Impressions - April/May 2013 - (Page 60)

talking SHOP Screen Printing Graphics & Design Use Easy Shortcuts for Art Setup These four methods will help you save time and become more efﬁcient with art-related tasks. By Thomas Trimingham, Contributing Writer Figure 1. An art guide can be helpful and should contain all of the job’s art information. In most cases, it should include the front and back of a T-shirt, an area for the needed copy, a list of the suggested colors, a breakdown of image sizes and an extra notes section for any special requests. screen printers. If you take time to test and practice these techniques, you often can cut signiﬁcant time from your average art job, using the extra design time with efforts on other projects. These steps include: reﬁning the sales script and art guide, starting the design based on the ﬁnal garment, limited and controlling ink palettes, and keeping proﬁciency a top priority. These steps may sound technical, but they are just a combination of logical processes and a production perspective, all applied to the art department. It is easy to create a spreadsheet and see how many designs an artist or department produces, then compare that data with the output in the printing department. This data could give you an idea of how much time is spent on artwork compared to the volume and difﬁculty that is required in the production department. This could be considered a snapshot of how well the art department is producing and how much capacity it really has when the shop is busy. THE SALES SCRIPT w hat if you could take 20%-40% of your time spent setting up art and invest it into another area? If your screen printing company is like most, you easily could ﬁnd places to your extra time spent in an art capacity. How can this be done? It is a fairly simple process when each area is broken down into time segments that are occupied every day, week and month. Small amounts of time saved will begin to add up and before you know it, you will have an hour or two at the end of the week — sometimes even more. 60 Impressions | April/May 2013 Some people adopt the thinking that if artists were proﬁciently efﬁcient, then their brains wouldn’t be wired for creativity in the ﬁrst place. However, the reality is that focusing on efﬁciency can be initially scary to artists because too much emphasis on output can make the process seem like it is centered on numbers and speeds. Achieving a balance between efﬁciency and quality is the place that allows artists to thrive, while also addressing the proﬁtable nature of volume production. There are four simple steps that will help save time and jumpstart the art process for It’s easy to blame the artist or customer for a job taking too long in preproduction. Maybe the artist didn’t design the initial comp the way the customer wanted, so there are multiple revisions. Perhaps the customer didn’t give clear indications of what he wanted, so the designs went in the wrong direction and had to be reworked. Both of these thoughts are common in many screen printing shops and, from a surface view, they are correct. Look deeper, though, and certain patterns may begin to emerge from the chaos. The real trouble often is the lack of a clear process in the information collection and documenting process prior to the design information being given to the artist. A shop that is having a consistently high number of revisions should look impressionsmag.com http://www.impressionsmag.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Impressions - April/May 2013

Impressions - April/May 2013
Contents
First Impressions
From the Show Director
FYI
Product Gallery
ISS Conferences
Game On!
There’s a Cap for That
Should You Start a Preprint Line? Part 2
How to Maximize Your Resources
Setting Up a Mobile Garment Decoration Business
Shop Spotlight
Embroidery Design & Digitizing
Embroidery Production
Screen Printing Graphics & Design
Screen Printing Production
Online Directory
Digital Decorating
Classifieds
Ad Index

Impressions - April/May 2013