Team Impression: Day 5 and Evaluation

Well day 5 was kind of slow I was in the finishing unit again. In the morning we foiled a whole lot of really high spec invites that had been designed by SEA. Their front and back was printed on sepertate sheets of paper which were then duplexed. I say printed there wasn't actually any printing involve, all the text was in silver foil and there was a big number 10 debossed at the top of them. Seeing them produced was particulay interesting becasue I had pretty much followed the job through the whole system, from the art work being setup in reprographics to them being stuck together and cropped in the finish room.

Again I got a real sense of the skill involved in doing a good foiling job. Richy the guy who was showing me how the machines worked clearly took a lot of pride in what he did. After the SEA invite we worked on some business cards for Front Ideas Company. The first batch had been sent back because they had bee cropped wrong so they all had to be re done, probably a couple of thousand cards whch was obviously very frustrating for Richy.

EVALUATION

I really enjoyed my time at Team and it totally changed how I think about the production and printing process. I kind of though before I went that you just sent a file to a printers they sent it to the press and your finished product came out the other end. Obviously there is a hell of a lot more to it than this. I though this would be more automated but actually a lot of it is still done by hand and requires a lot of skill.

Maybe the biggest think I will take away from the experience is that printers definately aren't designers and as such don't really have a huge appreciation for design. Before I went I had this vision that I would be on the factory floor with all these talented printers that had a deep seated paasion for typography, paper stocks, finishing prcesses and good design now I see this was pretty naive. They are printers rather than designers and while they take a pride in what they do and go to great lengths to get it perfect, they aren't interested in the design itself.

Overall I am really glad I went to Team and I got a lot from it. But I know I definately don't want to go into printing, design is a lot more fun.