Happy happy joy joy.

@joojaa Same to you. Do you also have a holiday tomorrow because of the ascent of Christ into Heaven? I thank him right now for pulling that stunt. And Friday is a "squeeze day" so it's a whole little mini holiday.

@Wolff teleport to space ship day, check.

yes holiday here too.

@joojaa Nice. Long time no see. You doing ok?

@Wolff yeah periods 1-4 are getting pretty hectic

@joojaa what periods do you mean?

@Wolff the uni operates under 5 x 6 week sprints (or 7 if you count the evaluation/exam time) called periods

@joojaa Ah.

So in period 1 i have 60 students to guide period 2 50 period 3 30 period 4 70

Realistically my capacity is about 10 students a day but in reality i need to handle aboyyt 2 times that

@Wolff but thats why i have an assistant

@joojaa I've had some crazy months. The two other designers at my job both took long-term sick leave with stress, so it was up to me to keep things together. The printer retired and since we had trouble making ends meet and our equipment was old we ended up closing down our in-house print shop after +50 years.

@Wolff sounds bad

@joojaa Both good and bad.

It's been my opinion for years that we had to close it down. It was a nice dream to run an old printing machine in the middle of the city, but it's very inefficient.

So now we focus on doing graphic design and print broking. Taking care of everything for our clients and supporting them.

But it's been a bit sad of course. Been romantic to have our own print shop and see things get printed right after exporting the PDF.

@Wolff yes, but no iown production has some long term implications

But running an offset print shop is an expensive hobby.

Well given that all of my work is a EXTREMELy expensive hobby, i cant relate :)

@joojaa Sure. We've been afraid it would scare clients away, but most of them don't really care. They seem to like the service we provide.,

Running a factory in middle of a city is not effective

Nope. And on ooold equipment.

The old Heidelberg printer goes to Pakistan and the cutting machine ends up in Portugal I think.

anyway the implications arent really about clients now. It can erode your capability over time

We have a good subcontractor. Real down to earth people with a good sense of quality.

@joojaa I guess. But we had no choice money wise, so we just have to make the best of it.

Well im writing instruyctions on how to use our Zünd cutter

And there is a market in being a middle man between clients and printer. The market is a jungle. We have a collection of good subcontractors with whom we've dealt with for years. So if the client wants both digital print, offset print, t-shirts etc. they just leave it to us.

@joojaa What does that cut?

@Wolff Cardboard, paper, vinyls, fabric, thiner board (though it could also cut aluminium and wood but we dont have spindle mounts)

plastic sheet

Oh. Our machine could only cut paper. And cardboard to some extent, but then the knife had to be sharpened.

up to triplle layer cardboard

@Wolff thisis not a shear it cuts any shape you wish

Ah ok

we also have a shear, dunno much about that

seems über fancy

But offcourse w also have dedicated shears for sheetmetal also

As you can imagine, our offset machine had some value being a sturdy piece of mechanics. The CTP machine, which was 20 years newer, is just trash.

heres a vide of the zund

zund.com/en/cutting-systems/digital-cutting-systems/g3-cutter

Had to remove a windows and part of the wall to get it all out...

@joojaa That's really cool. Completely different from the machine I was talking about I see.

@Wolff seems to be typical for machine moves

@Wolff the zund is cool as you can make your own boxes becayuse it can do creases etc and match the cut marks

Maybe... it cost more than the machinery was worth.

@joojaa I want one

thoug ours hhas a camera so it searches cutmarks on its own

@joojaa Better stay away from using them as graphic decoration then.

@Wolff yeah, they use our laser for that

@joojaa I mean designers shouldn't print graphics that resembles trim marks or their product will be cut in weird places

well yes.

But we dont do much print cutting to be honest

More furniture and other manufacturerd goods

Anyway if you ever stray into the neeigbourhood i can show you around

@joojaa I would like that.

And I would like to see Finland in general

So near yet so far

2 boat trips

I hope I'll do it one day. Not much of a traveler. Although I have mostly good memories from travels I'm the kind of person where the bad outweighs the good.

Buying tickets, checking in, going through security, fearing terror and crash, finding the shuttle bus, arguing with the hotel about our reservation... When I'm finally able to relax I'm all stressed up.

I know it's not normal, just being honest.

Well im going to gotland by ferry, and you can get with ferry from germany

so car all way no security

@joojaa I haven't driven a car for 15 years ...

me neither

i have chauffeur for that

@joojaa the wife?

yeah

really we dont actually use the car much, its mostly so that we can get to our summer residence

@joojaa, have you found any good use of AI when it comes to graphic design?

I struggle to see it. Graphic designers online mostly seem uninterested. And I'm not much better. I mostly see things that enable me to make very inferior quality, but very quickly. That's not what I need.

AI image gen mostly makes kitsch.

One of the practical things I can imagine right now was if I could have an AI assistant search my hard drive. Also look inside .indd files and understand them. So I could describe some fancy object style I made two years ago in some report and it would immediately open the file.