Radioactivity at QPC
We were on-press today at Quality Printing for the IS183 Radioactive Bodega invitation. This beauty is going to be hitting mailboxes all over the region in about a week or so, and you won’ be able to miss it! Studio Two Designer Amanda Bettis (the talent behind everything BIFF) has been crafting this piece with the help of is183’s Executive Director, Hope Sullivan. “If it glows, it goes” is the creative brief here.
What we were going for was something that reflects the crazy ambitious nature of the annual art school dance party, arguably “the” social event of the year in the Berkshires – a time when all the Creative Community comes out to outdo the year before. So the piece is big, over-the-top colorful, dense, post-apocalyptic, dazzling… But, we also wanted to get that scrappy, is183/Bodega quality into the piece, so we went with a lightweight 60lbs Cougar uncoated sheet, basically the weight of decent typing paper.
For those of you who are into ink on paper, you can almost see the train wreck coming – super high ink saturation, absolute coverage, and a thin uncoated sheet. An incipient disaster for dot gain if there ever was one. By all rights this job should have been a real problem on-press, with the colors dulling down and the blacks washing out. But thanks to a lot of careful prepress on our end learned over years of printing saturated images in 4-color process on uncoated sheets (it’s kind of our trademark) and some absolutely fabulous proofing, plate making and press-handling at QPC the job looks amazing. Kudos to Mike Hickey and Kim Czarnecki and all the other talented professionals at Quality who have made a huge effort and a multi-million dollar investment in new presses and CTP workflow (computer to plate) the last few years.
Look for it in your mailbox. And I think it is fair to say that QPC and Studio Two will be celebrating a national print award later in 2010 for this one.
Radioactive Press Sheet
Pros at work at QPC Studio Two Designer Amanda Bettis and Intern Allana Kellog This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 19th, 2010 at 7:17 pm and is filed under Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Edit this entry.
via studiotwo.com
