Prinspiration! Calendar time!
This month we are talking about CALENDARS! With the plethora of Goats on Rocks and Farm Equipment at Sunset you have available at any grocery store around November, you might not have even thought about putting your own photos or art in a calendar.
Calendars are a great way to make your creativity a part of someone’s entire year. A warning: once you start it is hard to stop. This will be the 11th year I’ve made one! Peep this year’s in the Shop Talk section. And, it’s the third year our wonderful Featured Artist, Caroline Geekus, has made a unique-to-our-shop calendar using 12 different paper colors!
All of our offerings can be utilized in a custom calendar, not just colorful paper. In this NewsLetter we’re going to show off several ways to enhance your calendar project. From thickcarding to specialty toner and even impressive size options! We can work with you to make your ideas come to life!
Today we celebrate the unsung hero: the wire/spiral bound book machines. These unassuming little guys may be old and not much to look at, but they have made tens of thousands of books that have gone all over the world.
Hero Number One: Hole Punch
You don't need fancy automation and digital interfaces to put holes in paper, and our ancient hole punch does everything needed for a shop our size. The teeth can be changed out depending on the book size and hole spacing needed for different binding methods!
Hero Number Two: Wire Crimper
What closes up the wire to make sure no pages fall out of your wire bound book? It’s this guy! It puts pressure on the wire after the pages have been placed and closes them up. Simple, but it takes skill to know how to set the pressure.
Hero Number Three: Hands and patience! (And these wire cutters/plastic breaking tools)
We have the flexibility to take small minimum orders because we don't have automation. What we do have is real knowledgeable and skilled staff. Eric, Dana, and Maddison all have had their skills tested with the amount of wild books that come through our shop and we pride ourselves on the quality they deliver.
From the punch, to the paper placement and collating of the covers, these projects (including all calendar projects! Remember the subject!) go through several stages before they leave the shop. The finishing step is cutting the wire or spiral to size and shrink wrapping them in small quantities to protect them before they make it to you!
We have a lot of wire sizes. Eric chooses the size based on the thickness of your book. You don’t have to worry about all of that behind the scenes stuff!
Eric saved a bunch of punched paper holes for me to show you how cool they are! Look!
Caroline Gikas
Instagram @_gikass__ // carolinegikas@gmail.com
What got you into printed matter?
I’m not really sure what spurred the interest, but I got into screen printing on my own when I was a teenager. I developed screens in my bathroom with a black trash bag taped over the window and a clamp light for exposing connected to the sink faucet. I had a DIY screen printing set up in my bedroom and would make prints of my drawings.
Before screen printing, I was making a lot of lino and woodcut prints. I’ve kind of always been obsessed with different printmaking techniques, bookbinding, and paper in general.
How long have you been working in your field? How long before that had you done art/design as a hobby? Is this your full time job? If it is your full time job, can you describe the moment you realized you wanted to make art/design a career?
Art/Design is not my full time job, but in some ways it is. I am the Director of Exhibitions at Stove Works, but there I am working with other Artists and their work, not my own. I’ve been drawing my whole life. Making art and designing has turned into a consistent side hustle of mine. I try to avoid crossing the line between making some extra money off of things I like to make and turning it into a job. When making art gets too wrapped up in making money, I stop having fun doing it.
I have been doing a lot of designs for bands and shows and recently logos for some local businesses. I do a lot of gig posters and sometimes merch designs. I really enjoy working on the posters even if they are for bands I don’t have a connection to. It feels rewarding to get to sit down, do a little research on the bands, and come up with a design that sticks to what I like to draw, but has a subtle tie to who’s playing.
How does print help your business in the digital age?
I think that physically printed things are more important to me than they have ever been. I love collecting physical prints and books. In terms of the posters I design, I think a physical print has a big impact, at least to the people who care about these things. It means a lot to me when venues take the time to print my designs and post them around town vs. just posting them online. It's a small thing, but I think that extra effort says a lot. If it's being printed at WonderPress, I always know it’s going to be well done too!
Every year I design a calendar to sell that features a drawing I made that year. Every year I plan to screen print it and run out of time. At this point I just plan to have WonderPress print them for me. I truly get so excited to look through their paper to select specific colors for each month!
Last year I worked with WonderPress for the printing of a two-part artist book I designed for a local artist, William Johnson. One book featured his photographs and the second his drawings and paintings. It was the first time I had worked on a project like that, and WonderPress held my hand through a lot of it!
Do you have a favorite process or specialty we offer? If so, why?
Anytime WonderPress prints any of my posters for shows, I know the poster is going to come out great, and the paper selection is going to be nice! I haven’t put together a project for the Risograph, but I have been itching to!! I love how much attention WonderPress put into expanding what they can print and how they can print it! I also want to come up with more book projects. When I went into the one I designed last year, I didn’t realize in the beginning how many different formatting and binding options they offer.
What programs/materials do you use in your process?
I mostly use Procreate and Illustrator. Sometimes I’ll work in Photoshop or InDesign. For those, I really only know how to use them for the specific thing I need them to do. Procreate has been a recent adoption for me. It has taken a lot of frustration out of transferring a drawing I’ve made into a stencil for screen printing.
Outside of these programs, I get all of my paper for drawing and screen printing from Wonderpress. I really don’t know what I’d do without them!
Where do you start in your design/art process? (Thumbnails? Digital? Pinterest board?) And can you explain the rest of your normal process up to getting it print ready?
I take a lot of pictures. Textures that catch my eye, weird things on the street that stand out, color combos I like. I like drawing things I see every day, but most people don’t stop to consider or think about. Something that feels familiar or nostalgic but is also kind of boring. I usually hold onto these ideas for a long time before I actually ever get around to drawing them.
Recently, I have been doing a lot of my designs starting in Procreate. Being able to draw with layers has been a game changer. I take a lot of time to add lots of texture and details in each layer. For the posters I design, most of this detail is actually lost with the image quality when it’s posted online. Just another reason why having a physical print is superior! After that, I just send it off to WonderPress. If I don’t have a paper in mind, I always default to what they recommend. Someone on the team always manages to catch my spelling errors before the prints are made too!
What is your favorite project you’ve made with us?
The artist books I made with William Johnson felt really special. Going through all the stages of photographing his work, staring at the computer screen for days while designing the layout, and then suddenly getting to hold the thing in my hands was an awesome feeling. I also really love the moment of getting a poster back from the printer and seeing the reaction of the person I designed it for. It always sort of feels like magic to me.
When you were starting out what is some advice you wish you would have had?Haha - don’t fixate on it being perfect!
This is our third year printing these press-sheet-sized (12”x18” with no trim) calendars. Caroline comes in and chooses a color for each month. We run them separately and collate them together by hand to make the final product. If you want to try something like this yourself it is best to come in and look at the paper we have in stock. If you’re out of state we try to keep the paper catalog PDF (https://www.wonderpressprinting.com/s/paper-cat.pdf) but it is still good to make sure we have enough of the stock you’re eyeing or that we can order more in time for the production of your project.
Size and shape have so few limits, it can be daunting. It doesn’t give you an easy starting point and if you make your item too big or small you have to consider how to scale it to fit your taste. It’s even more complicated because the type size needs to be big enough but not too big to leave space for them to be writable.
That is where a little work beforehand can help out! Take a ruler to calendars you’ve bought before, or books you think are a nice size when open. A standard we see often is 8.5x11 and 11x17 when open.
Once you have figured out your size, googling “Calendar template free” will give you a lot of options for the hard part. There are paid options also available on Etsy and other creative marketplaces. You can make your own as well! Like Caroline Geekus and Swilda Matilda below, drawing the borders and lettering the whole thing. It is time consuming but gives you a truly custom piece that no one else has.
Some of our favorite calendars for next year we’ve got so far:
Joseph Cooper
https://www.instagram.com/cooper_wildlife_and_nature
This is a traditional 8.5”x11” (opening to 11”x17”) layout on a matte-coated stock. The stock enhances the beautiful nature photography, but is a little limiting on what you can use to write on it. Cooper has reported no customers have complained yet though! A solid option.
Mandy Long (Photographer), Victoria Carlson (designer)
Like Joseph’s calendar, this is printed on Silk paper and bound with black wire. But, the design and size change up every other element. At 12”x12” this is almost the largest square we can print with bleed (12.5”x12.5” would be the biggest, both sizes are limited to what we have in 13”x19”).
Swilda Matilda
https://www.etsy.com/shop/SwildaMatildaArtHaus
This is a great example of an oversized wall calendar. Like stated above, we can go up to 12.5”x18.5” with bleed and 13”x19” without bleed. Swilda Matilda’s calendar is 9”x12” which opens to 9x24! A nice big statement piece that refreshes all year. Another unique detail on these is the hand lettering on the calendar pages.
Fend Hamilton
Last is a more compact option. 9x6, opening to 9x12. This is an economy size, which leaves the ability to add specialty processes without making them too expensive to sell. This calendar showcases a few of our specialties: gold wire, spots of gold toner, and multiple paper colors (French Banana Split and Bubblegum, Lessebo Sahara and Sweet Mint) were used to make this one.
If you are unsure if spiral/wire binding is right for the book you have in mind this PDF will tell you the specs, pros, cons, and how to of both! Calendars can be made in several other forms! Like pads where you tear off page by page, or saddle stitched for a more compact and easy to stack book! For example, since spiral binding wasn’t a focus in this NewsLetter, something to keep in mind is that there is a slight offset to pages that will be spiral bound vs. all other bindings. It can be a challenge to design for in a vertical hanging format. But knowing it going in can help make informed decisions. THAT is what this PDF is chock full of!! (click the image below to download the PDF!)
Beans and the chair from the last post made up! Enemies to friends~
