World's Smallest Worship Guide
Even though this was a misprint this sure would be a great way to cut down on printing costs.
Index
The iPhone: My New Camera of Choice
I have quickly fallen in love with the built-in-camera on the iphone. The convenience of having a camera with me wherever to capture moments that I might have missed with a "real" bulkier camera outweighs it's downsides.
At first I was mostly excited about the productivity I would gain from the new phone, but now it's becoming another avenue to explore creativity with.
- To process the photos I download a app call Camerbag.
- I also use flickit to upload photos straight from the iphone to my flickr account.
- If you want to see some more phenomenal iphone photos be sure to check out Chase Jarvis.
Live By The Widget, Die By The Widget
I'm sitting here at home chill-axing after a couple challenging weeks at PVC. This is a busy season for our print production. We had three departments needing well over 1,500 sq. ft. of large format printing for their series set designs. Unfortunately, in the middle of the first set our printer went down. I had never really had any significant problems with the plotter before. To make things worse the technician needed a week before he could even take a look at it.
I had to break the news to the departments, that their sets might not be done in time. Props to them for understanding and quickly moving forward with setting up some "Plan B" solutions. Fortunately, toward the end of this week a church volunteer offered to let us borrow his plotter until ours finished being repaired. MIKE ROCKS!!!
In the middle of dealing with this situation I posted a tweet "Live by the plotter, die by the plotter." This has now became a sobering thought for me. How much have I become dependent on one widget. The more dependent one becomes on a specific resource the larger the void if that resource is not there.
Here are a few practical lessons I learned from this experience:
- Frustration won't fix the problem, exercise calmness.
- Don't be overly optimistic the widget will be up and running quickly.
- Have some "Plan B"solutions ready to go at all times.
- Keep a current list of who can service all widgets used in production.
- Have art deadlines due weeks before production deadlines.
- Set clear expectations to those affected when widgets go down.
Widgets more often then not will break down. While those times can be full of stress in frustration it can also be a opportunity for creative solutions to flourish.
Tools Of The Trade!
I'm a strong believer that tools shouldn't make or break a project. But having them sure helps. I've been asked several times what we use to produce our printed pieces here at PVC. These tools have helped saved time and money and are a vital part of our production.
HP DesignJet z2100:
This bad boy is our large format printer! It prints 41 inch wide by up too 150 ft long. We use this primarily for stage set backdrops. We occasionally use it for large posters and displays as well. You can easily pay $7sq.ft. at our local printing shop. Having this in-house has brought the cost down to about $1sq.ft
Xerox Docucolor 252
This machine is a little less then a year old. We use this primarily for color printing of posters, worship guides, hand outs, books and so on. Before we got this printer it would take half a day to print our worship guides for the weekends. Now we can get them all printed in about a hour or less. It has a high capacity feed for large print up too 13x19 paper. It also has a booklet finisher. Only cons is that it's loud and hot. We use to have it in our office and would have to have the AC pumping non stop.
Industria 480E Paper Cutter
The newest addition to the family. Producing anything with a bleed use to be a nightmare. We had to take stuff to a print shop and have it cut. After having several deadlines not met and time when the cuts were wrong we decided on getting our own machine. After months of researching I found this cutter and it was the best product for the price. It' cuts our 17 in. paper in 2 in. stacks. It's a very easy to use machine. Now we're able to turn around jobs more quickly with options of using bleed cuts. I LOVE THIS THING!!!
Martin Yale 959 Auto Folder
Not the most glamorous of the bunch but it's another time saver. When I got here they use to fold all worship guides by hand. They also did perforation by hand as well. This particular folder does double folds, perforation and even scoring. This one is a tricky beast. You have to look at it just right or it might jam. But it does make it life easier.
These are some of the tools we are using here if you have any question feel free to ask.
From Sketch-up Too Sunday!
This post is part of Creative Chaos on Ragamuffinsoul.com
Yesterday we started a new series and along with that came a new set design. The team really pulled through to make this happen and such a short turn-around. I was really excited we stepped it up from our napkin drawings (sorry Jorge) and started using the google sketch-up application. It's basically a very user friendly 3d sketch application. Building our stage took a little while, but we now have a template to work with. for the future. This really help to address issues before we even stepped foot on the stage.
But enough of me talking check out the photos down below. Let me know if you have any problems with the slideshow, this is the first time using slideshow app.
Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.