Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 26

special issue: InnovatIon

Left, a simulated process color shirt printed by Anderson Studios in late 1990. Middle, Dave gardner at new Buffalo Shirt Factory,
in the mid-2000s. Right, one of gardner's favorite shirts from 1997, after new Buffalo had taken its look to the music industry.

a dagger in his mouth. He called Weiss with puzzling instructions
to buy specific inks from several different manufacturers. "So
he came in with this film, and we burned the screens, and we set
them up," Weiss remembers. "I had to put screens in every head
and flash in the unload station. We printed three shirts and I was
absolutely dumbfounded. By the time he got to me, he had the
entire process dialed in.
"I remember taking that shirt, going home at one in the
morning, throwing it at my wife in bed, and saying, 'We're
going to be millionaires.'"
Weiss and Gardner took that initial print to the NFL's offices
in New York hoping to obtain a license. Though they were
initially rejected due to their unconventional pricing, they
realized the same design effects would work at the collegiate
level, where licenses were easier to acquire at the time. Soon,
they had 38 universities under contract and a network of over
500 independent reps, taking New Buffalo Shirt Factory's sales
from $200,000 to $1.2 million in Gardner's first year on the job.
Before long, the company cracked the NFL, doing Super
Bowl shirts as well as a highly popular line known as Intense
Mascots. The look that Gardner had pioneered - for which
Weiss would soon coin the name "simulated process color"
- caught the attention of printers around the country. "Andy
Anderson and I would buy the Super Bowl shirts and take
them back to Andy's shop," Coudray remembers. "We literally
got out X-Acto knives and were scraping the things under a
microscope to see what the print order was and what they
were actually doing. I mean, it was brilliant work."
Gardner remembers meeting printers at shows who had
looked at his prints under a loupe and couldn't figure out what
he was doing. "They'd ask me what halftone line counts I was
using because they couldn't see any dots," he says. "I'd tell
them I was just using a 27-line or 32-line screen and they didn't
26

screenprinting

believe me. The dots disappeared because they were printed
wet on wet and the back of the screens were mixing the
colors. People who were imitating us were trying to run like
120-line screens and flashing every color."
New Buffalo Shirt Factory quickly grew and acquired
state-of-the-art presses that made flashing at the unload station
unnecessary and enabled Gardner to achieve his color effects
using more screens with dedicated colors. But he never abandoned his basic approach. "Even in a shop with 14 presses, the
technical expertise varies," he says. "Not every press operator is
going to be able to print cleanly and hold their dots. So I kind of
reduced it to the most common factors, and tried to standardize
my meshes, standardize my squeegees, and control everything
from the separation process. Basically, all I had to do was get it
up and in register, and the job took care of itself."
Adds Weiss: "What makes Dave a brilliant separator is that
anybody could print his work. You just put ink on the screens
and blasted it out."
As desktop publishing gave more printers the ability to
advance their separation techniques and experiment with
simulated process color, Weiss and Gardner successfully took
their distinct look into other vertical markets, including music.
You can see echoes of their work to this day, when the average
printer is still intimated by process color.
"When all this came out and took the industry by storm,
printers were impressed with the vibrancy and dimensionality of the process," says Weiss. "They were equally impressed
that they no longer had to print 100 percent on the underbase.
And that was Dave Gardner, because nobody knew how to do
it before him. They could come close using four-color process
over a 100-percent underbase, but it was Dave's manipulation
of the underbase and his understanding of ink opacity that
made the process brilliant."

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018