OUGD505 - Studio Brief 01 - Leeds Public Spaces - Production

As the brief requires an analogue print to be made, physical production methods had to be considered. As the photographic image is very detailed and some of the type is quite small, the most appropriate production method to take was screen printing. Other printing methods, such as lino printing and mono printing, would not have produced a print as accurate and detailed as screen printing. Risograph printing is one possibility that could have been used; however, it is more expensive to do and would have had to be done outside of Uni.

The final design chosen in the last stage in the process was separated into two layers. These can be seen below. The photographic image was converted to a black and white bitmap to ensure that it could be printed through the screen. Some quality was lost here; however, the main focus of Arthur France still came out as desired.

Before I began printing Mike gave me some feedback regarding the inks I was going to use. He suggested that it would be more effective to switch the colours round, as trying to print cyan on black ink would not come out very clearly - the contrast would be very low, making legibiliy very poor. For this reason, the background image was printed with cyan ink, and the type layer was printed with black ink. In a sense, this makes the poster appear even more energetic, as there is now more colour across the A3 sheet.



Printing the first layer went smoothly. The image of Arthur France came out clearly and not a lot of detail was lost. Problems began when trying to print the second type layer, as I found it difficult to print all the letters perfectly. The first print attempt, seen below, went wrong because the screen was not clamped in place properly. This resulted in the type being printed in the wrong position. After clamping the screen properly the type came out much clearer; however, some letters were slightly smudged (seen in the far right image). The only way to resolve this was to wash the screen and redo the process. As I set myself a week for the production stage I was able to experiment as much as possible with screen printing. This allowed me to correct any mistakes made and produce a final print that is to a high-quality.