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…
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…
Recently our shop Mirror Image printed a seven color print for Farm Aid. Farm Aid is a nonprofit started in 1985 by Willie Nelson, Neil Young, and John Mellencamp to help family farmers who were losing their land during the farm crisis. Dave Matthews later joined its board. Its best-known event is the annual benefit…
Karen Hao asked John Borthwick at CUNY whether we are in an AI bubble, and he said “absolutely.” Borthwick runs Betaworks and has lived through two of these cycles already. He calls this a productive bubble, like the railroads or the fiber buildout: too much money goes in, things break, and the survivors inherit the…
TBT: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly of Fast Growth — What Fifteen Years of Shop Talk Says In December 2024, Pam Ikegami published The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of Fast Growth in Screen Printing, a profile of Vlad Kalman at Printing on Main Street. $3,500 in sales in 2019. Around $320,000…
TBT: Crows and Shiny Things: Eight Rules, Fifteen Years of Evidence In April 2015, Rick Roth published Crows and People Like Shiny Things… It came out of a Cambridge shop near MIT, a reflective company down the street called Reflective Technologies, and a production manager named Aaron who summed up an entire product category in…
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…
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…
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…
Here’s the rundown. If you ran water-based ink a 20 years ago, you remember the heartbreak. You coated a screen, hardened it, waited a full day, and then watched it dissolve around print number ten. Pinholes everywhere. A razor blade and a sour mood for reclaim. Honestly, water-based earned its scary reputation the hard way.…
