palace decks.

 Really interesting board designs by Palace, again, with brilliant implementation of the logo and interesting use of the format of the board. I like the ones I particularly like the ones that are split into three sections because of the contrasting parts of the board. I also like how they use a lot of lines in the design, they seem to break up the sections and give something really aesthetically intriguing.

expedition one boards.

Some designs for expedition one boards that I think make great use of the shape of the board, cropping areas whilst still keeping the logo obvious enough...

Rekiem boards.

Rekiem : This Is How We Do It ! from REKIEM skateboards on Vimeo.

This time, the design was hand pressed onto the finished deck with a rubber printing block that had the design on it. 

Rekiem How to make a board

Rekiem how to make a board from REKIEM skateboards on Vimeo.

This is a really interesting and nicely filmed video showing the creation of a skateboard, from wood ply to finished skateboard. Here to print onto the boards, they screen print onto the flat play before it has been glued and pressed...

Team print foil blocking

This feature: foil blocking

The basics:
Foil blocking is a dry printing process in which a thin layer of foil is transferred via a die to the surface to be printed. A combination of heat and pressure releases the pigment and leaves the image on the printed surface.

Uses:
Although it is most widely known and used in its gold and silver forms, there seems to have been a recent resurgence amongst Team’s designer clients to use coloured foils, especially white, black and clear. This can achieve really striking results, such as in the example opposite, where a blue foil has been used on a blue uncoated stock. Clear foils can be extremely effective in cases such as this but on certain stocks a slight ‘mottling’ effect may appear where the fibres of the stock show through, especially if the stock has a very open and tactile surface. The coloured foil provides an excellent solution here, and nowadays it is relatively easy to find coloured foils to match a design.

Tips:
Clear foils can often be much more effective than spot varnishing. Be imaginative. As well as the wide range of colours available, there is also a wide range of special effect foils, such as pearlescent, opalescent, holographic and textured.

Preparing your artwork:
Treat your foiled area as a single coloured colour plate, clearly identified as a foiled area. It is worth considering that different coloured foils achieve different results on different stocks. This can greatly affect the fineness of detail that can be achieved, especially when foiling text in very small point sizes. In general, a smoother sheet will usually be preferable in these cases. There are always plenty of samples of foiled jobs in the Team portfolio.

logo frames from the video...

 

What I think is brilliant implementation of palace skates logo, in many different frames of the video. 

Palace skate

GANGBANGING AT GROUND ZERO from Slam City Skates on Vimeo.

awesome video by Palace skate making good use of their logo throughout.

Palace skate logo...

Fortunately I moved away from this logo, as my research has unearthed this skate brand making use of the impossible triangle. Propably much more effectively than I could have...

Lorenzo print seminar - at the printers

Commercial printing processes are:
>practical
>technical
>economical

Processes include 
-rotary printing
-digital printing
-screen printing
-pad printing

Knowing print processes helps avoid nasty surprises when you get your work back from the printers. 

Rotary printing
In this process the image printing plates are wrapped around a cylinder. This is an automated print process and the material to be printed can be sheet fed or on a roll.

The 3 main types of rotary printing are :
Offset Lithography (Litho)
Rotogravure (Gravure)
Flexography (Flexo)

Offset lithography
A process using etched aluminium plates wrapped around a cylinder that transfer ink to an ‘offset’ rubber blanket roller and then to the print surface. Sheet fed or Web fed.

Most web machines are incredibly high speed and run ‘rolls’ of material as opposed to sheet fed. Often have finishing and folding built into the machine.

Rotogravure
Copper plates (with mirror image) transfer ink directly to the print surface, usually on rolls. An advantage of this process is that the plates are more durable and so are good for long print runs.

Typical Gravure print jobs are high volume, durable.

Flexography 
A positive, mirror image rubber polymer plate, on a cylinder, transfers ‘sticky’ ink directly to print surface. Usually roll feed.

Typical flexo print jobs are high volume, low quality. Often these are throw away goods like bottle labels and such, that isn't likely to be kept.


• Lithography (Litho) PLANOGRAPHIC Etched aluminium plates on a cylinder transfer ink to an ‘offset’ rubber
blanket roller and then to print surface.
• Rotogravure (Gravure) INTAGLIO
Copper plates (with mirror image) transfer ink directly to print surface, usually rolls. Advantage, plates are more durable and so are good for long print runs.
• Flexography (Flexo) RELIEF
A positive, mirror image rubber polymer plate, on a cylinder, transfer ink directly to print surface. Usually roll feed.



Digital Printing
The reproduction of images by translating the digital code direct from a computer to a material without an intermediate physical process.


> digital print is ideally suited to short or special print runs on a range of media from paper to metal.


Screen Printing
A printmaking technique that uses a woven mesh to support an ink blocking stencil.

Pad printing
A printing process that can transfer a 2-D image onto a 3-D object.

Ranulph Fiennes - Personification of the notion that nothing is impossible

Adventurer

Since the 1960s Fiennes has been an adventurer. He led expeditions up the White Nile on a hovercraft in 1969 and on Norway's Jostedalsbreen Glacier in 1970. Perhaps his most famous trek was the Transglobe Expedition he undertook from 1979 until 1982. Fiennes and two fellow members of 21 SAS, Oliver Shepard and Charles Burton, journeyed around the world on its polar axis using surface transport only. Nobody else has ever done so by any route before or since. As part of the Transglobe Expedition Ran and Charlie Burton completed the Northwest Passage. They left Tuktoyaktuk on 26th July 1981, in the 18 ft open Boston Whaler and reached Tanquary Fjord on 31st August 1981. Their journey was the first open boat transit from West to East and covered around 3,000 miles (2,600 nautical miles or 4,800 kms) taking a route through Dolphin and Union Strait following the South coast of Victoria and King William Islands, North to Resolute Bay via Franklin Strait and Peel Sound, around the South and East coasts of Devon Island, through Hell Gate and across Norwegian Bay to Eureka, Greely Bay and the head of Tanquary Fijord. It is also worth pointing out that, once they reached Tanquary Fijord, they had to trek 150 miles via Lake Hazen to Alert before setting up their winter base camp.

In 1992 Fiennes led an expedition that discovered the lost city of Ubar in Oman. The following year he joined nutrition specialist Dr Mike Stroud to become the first to cross the Antarctic continent unsupported, they took 93 days. A further attempt in 1996 to walk to the South Pole solo, in aid of Breast Cancer charity, was unsuccessful due to a kidney stone attack and he had to be rescued from the operation by his crew.

In 2000, he attempted to walk solo and unsupported to the North Pole. The expedition failed when his sleds fell through weak ice and Fiennes was forced to pull them out by hand. He sustained severe frostbite to the tips of all the fingers on his left hand, forcing him to abandon the attempt. On returning home, his surgeon insisted the necrotic fingertips be retained for several months (to allow regrowth of the remaining healthy tissue) before amputation. Impatient at the pain the dying fingertips caused, Fiennes attempted to remove them himself (in his garden shed) with a hacksaw; this didn't work so he picked up a Black & Decker with a micro blade in the "village" and cut them off just above where the blood and the soreness was.

Despite suffering from a heart attack and undergoing a double heart bypass operation just four months before, Fiennes joined Stroud again in 2003 to carry out the extraordinary feat of completing seven marathons in seven days on seven continents in the Land Rover 7x7x7 Challenge for the British Heart Foundation. "In retrospect I wouldn't have done it. I wouldn't do it again. It was Mike Stroud's idea".

Low winter sun identity

Task 3 - Stock options & print finishing. 
Loz Ives 
Stock choice