Chronicling the adventures of Studio of the Month.
Live from beautiful Logan Square in Chicago, this is blogofthemonth. We, the members of Studio of the Month like to poke our heads around in many things so subscribe or check back often to stay up-to-date. Read about company projects, involvement in happenings around the city and progress in learning the jedi design ways.
As a designer, one of the biggest thrills is seeing your work out in the real world. No project has been more thrilling for us in that way than the Chicago Water Taxi. The Chicago Water Taxi has become an icon up and down the Chicago River and you would be hard pressed to spend a summer day in Chicago without seeing it.
Today we learned that CWT is adding a third water taxi to it’s fleet of bright yellow vessels. ‘Sunliner’ will be joining ‘Bravo’ and ‘Alpha’ starting at the end of May.
If you haven’t ridden the Chicago Water Taxi yet, give it a shot. For the $2 fare, you can’t beat the unique view of the city, especially on a beautiful Chicago summer day.
See more about the work we did for the Chicago Water Taxi on our site and check back soon because big changes are coming to the CWT Maps and Timetables.
Tomorrow, Friday, May 7th is the long awaited Chicago premiere of ‘Vincent: A Life in Color‘. Vincent is a project we have been involved with for a long time (May 2006 to be exact) and we are extremely excited to finally see the film in its home town. ‘Vincent | A Life in Color’ will be running at the Gene Siskle Film Center May 7th – May 13th and we highly recommend you check it out.
As a Chicagoan, you may think you’re familiar with Mr. Vincent Falk but after seeing the documentary you will totally fall in love with him. Aside from being entertaining, the documentary is the epitome of ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ or in this case ‘don’t judge a man by his fashion’.
A bit about the film:
Vincent P. Falk is Fashion Man. Clad in brightly colored suits; Vincent twirls on Chicago’s many bridges, performing fashion shows for passing tour boats. As he spins his way through the city, tourists and locals alike are left to wonder just who is this strange man. Over the course of one boat season, we follow Vincent and begin to unravel the mystery that surrounds him. We discover that the man behind the fashion, having come through the travails of life, has decided to do what makes him happy. And so, he spins on.
You can see all of the work Studio of the Month has done for the film on the newly updated Vincent project on our site.
When we talk to friends and colleagues about the lifetokens project, the big mystery seems to be “how does he print the tokens?”. We could do a whole week just on the trials and tribulations of printing that glorious first token, but for now we will skip ahead to the process we finally settled on.
In the beginning there were two general options of printing the tokens. Option one was having a stock of tokens printed somewhere. There are places online that specialize in printing ‘wooden nickles‘ but the cons of leaving it up to someone else were obvious. Little opportunity for quality control and tweaking, slow turn around when stock gets low and expensive. It was obvious we needed to move the process in-house. After a lot of research (we even tried to build a printer), Jamie settled on using a flatbed printer based on a modified Epson 1390. Printing the tokens in-house solved all kinds of problems such as printing the unique token code on the back and allowing us to keep lower stock of more tokens.
The solution printer also opened up one new problem, there is no special ’software’ out there to help with printing lifetokens on a flatbed printer. A custom tray was created to sit on the bed of the printer to hold up to 20 tokens in place (we will try to get photos of this tray) and Jamie needed to be able to select designs and have them print at the exact same place every time. Unless we expected him to purchase and learn Illustrator himself, it was obvious this software would have to be custom.
Thus the lifetokenstock app was born. Developed in Adobe AIR, we were able to simplify the printing process greatly.
Printing – the primary function of the application is to print the tokens. Using the application you can add up to 20 tokens of any design to print. After printing the front of the token, the application then instructs you to flip the token over before printing the back.
Updating – all of the token graphics are packaged with the application in .swf format. This allows us to add and update token designs by simply sending him an updated version.
Generating Token Codes – another big challenge to the printing process was storing the codes on each token correctly in the lifetokens.com database. The codes used by the printing application are generated by first checking the database to ensure they are not already used. Then, only after Jamie confirms the tokens printed correctly does it send the codes back to the database, adding the new token to stock.
Positioning – because everything needs a little tweaking, we were able to give Jamie the ability to reposition the tokens using very precise increments.
This portion of the project was a lot of fun and I’m sure we will be adding more functionality and tweaks as the company grows.
