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We saw that a signage company in a neighboring province was giving out little pvc? squeegees with branding and instructions printed on them really tiny; cute idea, made it easy to hand off a decal to a client who has never done it before.

Cool! I have generally found Versa's spot colour conversion not too bad, but occasionally we do get one or two that is like "????"

Another traditional (relief/intaglio/litho) printer!! Glad you're here!

Yep! Offset path is for sure the tool you're looking for. Instead of deleting the path, sometimes I merge them with pathfinder because they're selected together, effectively "deleting" the inside path. Depends on what you need.

Very much agree, our design rates are, I think, much much lower than a design firm, but we're East Coast Canada in a small city... etc. There is one thing I do want to mention re: this entire revisions discussion - I've made the mistake of saying to a client "Hey, let me just bring this up and...

It doesn't always come up in the first conversation, because for all I know they could have vector art ready to roll. But our proof sheet that we send has a 3 revision rule directly on it. Yeah, sometimes we give a little more than that, depending on context, but the proof sheet that they've...

To me, it looks like there's a nozzle (or a few) printing incorrectly every pass, sticking a black mark or two where it's not supposed to be. It's very consistent. Have your test prints been like this for a month, or just they happened to have a bad day a month ago? The missing and deflected...

Mmmm, I am not an expert, but it really looks like those black jaggety fuzzes are coming from your black deflected nozzles? Do you have this issue with other files too?

Or, if you haven't put them on their own layer (oops) you can use the "Select similar" buttons to grab only what has that stroke colour, and then move them to their own layer. Also anyone else ever accidentally copy/paste a cut line twice without noticing, and then watch the printed chop it...

I really agree here - we've had success (and failures) with loads of different vinyls and it almost always has to do with the wall; texture, low VOC paint, etc. Definitely suggest doing a little test somewhere! Relatedly, we've swapped from using "wall vinyl" to a slightly less heavy/slightly...

Or, "My nephew/friend/cousin etc. made this for me!" Worst though is when we have a client come in and we tell them "I'm sorry, this isn't in a format we can use" and they tell us they've just dropped $700 bucks to a "designer" who told them that's industry standard. Oh sweetie, .PNG might be...

This seems so true - seems like some projects that start off on the wrong foot tend to snowball, and then other projects start to suffer

Wow, sounds just like us. It's just me and my two employers, one of whom does the bigger production (building sign surfaces/cradles, larger installs) and one who does all clients/payrolls/quotes/sales and some production with me. It's a small set up but I really enjoy having autonomy. I'm the...

I'm curious as to what other sign shops daily routines are like or if anyone has found some helpful ways to keep efficient, or reduce waste (both media and time) and avoid errors. Does your team have meetings? Do you have a dedicated designer? A large team? Do you track your waste? Our typical...

The communication piece definitely takes a lot of effort. And it's not always just clients that don't get it - I had one freelance designer that I assumed would know how to "outline text" - they thought it meant "rasterize" text apparently, by the next file I received.

Yeah we occasionally get a head strike on perf or other briteline material. If it's bumping near the sides of the media, be 110% sure that it's feeding off the roll as straight as possible (you can feed it out a bit at the start to get an idea for it). When we just started, sometimes we were...

Mmm, I'm going to add 1 to 3% ink costs on every "o" I have to print.

Aww, good luck! That's super exciting. I'm an adoptee with a surprise sibling who isn't adopted, but we're as close as can be.

We also almost exclusively use PDFs with VersaWorks as well. Just a workflow that we use. The only frustrations we face is when have to open up one in Illustrator and there's silly masks everywhere.. ..but since we have a working .AI, that isn't generally a problem.

I love that "sorry" was the lowest priority on the list. This is adorable.