Summer Brief - The Presentation

Our summer brief part deux, was to create a 5 min presentation on interesting examples of print/print process.

I figured it would be more interesting to talk about the actually process and the industry standard equipment than plough through dozens of examples simply pointing out why i liked them.

Fortunately for me one of my friends was temping as a receptionist at a print agency and she kindly arranged it so I could come in a poke around for a couple of hours.

They did printing methods such as;

-large scale automated screen printing

-batch production manual screen printing

-heat transfer printing

-ink jet printing

and also a very large embroidery section, which was capable of stitching onto almost any type of garment.

The automated screen printing machine was pretty cool. It has a work force of 3 people running it, all doing very repetitive production-line-style jobs.

This is the monster screen printing machine. It is pretty awesome. Basically one of the guys operating it puts the product onto a little rotary table. It then moves to the first screen point where the first layer of ink is put on by an mechanical squeegee. Then it moves around to the heater for a few seconds to dry the ink. If there is more than one colour to print it will then move around to another pre-set up point where the next layer is applied, then back to the heater ect... you get the idea.

This is the manual screen printing machine. It is pretty cool too. Could do with one of these at the college. Would save so much time and would make the prints more accurate, but oh well.

The ink jet printer is really good for quickly producing lots of products. Lower quality of print, but not too bad really.

Something that did surprise me was the number of people working there who had very dull jobs. Such as these guys, who basically sit there all day cutting out designs for heat transfer items. The heat transfer designs are the least detailed and also leave that annoying shiny border around and over the design.

I did find it quite nice looking at how messy the place was. I think the studios at college are tidier than this place. Just check out all the ink.

The embroidery section was completely new technology to me. They can print p to about 26 garments at any one time and it only takes a min for tem all to be done. They can embroid, shirts, jumpers, fleeces, trousers, hats...well pretty much anything really.

There is a little machine which creates a stitch version of the design scanned in. This process is called digitization. It also calculates exactly how many stitches will be needed and therefore can calculate the over all cost of one unit.