Disappointment Artist

In my new job, one of the things that comes up is the black-only business cards on plain white 80# stock. This is the cheapest business card you can get. Nothing special about the paper, no bleeds, no added colors, etc. Because they're so cheap, we gang them to make a more efficient press run. But ganging them sometimes means blanks, empty slots where we make blank cards that get thrown away.

In my last job, the last bit there just didn't happen. Most of what we manufactured had magnet material applied to the paper after printing, and the magnet material was way, way more expensive than paper. We ganged, but using 100% of the sheet came first.

So anyway, I can run cards for myself in those blank slots. This is a novelty for me. I've been making my own on an HP Indigo for years, something which let me make a sheet or two at a time. Which is nice because I hardly go through a dozen business cards a year. They're more like calling cards for me, and I don't do that much calling.

But raised print? I'd have to order a box of 500, no way I can get rid of them before my contact info is outdated.



Still, I haven't acclimated to the waste potential of knowing a slot or two is getting chucked.

Plus, there's some cool effects you can get running halftones through thermography (raising the print). Sometimes it looks like hell (like my Disappointment Artist card), but other times you get cool 3-D effects, like my polydactyly card.

This is probably something that will get old in a hurry. That, or I'll end up with enough 500-card boxes of business cards to build a clubhouse, stacking them like bricks.

Yes, the Disappointment Artist card bleeds three sides. I'd run the other two in the two blank slots of one run; there were three blank slots next time, and I was able to put it on an end and bleed it into two blanks that did, indeed, get chucked.

The halftone image in the picture didn't turn out that great raised. Which was disappointing, but that's the medium I work best in.