❖ Version History ❖

1st-15th of July 2022
As we discussed last time on the Design Journal, we were preparing designs for garnishing our pin packaging for the Calendra Seasonal Pins Collection. These little card stock prints, having been designed to the specs that we need to make the package snug and perfect for our prototype, now need to be made on a massive scale to accommodate 800 individual pins.

To accomplish this big task in as small a way as possible, I have purchased ten sheets of colored card stock for each color of the pins. I selected the card stock this time using the prototype pins as the example for the color matching, then brought the raw card stock home, cut it down to a size my printer could consume, and then laid the graphics of our pin back designs out on a full sheet of paper in photoshop to make sure that we would get as many designs out of each sheet as possible.

The result of that process was, at our best, 20 individual pin designs per sheet, which is a perfectly good number. We have 200 total pins in each color that we are going to have made in our initial batch, so this only requires 10 sheets of print each… but that is still an astounding 40 sheets of print. Though this is still the most cost effective way of accomplishing the task, this will inevitably take 2 sets of ink cartridges through the printer, effectively costing us $80 in black ink… which is fortunately only $0.08 per pin in additional cost (this process costs $0.25 per sheet with many manufacturers, so it is a good amount cheaper, just labor intensive). When we are finished, we end up with:

Though it is a lot of printer maintenance to get these made, the process is fairly quick, and so is that of cutting the paper (which only takes about an hour of time to get all 800 individual tiny sheets prepped)… but then there is the process of adding these pins onto their card stock… and this is a project that took more time than anticipated.

At my absolute best, I think I could get about 2-3 pins attached to the card stock and placed back into the plastic bag within a minute… which means that this process of doing up every single package is going to take about 6 hours to complete (at best).

So…

Yeah. Pulled up the Netflix Machine and started delving into the binge world for a few nights, cranking about a 2 hour session out per day for most of a week. But honestly, the work is cathartic and simple, and it feels really good to make something like this that makes the product look so much nicer with such a simple fix. Luckily, I don’t think I will need to do this again any time soon either, but that will depend on the demand of these things once they finally hit the marketplace. After a few days, I end up with eight boxes that each hold 100 of the pins, and they start to look like this once the cards are all attached:

It is truly a bit exhausting… but it feels great to get it done. And with this project getting completed, we are one more major step toward being prepared for a strong & healthily organized Kickstarter launching experience. We have a few other fun pieces of Calendra swag that we plan to put together, but for the time being, our new objective is all about beefing up the website to be more prepared for the peer-reviewing process by getting our Calendra home page fully fleshed out… and that process begins with our final rule book design project: Videography.