In case you missed it, Xerox announced last week that it has developed silver ink that can used to print electronic circuits.
In case you were wondering, the printed circuit board (PCB) industry was estimated to be worth $76 billion in 2007.
Not much in the way of practical details from the press releases. the implications are that the ink will be used only in inkjets, not litho or flexo or gravure, which is really to bad. So if you are a printer and you want to hack around a bit, you can't just buy a gallon of the ink, print out some circuit board on heavy stock and see what you get. Too bad.
But hey, if you have some spare time, the software for designing PCB boards is free, if you can believe that.
If I was a printer with some downtime, I would at least check it out. I mean, the PCB industry is not going to go away anytime soon, unlike some other niches (cough, newspaper/magazine) that once needed the services of a printer.

Smashing Magazine is the monster web site for graphic artists, one of the most popular if not the most popular site on the internet for webmasters and desktop publishers. Their latest blog post is titled 10 Pre-Press Tips for Perfect Printing.
And they are good tips too, none of that outdated crap you see in Wikipedia and about.com. Bookmark it and send it out to your clients.

I noticed for the first time today that Michael Jahn has a blog. Of course, he has had that blog since 2003. Sometimes I'm a little slow picking up on things.
Dave Kauffman has a blog too. And of course, Gordon Pritchard still maintains his excellent quality in print blog as well.
What do all these people have in common? They were significant contributors to the seminal CTPP (Computer-to-plate) forum back in the 1990s (cue warm glow, soft nostalgia music). With Dave Mainwaring as moderator, it was the most active electronic community in prepress (and probably in printing) of its time. And with the decline of printing at the beginning of this century, perhaps the glory days of that forum will stand as the high point of this industry for quite awhile.
BTW, Gordon and Dave posted for Creo, the leading edge solution provider for CTP of that time. Michael Jahn posted for some other company. I forget the name.
8^}

So when cruising the printceo blog, I find out that newsprint production will fall by 1/3 in 2009 from the previous year, or by 1.5 million tons.. Thannks for your contribution to western civilization by allowing greater public discourse. Don't let the door bang you on the butt while you are on the way out.
And oh yeah, magazine print production will fall by 25% or million tons. Hey, have you seen Newsweek lately? Or what's left of it?
In the meantime, packaging chugs along. How long until flexo overtakes litho in net economic value creation, not to mention prepress employment? What does flexo do? It doesn't provide information (not word-information anyways) so it doesn't compete with the internet. Flexo makes everyday things more beautiful. Check out these awesome packaging designs from designer daily.nn

So, instead of digging myself out from the usual massive load of work that I face on a weekly basis, I procrastinated somewhat by reading one of the excellent series of articles by Rolling Stone about the usual fraud and swindle on Wall Street.
Naturally of course, I was curious to check Kodak's share price. Ah yes, it's going down again, after a most mysterious spike upwards in late summer.
Well, the third quarter numbers are coming out this week. Shall we hazard a guess to what the numbers will be? I'll go out on limb and say that they will suck, but the share won't go down because all the naked short sellers will be covering by then. And laughing at you and me.
Note: The title of this post refers to a Wall Street practice of buying non-existent shares (a perfectly legal practice) from a market-marker and flooding the market as to lower the share price.

Every once in awhile, I get an email message or a linkedin invitation from an old acquaintance or even just somebody who has read my blog and I get asked one or more of the following questions:
1. What is it like being a professional blogger?
2. Can you make money blogging?
3. Can you make a living as a professional blogger?
4. How do you start?

So in this post I'm going to answer this questions so that I can just link to this post everytime somebody emails me with inquires about the life of a blogger. So here goes...
1. What it's like being a professional blogger?
To tell the truth, the professional code of conduct for being a blogger is a bit of drag sometimes. Like always sitting in front of your computer wearing nothing but your underwear. It gets tedious. Somedays I think to myself "Ahhhhhh, what would I give, just to once again wear a nice comfortable suit, blazer, cuff link and all"
Plus, when you are married, groupies are always a problem. Temptation, temptation. Thankfully, I've been able to resist so far.
2. Can you make money as a blogger?
Yes. You can make good money. Lots of people make great money.
3. Can you make a living as a professional blogger?
Yes, you can, but before you run off and open a Blogger account and tell the world what you had for dinner last night, you should be told that 1) Most blogs don't make any money 2) It takes years for a blog to become profitable (with a few exceptions).
Take this blog for example. I make anywhere from one to two hundred bucks a month off it. Of course, I spend anywhere from 5 to 15 hours a month posting to it, so let's say I'm making $12-15 hours doing prepress pilgrim. And I have been posting to this blog for more than two years. Now why does this suck as a money-maker? Because I didn't do a competent job of market research. Heck, I didn't do ANY market research. I have just been doin' prepress for more than 15 years and heck, that's what I'll blog on.
Now, this is not really a big secret, but I'll tell you anyway, there's no money in prepress and hasn't been for years. I mean, jees, most people that read my blog are probably more interested in knowing if they are going to keep their job over the next six months then whipping out the old wallet and buying the latest and greatest widget-whatever through one of my affiliate links. Now, if two years ago I had started blogging about anti-aging strategies or personal health issues, I would be making a LOT more than two hundred bucks a month blogging. Those niches are so hot that the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) along with Google is launching lawsuits against fake blogs (or "flogs").
4. How do you start?
Well, that's dead easy. Open up an account at either Blogger or Wordpress or Live Journal and start typing away. A far more important question to ask yourself is why do you want to be a blogger?
Are you trying to make money (see answer to #3)?
Do you have a burning desire to write about something?
Do you need a marketing vehicle for yourself?
Do you need to vent?
In my case, it was a combination of all of the above, although you may find it interesting to note that making money off this blog is becoming less important over the years. Bloggers who have been doing it for more than a couple of years will tell you that having a good marketing vehicle like a blog is actually more valuable than trying to make money off it. That is to say, because you are a blogger, you are offered far more opportunities than if you are Joe Schlub with the bullet point resume. No really, unless you are applying for a government job, if somebody says "send me your resume" well you might as well just forget about it.
Again, I can only speak from my own experience. Like right now I'm busting butt on a project with good potential in between being a stay-at-home Dad and there's NO WAY I would have had this opportunity without blogging for a couple of years. Like the client totally understands that I stay at home with the kids and we are in a con-call and there's a Dora the Explorer video playing in the background, that's cool.
Mind you, if any of you guys think this is a dream job, just remember that if the kids going crazy every odd day (it happens) that just means I have to stay up until midnight catching up. But hey, if I think I'm hard done-by, I just think what would have happened if I had picked the "safe" route back to reemployment and taken some technical course to retrain myself like... the PMI certification (Project Manager Institute). Oh man, tons of those guys in the city looking for work.
Anyhow, gotta go. Boatloads of work to do. I'm really glad that Blenz opened up this nice coffee shop on Main close to where I lived. The seats with the nice cushions are outstanding.

I got this email from Daryl Spencer and I thought it was interesting enough to post to the blog. Remember that some of the people on the other side of the fence are passionate about their work and do care. TEASER: Guess how many pics he had to look at to get down to 28 for show?

EMAIL:
Two weeks from today the first showing of my photography will open!

I'm very excited about this and I hope that you can either come to the "opening" or stop by sometime between Oct 25th and November 22nd to see it. If you don't want to read the rest of this email but are wondering where to go to see the show, scroll to the bottom of the email and I've put the address and phone number in bold for your convenience.

If you're wondering what this is all about, let me explain. Wait - there isn't enough time. Let me sum up:

For a while now I've been thinking it would be great to have an opportunity to show my photography work beyond the handful of friends and family who visit my website from time to time. As you may know, I've been producing fine art landscape photography for several years. Some of you have prints of my work in your house (maybe the downstairs basement or the garage or stuffed in a corner with other stuff that you're afraid would hurt someone's feelings if they found it at the garage sale you had in the summer). But anyway, some of you do have some of my work somewhere.

Anyway, as I said, I have been thinking for a while that it would be great to show my work to a broader audience.

An opportunity came up through the View Gallery who showcases a different artist each month. The View Gallery is part of the FraserView Church in Richmond, so if you're looking for it and find a church where you think the gallery should be, you've found the right place (or maybe you found another nearby church - but go in anyway, the people are probably very nice even if they don't have an art gallery at the facility).

So, over the past few months I've been putting together a show. For those of you who (like me a few months ago) don't know what it means to "put together a show", I'll outline the highlights below. It was certainly a fantastic learning experience and a lot of work.

The first step was to get the photographs together that I wanted to show. I went out to the gallery to check out the space and figure out how many prints I wanted to have (I decided on 28). Then I started looking through my photographs. As you may know, I have a lot of photographs. In fact, doing a quick scan of my computer at the moment I have over 85,000 images. Of course the fast majority of them are pure crap. But even filtering to the ones that I've bothered to do something with in PhotoShop I have over 2,500 to look at. Wow, that's a lot of photos. Hopefully there are a few good ones in there. How hard could it be to find 28?

Well, harder than I'd expected. You'll notice in my photographs that I have a lot of diversity. I have brightly colored wildlife, studio portraits, abstracts, black and while landscapes, color landscapes, travel photos, and other stuff that probably few of you have even seen (saving that for another show sometime). For this show I really wanted to focus on black and white and on what I call the "essential landscape".

Essential Landscape? What is that?
I like to divide landscapes into two groups. The "grand landscape" are the shots of the lake with the stream and the trees and the clouds and the birds and the canoe with the trout jumping behind it while the sun sets and a deer grazes in the distance. These are the shots you'll see in calendars, postcards and the like. Very pretty stuff, really. Nothing to complain about there, but not what I'm doing for this show.

The "essential landscape" is not about showing where you are. It isn't about including the stream and the lake and the trout and the trees and the clouds and the birds and the canoe - it is about narrowing the focus down to one or two elements and making a graphic composition. Telling a smaller story. Capturing the essence of something.

Now before I put in a link to some of my essential landscapes, I know some of you will look at a few of the images and say "wait a minute, that one in the bottom row of the first page looks to me like a "grand landscape". Well yeah - maybe it does. But I put up the website so I get to be the judge of what fits my critera. There isn't a clear line between the two so don't get hung up on it.

Ok, now that we have that out of the way, you can view some of my essential landscape work at www.essential-landscape.com if you're interested.

But back, for a moment, to my exciting account of the process of putting together a show:

Once I decided that I wanted to show b&w essential landscape prints, the task got a bit easier. I have lots of these, but not 2,500. The challenge, I found, was assembling a set that I felt had cohesiveness as a group. I printed out a whole bunch of 4x6 prints and put them on the table and arranged, re-arranged, grouped and discarded and then printed a few more until I had a set that I though would work together in the space that is available in the gallery.

Then I had to get to work on making my very best quality prints of each of the images, selecting (and buying) frames, deciding on how I wanted them matted, buying the mats, getting them cut, learning about the proper way to hang artwork in a matted frame (I'd been doing it wrong all this time - how embarrassing! - but who knew that painter's masking tape wasn't the right stuff to use?) and assembling all the prints into the frames.

The final step, just before the show opens, will be to hang them up in the gallery space and hope none of the frames broke during the drive over. If you get there and see only 27 or 26 photos, don't ask me why. Assume something went wrong and I don't want to talk about it.

So, I hope you'll come out and see the show sometime. The gallery doesn't have formal open and closed hours. If you want to go there, give a quick phone call to the church at 604-270-4211 and ask if someone will be there whenever it is that you plan to go. If someone is there, they'll let you in, turn on the lights for you and leave you to browse to your heart's content. When you're done, please turn out the lights. The church is at 11295 Mellis Drive in Richmond. It is near Cambie and No 5 Road, but I suggest looking at a map before you go as the streets are designed such that it is only easy to find once you're within 100ft of it.

If you want to come to the opening of the show, it will be on Saturday Oct 25th. There is a church service from 10am-11:30am and they're introduce me at the service and then at 11:30 there will be mingling and "meet the artist" time in the gallery.

So, I hope to see you there!

All of the art I've put together for the show will be on sale. Very reasonable prices - $100 for the ones in the 18x24" frames and $75 for the ones in the 14x18" frames.

-Daryl

In case some of you guys were wondering, yes that's the same Daryl who was Renaissance PM at Creo.

A acquaintance of mine shot me an email a while back ago looking for an offset printer to do a short-run booklet (500 copies). I told him not to waste his time with the web printers, but phone up the sheetfed guys in town and see if they would take the job.
So he did. He found one printer that was willing to do the job at a price that was agreeable, but he had to up his order to one thousand copies. Now the interesting thing is there were printers that he phoned asking for a quote that never bothered to phone him back.
Yeah, hard times in printing for sure. And jeepers, nobody better dare a snarky comment saying that 1000 copies is not enough business to quote on. I've been hearing about inkjet presses for close to a decade now and supposedly that's the business they are made for.
On the other hand, doing phone quotes in the printing business is like the worst job in the business. Well, maybe cleaning the plate processor outranks in terms of suckiness, but if somebody offered me the position of phone estimator at a print house, I would have been on the verge of defaulting on the mortgage before I would accept.
Really, doing quotes and dealing with orders is REALLY the stuff that you want to move to your website. You know, that thingie on the internet that represents your company. I'm actually working on a clients site all this weekend (oh yah) with specific focus on the backend, ie the web page where we try to get the customers money.
Here's a hint, no matter what business you're in, whether it's printing, design, or kitchen magnets, you should be spending a lot of time on the money pages of your web site. Work with that designer and get it down.
And maybe you should return phone calls too, no matter if you don't feel like it.

Last week was way to busy and I'm just about to sit down and write a nice post and aiiiieeeeee... there goes my back.
If you see me walking around Main Street with my kid today, walk over and say hi. I'll be the one with the hunchback.
I've had this back issue for decades, picked it up in university. I'll be fine in a couple of days.