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Tag: printing

Nelly Duff/Eine World Record Print and private view

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We’ve been fans of Nelly Duff for ages, and our growing collection of prints attests to this. Cassius & Co are not only knowledgeable and infectiously enthusiastic, but also full of great ideas and a sense of fun.

The latest ‘wheeze’ was collaborating with Eine (rumoured to be, ahem, Banksy’s print-maker and of course recognised creator of the alphabet of ‘circus font’ stencils that adorn most of Shoreditch and Hoxton’s store shutters). The collaboration involved a world record attempt for the largest number of individual screens and colours in a single print. More info is on Eine’s page at Nelly Duff.

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The print is a w-less alphabet, with each letter taking 3 separate passes: the base colour, the outline/border colour and then the stripey fill. None of the colours are used elsewhere in the print so this is 3×25 ie 75 individual screen passes, plus the black and white – 77 in total. All of course need to be precisely in register.

We ordered the print white, but there’s also a run on black and on gold.

The private view on 7 May, 2009 was a real scream. It was held in a car respraying place just north of Brick Lane. The added cunningness was that they’d pulled a print at each stage of the printing process (ie #1 had only the white base, while #76 had every letter finished, bar one final colour pass). The whole 77 series was arrayed around the room. You can see the panorama of the PV at the top.

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UPDATE: See the photos of the event on Nelly’s blog.

Getting Canon inkjets to work on a Mac…

So, the ugly, ink-swilling, temperamental Epson Stylus Pro 1270 finally died a death. Total inability to feed paper (bit of a disadvantage in a printer). So, with Vicky having a book to get ready for London Book Fair it was back to the PITA of finding an A3 colour printer for high quality home office use.

Mac users know that the only company to have a full driver complement for their range is Epson, with HP doing pretty well as a second place. Most normal people can now stop reading. The rest of the post is for therapeutic purposes and the sanity of other Marital Tech Support People who have to get the printer to print…

Firstly, we bought a Canon PIXMA 9000PPDs on Wikipedia – remembered about Postscript and felt old

  • Re-googled, PPD with generic Adobe. Found out that Adobe have a ‘generic print driver’ and tried to associate this with the 9000. Didn’t work, but failed in a more attractive way. Found some suggestions that if one saved work as a PDF then printed that it’d improve quality. Exported the Adobe Illustrator book cover as a PDF and then printed this. Better, but we were still looking at divorce…
  • Turned to twitter and asked about PPDs for Canon. Doug Winter (@winjer), ever-helpfully, pointed me at the stunningly useful openprinting.org (formerly linuxprint). These folk test, edit and create print drivers for the linux world. Luckily a) the mac is based on unix and so this all works; b) unix folk can roll their own; and c) unix folk like sharing things free 🙂
  • Here’s the driver page for Canon:
    https://openprinting.org/show_printer.cgi?recnum=Canon-PIXMA_Pro9000
    No open PPD, sadly, but a pointer to TurboPrint.de and the promise of “working”
  • TurboPrint has a mac-specific printer driver suite called (catchily) PrintFab. €49, but we needed the €79 version (interesting licencing approach – you need a more expensive licence to print bigger pages! The entry level just supports A4, while the ‘pro’ supports A3 and A3+). I admired greatly through gritted teeth as I downloaded.
  • PrintFab installs as a new printer and – after a restart (bah) there’s a total transformation. Not only is the basic output better (certainly ideal for proofing), but the quality twiddling is nothing sort of breathtaking. ICC profiles, gamut adjustment, ink-by-ink adjustment (directly by ink mix, RGB or CMYK adjustments). The ink-saver mode is really useful and the photo quality is photolab level on 6×4 and 5×7, and passable for a 10×8. More work needed on this.
  • So, we now approach happiness. The Canon’s delivering on its promise and we have a great step forward from the (admittedly ancient) Epson. We also have a whole pile of new things to learn – colour profiles? Ugh.

    Whatever happened to “just press Apple+P” ??