Ya’all have probably figured out that the “Lon & Don Show” can get pretty competitive at times. We’ve always partaken in many sports, races and the occasional drinking game. In fact, one of us did play college football. Since then it’s been a variety of pick-up basketball games and some company softball teams. We even have few trophies. However, as the knees become more and more fragile and the body heals a little more slowly these days, we have taken up “the sport of all sports,” ‘cause that’s how we roll. Bowling balls, that is.

Noodling the design

That’s right. Bowling. We roll ‘em every Thursday night in the fall and winter. We just started up again at the little bowling alley in the hood. This place is a small neighborhood bar a grill that has a six-lane alley built just for folks the likes of us.

Most of the regulars and kind folks who work at Wheat Ridge Lanes welcome about any kind of conversation about horsepower. (Gee, I wonder why we fit in so well?) Accordingly, while enjoying a post-league icy-cold diet green tea, the fellas approached us with an idea for new promotional shirts to sell out of the bar. The idea was to use a classic-style hot rod and the theme “That’s how we roll.” Our first thought was “Heck yeah, we can help ‘em with that!” We were pretty sure we could handle a project like this.

We had to start with the car. Where else would we start? We had to have that old-school look, and what says old-school better than a primer-grey classic roadster? And flames! We had to have flames. We were pushing for black shirts with up to fourteen colors but budget was an issue. Always is. They wanted to go with heather shirts with around six colors. (We wonder if Picasso had these kinds of constraints? But we digress once again.)

We would need some type to for the name of the establishment and the catch slogan. We set the type in Illustrator for the “Wheat Ridge Lanes” portion and warped it around a bit until we liked the shape. Adobe Illustrator has so many cool features nowadays that you can do almost anything you can think of to your typestyles and shapes.

Once the type was laid in we added some cool checkered flags. What says horsepower like checkered flags, eh? We set the flags behind our flamed hotrod and the type above it all. Then we added our tagline to the bottom, again using a bit of a vintage-looking font. That’s how we roll. (We love sayin’ that.)

Once we configured our layout by resizing and placing our parts, we were pleased and sent off the email for proofing. The fellas at the bowling alley had us increase the size of the rod a bit and we were good to go to film.

It was an easy output because we built the design in Illustrator and in spot colors from the very beginning, and were able output straight out of the same software. We set our halftones at 50-lpi, because we wanted to see the dots for that old school phat-dot look. (Phat, not fat.)

We set up our film on carrier sheets for the registration system and proofed it along the way for registration and accuracy. Once the films are labeled with print order, mesh and ink callouts, we’re ready for prepress.

Screens and inks

Inks were no sweat as we went with stock colors for the entire design. We went ahead and cut all the colors with some soft hand and curable reducer to thin the inks for a nice touch and drape. We ended up with the black keyline, the white of the flags, plus the blue outline, the red and yellow in the flames of the car, and a couple of very neutral grays, dark and light. That makes six, yes? (Or maybe seven. Close enough.) Because we were running on heather-grey shirts, opacity was not much of an issue other than with the yellow. So we went back to the opaque version of ink for the yellow of the flames.

We opted for the relatively high count of N272 high-tension mesh—one of our favorite all-purpose meshes for this type of application—all stretched to 45N/cm2 and with a duel-cure stencil (thinner than our normal EOM ratio) of about 10 percent, for a fairly thin ink deposit.

Print order was nothing too special. We started with our two grey screens, printed the red and then the yellow to build a nice transition on the flames creating an additional orange color. Then we printed our white and, finally, our keyline black. No flashing was needed or used. We added a one-color tag print on the back with the acronym WRL and, again, our tag ling “That’s how we roll.”

A matter of timing

We ran twelve dozen heather Ts and 36 hoodies. The shirts turned out great on the initial set-up with the original colors called. We delivered the product on Friday afternoon. And, oh, by the way, Wheat Ridge Lanes hosts an impromptu car and bike show in the parking lot every Friday evening. There is something to be said for timing . . . ‘cause “That’s how we roll.”