Printing | erdbeerblau

Stage 2: Experiments

Now that I understand how microcapsule paper works, it’s time to get a bit nerdy with material science.

Most blind students in Austria attend regular schools, so they will have sighted people around them. This is why we decided to try and make the materials work better for this integrative approach by including the text in schwarzschrift (literally black print, I don’t think this term exists in English so I’ll stick to the German) too. Schwarzschrift here, for us, is red though. There’s technical reasons for that, but maybe I need to explain how swell paper works first.

Pages of swell paper with test lines in different line styles and red writing in different shades that has stayed flat in the swelling process

Testing different shades of red by applying different heat settings.

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Posted in Design, Printing, Projects, Research 03.08.2018

Tagged Accessible Design, Graphic Design, Tools & Technology

How to read Braille

Pages of swell paper with different surface patters consisting of dots, lines and crosses

A number of pages with different surface patterns and intersections of lines and patterns

My new design project is interesting. It mostly consists of maths and programming, combined with social research. After that, finally, some layouting and typesetting – but the final product will not necessarily look pretty. That’s alright though, since it’s not made to be looked at: We are working on teaching materials for blind and visually impaired students. More specifically, a graphics catalogue to be used in high school maths education.
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Posted in Design, Printing, Projects, Research 15.07.2018

Tagged Accessible Design, Graphic Design, Tools & Technology

moar scissors

I Love the aesthetics of linoprints.

In between all of the usual end-of-year chaos, a dear friend invited me to play with her printing press. We made a few things, and in the end I finally managed to print the linoleum plate I cut as a test when trying out the newest laser cutter.

Turns out that the prints I wanted to make were too complicated for water based paints, so now I have oil based ones (jay for black fingers and mineral spirits ;). When looking at my black fingers, I keep being reminded of my print workshop teacher from art school – When anyone was annoyed with their paint-stained hands, he would always smirk and say “Na, es heißt ja die schwarze Kunst” (Well printing is black art after all).

Posted in Printing 15.12.2016

finally: zombies

Posted in DIY, Printing 21.08.2014

and even more scissors!

So I printed scissors on things again. This time: screen printing.

This is the picture I used to make the template for the screen.

Posted in Printing 27.01.2014

Tagged Scissors

i do have a lot of pin-back monsters now

Aren’t they great? The cephalopods and zombies are screen printed on different fabrics. The printing for each design needed two passes – one for the outlines, and one for the colouring.

Special thanks go to Alex, who basically provided all the features an additional human body has to offer when working on a project like this one … Especially having two extra hands to use turned out to be rather useful ;)

And he got us the fancy badge maker we used.

As I’m all about figuring out how things really work, what made me happy was that I finally managed to prepare a screen for screen printing that can actually be used (I just flooded the dark room one and a half times in the process -.-).

Also, This is the first time I printed on fabric with more than one colour, which is exiting as well.