The Noise Problem America has a gift for taking anything with mass-market potential and marketing it until it’s unrecognizable. Something real gets buried under so much hype that people stop listening. AI is deep in that cycle right now. Every product is “AI-powered.” Every ad promises transformation. Most of it is noise making AI workflow…
For this Throwback Thursday: Made in the U.S. A., Let’s take a look back and a look forward at Apparel Made in the U.S. A.: Unionwear: Thriving in a New Manufacturing Landscape Unionwear, located in Newark, NJ, remains the real deal in union-made, USA-made hats, bags, and accessories. Their president Mitch Cahn continues to be…
We print mostly on material made from plants, and it is sewn and printed by living, breathing human beings. All of that means our work includes some diversity and is absolutely full of imperfections. On the other hand, we are faced with customers operating with their perfect (actually not perfect) Pantone books, icy close stares,…
If you are following along, I have been posting about my Print Order AI tool. I have been working on Establishing Flash Rules from Production Data for about 2.5 weeks. Flash placement, so far, is one of the hardest things to codify in screen printing automation. Unlike base-first or white-last rules, flash cures don’t appear…
Ask a screen printer where the image goes on a shirt and you’ll get a deceptively simple answer: wherever it looks good to the customer. But “looks good” is where things get complicated, and where expensive mistakes happen if you’re not careful. Templates Are Guides, Not Gospel Some shops rely on elaborate placement systems. Some…
°FAI: AI Image Resolution Upscaling for Print: Using Topaz Gigapixel, Photoshop Generative Upscale & DALL-E for Production-Ready Artwork I spend some of my days making and/or taking others AI-generated artwork and making it production-ready. This means upscaling images from typical 1024×1024 outputs to print-quality resolutions of 300 DPI or higher, cleaning up artifacts that become…
Poly White vs. Low Bleed White: If you’ve been in screen printing long enough, you’ve watched the dye migration battle escalate, and our options for overcoming it, grow. So What’s the Difference? Here’s the breakdown. Low-bleed white covers any white ink engineered to resist dye migration. Manufacturers originally created these inks for 50/50 cotton-poly blends,…
SO…. if you ran into me in Long Beach, you heard about my AI build for Print Order. The premise is simple, it assists users with setting print order, mesh, flashes, etc. This is done by supplying it a simple data file extracted from a sep. The idea, an artist that is maybe not so…
I had a snowy homecoming after a sunny week at ISS Long Beach 2026, and wow, what a contrast. I traded sunshine and mild California weather for roughly 30 inches of snow at home. Long Beach was a great reset, and the show itself was really busy and seeing everyone was excellent. I saw AI…
Ink Kitchen and Impressions are sponsoring hand-done poster printing at the Impressions show in Long Beach this week January 22-24. The posters produced will be sold (suggested donation $10) to benefit a great non-profit called Care Closet, serving unhoused folks in Long Beach. You can watch the posters being printed and purchase one at…
