Production Update! #2
almost 7 years ago
– Tue, Apr 30, 2019 at 08:44:40 PM
Backers -
We've been in contact with the manufacturer and would like to inform you of an unexpected - slight, but unfortunate - delay to the process. These are our fault and we apologize.
Standard Samedi decks were anticipated during the month of May, but due to being placed in queue for manufacturing behind other projects, will now be delivered to our fulfillment house on the last week of May, and then on to fulfillment to each of you.
This unfortunately also affects the timeline of gilded decks, which unknown to us are actually sent to a different facility where they are gilded by hand for best quality, and unfortunately this process adds time. We were unaware of this additional step. These are currently expected to be delivered to our fulfillment center the third week of June, and then on to fulfillment to each of you.
While we attempted to be on top of every detailed stage in the manufacturing process, these steps were a surprise and have unfortunately impacted our shipping schedule. We apologize for this unforeseen change and hope you will not be negatively affected by it.
The upside is, these delays are now understood and will be incorporated into future project schedules. It may have been too much to hope for a completely smooth process for our initial Kickstarter launch, but we are still thrilled with this project and very excited to get these decks into your hands!
Thank you for your patience, and please do not hesitate to ask if you have any questions.
Production Update!
about 7 years ago
– Wed, Mar 27, 2019 at 02:08:48 AM
Hello, Backers!
It’s been a while since we had an update, and we wanted to wait until we had everything sorted before posting, instead of inundating you all with a bunch of small incomplete updates.
Lots has been going on behind the scenes since the campaign ended, and we have been tirelessly working toward the single goal of getting great products to you fabulous people.
We’re proud to say that, after some unexpected hiccups since the last update and lots of back and forth, all elements are now well underway with manufacturing, many having actually already been completed due to the shorter turnaround time of some add-on items (such as dice, coins etc.)
Printing with USPCC
As we find the production process fascinating - and think that some of you may as well - we thought we'd share some of the unexpected obstacles we've been tackling during the past few weeks. There have been a few more back-and-forths with USPCC than we had expected - all of which have now been taken care of - and we’d like to walk you through what we’ve learned that will help us streamline the process for the future to produce products even faster and more efficiently.
1. Raster vs Vector. Our experience is in digital art - painting and concerting - so our native format is raster art. As it turns out almost all offset-printing card production is done with vector art. If you’re curious about the difference, allow us to explain:
Raster art is made with pixels. Think Photoshop and MS Paint; the bitmap is the simplest version of this. The more pixels, the sharper the image. However, if you zoom in on a raster image, it gets blurry. That’s the downside; the upside is that is allows for much more dynamic image manipulation and modification.
Vector art is made with math. Shapes are mathematically defined by curves, points, and shapes. Think Adobe Illustrator. Many graphic shapes and logos are made as vector images, the simplest version of which is an .svg file. While vector images don’t allow for as much dynamic manipulation as pixel images, they have the benefit of remaining infinitely sharp when zoomed in.
As mentioned, vector files are apparently the standard process for card creation, a fact of which we were unaware when we began. As it happened, our entire production process was geared toward creating raster files (our test print company used raster), which caused a bit of a hiccup when it was tome to finally start production with USPCC.
2. Special ink channels for Pantone inks. With the addition of metallic ink - which is very easy to add in vector files, but more complicated in raster - we had to do some retooling of our card images. With raster files, such as what we had created, images needed to have a separate “spot channel” for specialized ink - in our case, metallic orange gold, Pantone #10129c. For this process, a spot channel is created inside Photoshop and the area to be made metallic is separated out into its own black-and-white mask, underneath which a white layer must be left in the rest of the image so that the gold ink can show over white. In essence, a “hole” has to be left in the image for the gold to show up correctly.
3. Separate tuck seals. To differentiate our special purple gilded decks from the standard Samedi decks, we have created special tuck seals to set them apart. After much back and forth we found that USPCC could offer both gold and silver foil for tuck seal printing, so we created both the standard black and gold seal for the main decks, and a special purple and silver seal for the gilded ones.
4. Different print margins. In printing our test deck (with a separate print-on-demand company, which could offer print runs as low as 1), we tooled our card images for their specific safe/bleed/cut lines. Safe/bleed/cut lines indicate the zones for a print process wherein they can and can’t guarantee that slight misalignment will accidentally trim part of an image. Art within the safe zone is guaranteed not to be cut off, outside the safe zone is potentially at risk for a standard misalignment to trim the art away. It turns out that the test deck company, since they were printing non-offset inks, had tighter control and therefore had narrower margins (less of the image was at risk of being cut away). USPCC, being one of the highest volume CMYK offset card printers in the world, has wider print margins and so therefore the card images had to each be tweaked by hand to ensure the art would look the best in final printed form.
5. CMYK load. This was news to us, and is apparently due to the specific print requirements of USPCC’s offset process. Normally, when something is sent for CMYK printing, an image can simply be converted from RGB (Red-Green-Blue, or monitor color space, where the images were created) to CMYK (Cyan-Magenta-Yellow-blacK) and print with no problem. All colors are made up of those four inks, in different combinations. Our graphics program easily converts RGB into CMYK, splitting the colors needed (black, purple, white) into the CMYK channels. However, due to the specific requirements of the USPCC card stock and printers, full black - which would normally be made up of cyan, yellow, and magenta ink in addition to black ink - had to be moved entirely into the black channel. This means that anything that had full black in it - the majority of the card backgrounds - had to be stripped out of the C, M, and Y channels of each card to be sure the ink didn’t over-apply. As we were informed by USPCC, had we gone ahead and loaded black, cyan, yellow, and magenta ink in those quantities, we risked both jammed printers and chipped ink on final cards. This was rectified.
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So that's what we've been working on since the last update! While none of these issues were expressly expected, we knew that something would be requiring our attention in this phase between funding and fulfillment, so our timetables are generally unaffected. Part of the fun of this Kickstarter process is learning and adapting to the new challenges that pop up, and overcoming them as efficiently as possible!
That's it for now! Hopefully, the next update we will be posting will announce the end of production and the start of fulfillment! As always, a huge thanks to all you fantastic backers and immense gratitude for going with us on this journey!
Also, if anyone has any specific questions about the process of making these cards, we would be happy to answer them!