Bouncing between projects, jumping on a call, answering a “quick question” that ate forty minutes, at the end of the week I couldn’t tell you where any of it went. So I built a time tracker. Not an app I downloaded. Not a subscription. One HTML file that runs in any web browser, on my…
Screen Exposure: Bake the Cake Drawn from working printers’ conversations on The Shirt Board, 2011–2017. Direct quotes link to the exact post. Other references link to the thread. TBT: Screen Printing Exposure: Bake the Cake Exposure is the step where a coated screen becomes a stencil — or fails to. It’s also the most misunderstood…
Two weeks ago the press log credited someone with a sixteen-hour breakdown. So I made some updates to the logs. You can check out the earlier development here, here and here. The tablet went to sleep overnight, its software timers stopped with it, and the check-in popup and auto-pause slept right through, while the clock…
Drawn from working printers’ conversations on The Shirt Board, 2013–2016. Source threads linked throughout. Every printer has a coating ritual, one wet pass or two, sharp edge or round, which side last. Far fewer can tell you what those rituals actually produce, because the result of coating isn’t a routine, it’s a measurement: EOM, emulsion…
A few weeks ago I did a Shirt Show episode, and one of the things we talked about was keeping a human in the loop. Because ultimately, a junior separator learns by failing. You fail over and over again, and then you get better at what you’re doing. °FAI: Human in the loop AI, Keep…
Everything below is drawn from real conversations between working printers on The Shirt Board, 2011–2022. Source threads are linked throughout — the arguments are worth reading in full. TBT: Discharge Printing: What a Decade of Shop Talk Actually Teaches Discharge gives you the softest print you can put on a dark garment — and in…
I recently attended the Decorators Summit in Nashville by Printing United, and this was my presentation. °FAI: AI Pipeline for a Screen Print Factory: Everybody wants an autonomous agent on day one. That’s exactly how you get bad output and torch your own confidence in the system before it’s earned any. So I don’t build…
Here’s the rundown. We’ve covered the screen and the ink. Now the fun part, the art. Foil, puff, crackle, flock, burnout: none of these are new. Printers have been pressing foil and puffing ink for decades. Somewhere along the line, though, the trade started treating them as cheap novelty, a sticker-y add-on rather than real…
I attended the Printing United Decorators Summit in Nashville at the end of June, and this is an excerpt of the speech given by Ami Servi-Bonner, VP of Printing AI for Printing United Alliance. AI Adoption Is a Leadership Decision The tools will be commodity by next year At a recent industry talk, Amy Servi-Bonner,…
Here’s the rundown. Last week we revisited the screen side of water-based printing. Now let’s talk ink, because honestly, that’s where most of the old fear lives. Rewind to the UK in the late 1980s: plastisol barely existed there yet, so water-based wasn’t a choice. It was simply how you printed. Tony Palmer started in…
