Last week I showed a customer-supplied AI file going from a mess to print-ready and what the tools cost. This is every step, in the order I did it in the video, with the terms defined the first time they show up. °FAI: AI Art Cleanup, Step by Step. Before you touch it. Audit the…
Throwback Thursday. Rick wrote the original version of this post in January 2023. Nothing in it has stopped being true. What has changed is the shop side. Printers now own spectrophotometers and light booths, and they are asking the ink companies why the formulas still don’t measure up. Here’s the rundown, updated. Why Color Matching…
There is a big fight on between Hockey Canada, USA Hockey and the International Ice Hockey Federation over rights to display sponsor and who can sell jerseys. It is a boring and twisted tale and ultimately negotiations failed and now we get to see the elite hockey players wearing uniforms that are worse than you…
A customer sent art. Three trucks, a company logo, a CAT mascot, a tree line. 1618 by 1872 pixels. The truck numbers don’t match from bumper to door. The badge on the grille is a smear. The headline logo doesn’t say “Trucking.” It’s AI-generated, and it’s customer-supplied, so you fix it. I recorded the whole…
The Shirt Board has argued about AI art since October 2022. I went back through every thread on it, including two new ones from October 2026. Here’s the rundown. Read in order, they tell a clearer story than any single post does. TBT Four Years of AI Art Talk on The Shirt Board 2022: Can…
Every shop has a place where problems land. Art came in low-res. The PMS doesn’t match. The proof went out with the wrong ink color. Maybe someone posts it. Someone fixes it. The message scrolls up and nobody counts. But the history is still there. °FAI: Your Art Channel Already Knows What’s Broken. Here’s how…
In September 2016, Tom Davenport posted It Glows! It was a short review of a high-solids, water-based glow in the dark ink from Allureglow. His opening verdict: “most of the glow-in-the-dark inks on the market SUCK.” His complaint was specific. Most glow inks only worked when you laid down so much ink that the print…
Once you deploy a decision tree, you can do more than run it. You can ask it why. SMEme answers from logic, not a guess, so it can tell you which facts decided a job and what would change the outcome. °FAI: Ask the Tree, Own the Tree. Part 1 covered why rules don’t belong…
In March 2015, at the end of trade show season, Rick Roth posted Reflections at the End of the Trade Show Season. Most of it is booth photos. The first paragraph is a prediction. Rick named the two big trends of the previous ten years: digital printing and environmental concerns. Then he called the next…
The Ink Kitchen is back at the Impressions Expo Dallas, October 21–23 at the Hilton Anatole, printing posters live on the show floor to benefit UpSpire in Fort Worth. This year’s poster: Stop by Poster Printing by Ink Kitchen, Booth 976, and watch Mirror Image’s Jessica Bahl and Eliot Neff printing live. Make a suggested…
