Printing & Copying

This is an interesting article that I was able to find online at a blog site. Please take the time and check it out. Recently I have been made aware of such practice in local church and am very concerned of the sverity of it. After reading this article I'd like to get your opinion and perspective on whether or not copying and preaching someone elses sermon is considered a serious thing. Should we care or should this act be frowned upon? What do you think?

The Artile can be found here at narnia3.com

http://www.narnia3.com/mtype/mt-tb.cgi/67

Well, I am sure you must have gone through a time when you all needed to print a few T-Shirts either for fun or for some ceremony in office. And then that Nth hour rush to get hold of a printer who can do this for you!! Well if you are lucky or have some good friends you might as well get it done in nick of time. But what when you cant, well here is my suggestion.

T-SHIRT TRANSFER PAPER (also known as IRON-ON HEAT TRANSFER PAPER) a quick remedy to your small quantity t-shirt requirement! Yes why i say so is for a reason, according to my studies what i suggest is IF YOUR NEED IS LESS than 20 Customized shirts, then this method is best and worth while, else search for "Screen Printer" around you.

Ok what will you need for this process, might be your next question? Well here is the list.

Read the rest of this entry »

today, i am fried. fried in my brain and fried in my body. i've been working some crazy hours and we hit 113 degrees here yesterday. stop asking me why i live here, i don't have an answer for you. apparently i'm not nearly as smart as i thought i was.

so, to put myself in a lighter mood, i've come up with the top 10 best things happening at durtbagz right now. the video i posted just makes me laugh and has nothing to do with the post.

here we go:

10. i successfully negotiated a lower rate on my merchant account for processing credit cards. boring, but a good thing.

9. i got myself a business toll free phone number/voicemail system. even more boring, but necessary and checked off of the list. please don't ask about how long it took to set it up. that belongs in the top 10 worst things to waste your time ever list.

8. yesterday, i figured out a cheaper way to ship the products than i was using before. still bored? yeah, me too. but, that means more moolah to use on marketing, aka doing funny stuff to attract attention. my favorite.

7. i only have 30 bags remaining of the initial 80 produced from the first round. i've delivered 50 in a little over two and a half weeks. not bad.

6. every time i've carried a bag in public, i've had at least one person ask me about it.

5. the durtbagz cards that will go in the pocket of each bag delivered (for the owners to hand out to those that ask about the products) will be ready by the time we hit breckenridge oktoberfest in two weeks (where we'll be giving out free shwag).

4. we've come up with two solid ideas for durtbagz videos to be produced in the near future. and when i say solid, i mean solid.

3. today, i started submitting the website content for each page to my developers now that the design for the homepage is finally done.

2. the mullet sign is being digitized and in the next week, i'll know whether we're going to keep printing or embroider the bags so i can begin ordering the next round.

1. the mullet sign makes me laugh again, which i haven't done with these signs in a long, long, long time. it is a breath of fresh air to me since i've been scrutinizing each sign for the last six months. i think it's going to be one of our best signs and that makes me happy.

sorry if you were bored, but i needed to remind myself that things are moving forward, even if they are slower than i'd like. we are making progress and soon enough, we'll be selling bagz. lots and lots and lots of bagz.

some day in the future, i'll look back on this time and think, 'i can't believe how rich and famous and popular and famous and awesome i am now.'

kidding. who do you think i am? i'll think, 'i sure am glad we moved out of the easy bake oven and back to the mountains where our kids won't vaporize before our eyes from the heat.' yeah, that's more like it.

I was watching my fav new channel Current TV on satellite earlier tonight, and they showcased a website where you can get business cards with photos YOU take printed on the back.

I know, it's sounds expensive, but what caught my eye is that they are shaped differently from the usual business cards, so they will stand out. This is the shape I have been searching for, but most online printers charge way extra for them because they are odd shaped.

Just for the heck of it, I headed on over to MOO.COM  and was pleasantly surpised!

I just finished ordering the "1 x 100 pack" and get this: I didn't have to limit my choice of a photo to use on the backside of the card to just one. I uploaded several, played with them, and then decided on 3.

The price? $19.99! Global shipping is $4.99. [They are located in the UK.]

Stay tuned and when I receive them, I will post a review on them.

August 22, 2007 01:45 PM Eastern Daylight Time
Semper International Opens New Island, HumanResource Island in the Virtual World, Second Life

New location coincides with company's new venture into virtual world consulting

BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Semper International, the leading placement firm for skilled help in the graphic arts and printing industry, and a growing provider of trained, technical staffing in other high-tech areas, particularly video games, announces it has opened a new island location, HumanResource Island, in the Second Life® virtual world.

Second Life®, developed by Linden Labs®, is a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents. Opening to the public in 2003, it is currently inhabited by over 4 million residents from around the globe. Second Life is an exciting new venue for collaboration, training, distance learning, new media studies and business.

HumanResource Island has been developed to allow Semper to augment its current capabilities in Second Life. With the additional land they will have a much larger location to handle their growing uses for Second Life. The collaborative nature of the virtual 3-D Second Life world makes it an exceptional resource for a recruiting company to interact with clients and talent.. They are already using it as a forum for seminars for clients. The company is also successfully inviting candidates to Second Life to listen to presentations offering job search advice while, concurrently, prescreening them for possible jobs.

With its knowledge and experience in virtual worlds, and its extensive list of programming resources, Semper International has also built a business around Second Life consulting. The company provides expert analysis of whether a client is prepared to build a Second Life location, rules of how to culturally engage with other 'residents', and programming resources to build an appropriate site. Companies interested in exploring more can visit http://www.semperllc.com/metaverse/.

“I think it is important to note that our continued use of Second Life is not specifically as a marketing platform. We’re not lining the streets with banners,” explains Brian Regan, Semper International president. “We continue to be impressed with the non-marketing utility of Second Life. For example, the introduction of voice in Second Life has allowed us to use the virtual world as a collaboration tool between Semper employees from different, real-world offices. They are able to meet in our Second Life office for conference meetings. New ideas of how to use it are generated almost on a weekly basis, which is why we were willing to invest in a complete island.”

Semper International’s HumanResource Island can be found at http://slurl.com/secondlife/HumanResource%20Island/196/112/27. A Semper International blog that further delves into their Second Life experiences can be found at http://semperllc.wordpress.com/

"Second Life” and “Linden Labs” are registered trademarks of Linden Research.

- end -

About Semper International

Headquartered in Boston with branch offices nationwide, Semper International is a temporary help placement firm founded and staffed by professionals who understand the positions, equipment, and software essential to their core business areas, assuring a perfect employee-employer match.

To provide career growth, Semper University is an online training program to help employees prepare for upcoming changes in the industry. Realizing how the Internet is revolutionizing the industry, Semper also works with the most talented web designers, graphic designers, desktop publishers and production managers.

For more information, visit Semper International at www.semperllc.com. Semper International’s Second Life office can be found at http://slurl.com/secondlife/HumanResource%20Island/196/112/27.

Liquid Sky Arts 

Cool neat designs that originally come from textiles designs. I love the idea of transfering the image onto different materials the play between paper and Fibre what a lovely mix. I cant wait to start experimenting with my designs onto paper.

Way back at the very end of June, I was contacted by Chris Bradley-Kidd of Fixerlabs.com, asking if I'd tried their product SizeFixer for upsizing. Apparently his attention had been attracted by my article on the myths of upsizing. He offered to send me a free copy of SizeFixer if I was interested in reviewing their product. After nailing down a few details, I agreed to do a review of SizeFixer.

Now, this all was happening just as I was switching from Windows to the Mac. I ordered a copy of SizeFixer XL for the Mac, and it arrived in the middle of July, just as I was in the thick of several things all at once. SizeFixer was on the stack of things to do, but other stuff kept burying it.

This past weekend, during a brief slow period, I installed the software and started playing with it. I only had a few hours, and this was a problem because the software is slow. Now, I'm not talking 'resizing an image takes a couple of minutes' slow, I'm talking 'resizing a full frame image from the EOS-5d with the quality cranked all the way to the max takes 5.5 hours' slow.

I had some problems, and I've fired off a set of questions to FixerLabs. Hopefully I'll get answers quickly and I and proceed with more testing. The results I got this past weekend were simultaneously encouraging and disappointing. They're encouraging in that if I could get the speed problems ironed out, and figure out exactly what all the controls do so that I could eliminate some unpleasant artifacts, the results would be pretty impressive. Discouraging in that the documentation seems to be on the sketchy side, the artifacts are pretty ugly, and the software is so slow that it's not exactly easy to figure things out just by experimenting.

More news as things develop, as it were.

This guide to various binding techniques for books and brochures is quite comprehensive and well put together. It's published online by Purdue University in Indiana and is a useful reference tool when you're planning to put a new publication together.

yes siree, here they are. sweet, huh? good. now, we're changing them.

yellow signs are on a point, not in a square. how long has that been happening? since the birth of traffic signs, you say? so, really, it was a mistake that anyone could have easily made.

um, let's be real here. this was actually brought up to me at one point BEFORE we went to print. and in my brilliance, i said, the signs stay square because no one will notice. people notice and by people i mean me. and my husband. and a few of our friends. my parents. and a foreign exchange student from down the street. i'm just kidding on that last one. he's from colorado.

also, we might be changing from screen printing to embroidering the signs on the bags. the logos are embroidered on and they look fantastic and really pop off of the material on both bags. the printing of the signs definitely stands out on the bags and it looks really cool, but i want to experiment with a few and embroider them to compare.

you might think that since i now have 80 bags, 300 t-shirts, and a plethora of photos shot 48 hours ago all with square signs screen printed on them, that my mood might be a bit low. abso-freaking-lutely not! so far, this is the feedback i've received and it's physical, not creative. it's just logistical, it has nothing to do with the brand or model or designs themselves and that makes me really, really happy. in fact, now that some people have actually seen the product, i can't count how many times i get 'oh, you should do a sign with...' or 'you know what would be really funny? if you had a guy...". i love hearing all of these ideas and it gives me a lot of hope that that will carry over to people participating online, considering how easy we're making it to submit a sign. you see these things, and you automatically start thinking of others. and that is exactly what i wanted. so i feel like i've already won my first little challenge: people genuinely seem to like it and enough so to comment on it. awesome.

for those of you that don't like it, don't tell me, tell your friends. be sure to run out and tell everyone you know about this lame company called, durtbagz, and tell them to see for themselves how lame it is at www.durtbagz.com. share your feelings with everyone and even prove it to them by giving them the website yourself. it's okay, i can handle it.

so, those of you with bags coming to you, i'm shipping them wednesday. you are now getting a bag with a sign on it that was printed for one run only; limited edition, one-of-a-kind bags. does it get any better than that? maybe if it came with free beer in it, which it's not. you're not that lucky. although, not a bad idea for when we're in breckenridge for oktoberfest next month...hmmm.

Semper sent out the below to a large group of our database. The responses we received were quite interesting and we felt important to share. We decided to post it to our blog and invite people to share their responses in this public format.

Brian Regan
President
Semper International

Original message:

We keep hearing from our local offices that skilled, reliable print industry workers are hard to find.

We understand many of you are managers with hiring experience and some of you are skilled professionals happily working but your advice is really needed.

I am told we have had to decline or been slow in filling orders due to the lack of available candidates. Have you seen this recent scarcity of skilled workers? Are you or have you had similar trouble hiring? Are there many open spots that your company can not fill?

From the standpoint of those looking for work, what has changed in recent years, why are you coming into the industry or leaving it. What has your recent experience been looking for work in the print industry?

PLEASE feel free to post responses on this blog.