with us for life. Lesson learned.