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As a shop with no CNC, why not acrylic instead of PVC? Just curious. My supplier here says PVC is a ton of extra work, sanding and filling the returns before painting, whereas acrylic doesn't require all that. Is it really worth the savings in material cost?

Awesome tip about the full width scan - I never would have thought of that on my own. We haven't had issues with this before as we don't do a ton of wraps, but good to know.

How does a small company develop a software product like this without spending an enormous chunk of cash on buying a license for every font in existence, to power their search algorithm?

We have everything, going back 10 years to when we opened. We keep it all on a NAS with RAID 1 (mirrored on 2 disks). It's handy having it all accessible, as we dig up old files for various purposes all the time.

Gatorboard is for indoor use, or short term outdoor. I wouldn't use foam for anything more than a year outdoors.

The end of the gradient may not match the spot colour after rasterizing, since it would no longer be a spot colour. The workflow I mentioned gives you better transitions in gradients, because designing a gradient in CMYK is usually not going to transition the way you want.

If you didn't pause it at that point in the print, is it possible you switched the head height?

Spot colours in gradients won't usually work the way you want. One workflow that's more reliable for gradients is to do your gradients in RGB, then rasterize them before converting to CMYK.

Takes 2 minutes in Illustrator. Try this: 1. Draw a grid of checkered squares, 2x2, 8x8, etc. depending on the scale you want the waves to be. 2. Effect > Warp > Flag > 5-10% or so 3. Object > Pattern > Make 4. Adjust the height setting for the pattern so it matches the width. It starts off a...

Get over it and add a "cancellation fee" note to your quotes going forward. In the line item, not in the fine print. Make sure you say "will be charged" not "may be charged" Then, when it happens, just politely reschedule and tack your $75 charge onto the invoice. You don't have to have an...

We use Avery for most of our vinyls, plus a bit of 3M and Oracal. Those are generally considered the "big 3" brands - stick with them for anything that isn't temporary and you'll be fine. Not to say you'll never have issues, but we see it as far less risky to just stick with the established...

As VanderJ said, feed calibration is the first thing to check. That's the setting that allows you to fine tune the speed at which the media feeds through the printer, in case your prints are coming out slightly short or slightly longer than they should be. If the feed calibration is really far...

Hopefully whoever designed this is laughing at us now for trying to identify it! It seems it could be a hybrid of Helvetica, Neue Haas Grotesk, Neue Haas Unica, Nimbus Sans and Folio. But with a round dot on the i.

It's always your fault. No matter how bad the client is, there's always something you could have done to prevent the bad experience. If you look at it that way, you'll find ways to avoid these types of problems in the future.

Pardon my giving advice without following it myself, but... Does anyone else have a Pantone book with the D50 lighting indicator at the back? We have it in our Coated Color Bridge. We haven't started switching to D50 (5000K) bulbs yet, but after reading this thread yesterday, we noticed our the...

Illustrator renders on screen differently than it does when you export to a vector or raster file. On-screen rendering can be comparatively glitchy in Illustrator. I can't see what you're referring to in the image you attached, but most glitches like what you've described only show on screen...

As others have hinted at, definitely use D50 for everything if possible. Check your Pantone book for a D50 lighting indicator—it's a nifty little patch of colour that changes to show you whether the lighting you're under is D50 or not.

Here's an example of one of these scams. This one came in yesterday to our general inquiries email. The obvious tip-offs in this one are telling us the method of payment, and saying "god bless" at the end of the email. This one's interesting in that they're not requiring a specific shipping...

This is the biggest design issue with the new forum, IMO. Overall I like the new design and it didn't take long to get used to the new interface.

You could export to PDF and then open it in Adobe Reader to confirm that everything looks correct, before sending it to your print vendor. That's a pretty safe way to avoid errors. Ditching Flexi and using Illustrator is safer, though.