There are times when we get that cool project that makes us remember why we got into this industry in the first place. This was one of those. A dear old friend and long-time customer of ours had a crazy idea. We just love crazy ideas, as you know. Greg runs a bakery. We print his Denver Bread Company logo on all kinds of apparel several times a year. By the way, his fresh homemade bread is fantastic especially when it is still warm out of the oven. So one day Greg brought us in some of his pastries and let us in on the plan. And this wasn’t about dinner rolls. This was about rock-n-roll, baby!

Another reunion tour

Greg, now in his—how shall we put this?—more mature days, was in a rock band a long time ago. Of course he was. Weren’t we all? He and his buddies had started the band about 30 years ago back on the east coast. His big idea was to get the band back together. Hey, if the Eagles can do it—twice—why shouldn’t Greg? After several, ehem, meetings and a bunch of “remember when” stories, the gig was set. The band would get back together and form a reunion tour for all the fans and friends that remembered the early days. What else could he call it? Ah yes, another reunion tour.

The first couple of shows were a big hit. Well, as big a hit as an old local band playing a small venue in a favorite watering hole could be. Big enough for Greg and the boys, though. And they were pretty damned good too. So they decided to go for the big time and do two more shows. For the next shows they would surely need some T-shirts. Big-time rock-n-roll T-shirts. If you like the band you gotta have a shirt. We think it’s like a music rule or something.

MS Word . . . for artists?

Of course, Greg has a computer and is an artsy kind of guy who can build a design himself. He is a musician, after all. Oh boy, what were we in for? So he brings in this design built in Microsoft Word.

Hold on, now! Not exactly what we would like to see and not really what he wants when we open it on screen. Pretty tough to do much with this type of file. So we sent Greg off to do some homework. He would go home and dial in what he was looking for and go down to his local Kinko’s and print out a nice proof of what he wanted the final design to look like.

The image on paper wasn’t too shabby when we saw it, but we knew we could manipulate it and print it on a T-shirt even better. Essentially, we would just rebuild what Greg was looking for, what we knew he wanted. After we scanned and imported the image into Illustrator, we began with type solutions and added some outlines and a little “warp” treatment. Then we built a sun shape similar to the one he brought us. The band was called Solstice so a sun was essential. Using some of the cool brush tools we created a nice stroke we liked and repeated it in a circle around the center shape. We added some outlines to it and filled in some color. It was still in need of a little something at this point. Something in the back ground. We decided to copy part of the sun strokes and skew them as a one-color for the shadow areas behind our main element. We would make it a halftone of one of the other colors in the design to hold the number of screens down. Everybody is on a budget.

Good to go

We would need to build a base-plate for the design because our band wanted to print on various colors of garment. We avoided putting the base under the background halftone color, in order that in would sit back into the shirt and remain nice and soft, both visually and physically to the hand. We output our film at 50-lpi with angles set at 29 degrees.

Because the band really had no logo or official colors previously, it was up to us to choose ink colors. No problem there. We used something right of the shelf, no special mixing needed.

Sometimes these things do work out. Screens were really no big deal on this job either. The white printer was on a 156-tpi at 35N/cm2 and the balance were all on 230s at that same tension.

The real challenge here was in registration or, more specifically, in pre-registration. Outlines like the ones on this design are particularly challenging and can really expose any registration weaknesses. We made sure everything registered well on the film and carriers before going to screen, and were careful in hanging the film on the screens and in exposure, so as not to make any mistakes. We double-checked our parallelism between each of our screen clamps, and then to our platens, and set our off-contact even to 80/1000ths of an inch. We dropped our screens on the platen fixture in each head and, after adding inks, floods and squeegees, were ready for test printing so let ‘er rip. Our initial test print was pretty darned close to registering on the money. We micro’d two screens just a touch and were good to go.

For those about to rock

The order turned into a couple hundred shirts at a time and three different reorders. Solstice played about a dozen gigs and rocked the house each and every time. Not a bad little deal. Hold up your lighters and repeat after us, “Rock-n-roll never forgets! Long live rock! Rock-n-roll ain’t noise pollution! For those about to Rock! Detroit Rock City! Rock on!. . . .”