Initial J-card Screen prints

Initial J-card Screen prints

Today I began my first phase of printing my J-card via silk screen printing. I had exposed all four design for the front and back to be carefully aligned on an A3 screen. I also chose a thick 300gsm paper stock to print on as I wanted the card to fit really tightly in the packaging but not so thick that it couldn't close or bend without damage. I began my process with mixing my colours to the required standard which was a dark navy blue and a red. I ended up printing about sixteen cards which were carefully aligned on the front. However I has some issues with alignment on the back side of the design. When I cut my cards out the back would be half cut off and missing major pieces of the design. This is a major design flaw and I need to figure out a way of fixing this immediately. The front alignment on the other hand was really great and most of the J-cards lines up with the text perfectly. 

I managed to get the front alignment within the crop marks work quite well and the J-card size was correct also as it fit perfectly inside the cassette case. The design did not spill over the panels at all and the spine and rear panel remained independent from the others. One more issue I had however was that my 300gsm paper stock was actually a little bit too thick as it was quite tricky to actually slip the cassette into the case and would get stuck on the way out. I'd have to size down slightly to achieve the best production. 

A few other key points of feedback I received was that my red was perfectly fine but my blue was way too bright and had be darkened a lot more. I needed to have a really deep navy for this design to look great.  I also had some issues with the screen and amount of tape I applied due to how dense all of my positives were together. This led to bleeding onto the page which gave some designs an unprofessional look. Now I know that I need to space my designs out a lot wider over several screens or one really big one. I also need to alter my blue and figure out a way to align the back and front perfectly. I was finally told to source some off white paper as the straight up vibrant white paper was way too intense and made the design look unfinished.