Digital - week 12 - 15/05/2019

Project update

Os far I am basically done with my project, all I have to do it gets the books printed and then die-cut them. I have done a lot in just one week after having the meeting with Lana, who happily gave me a more cheaper and quicker way to make the sticker book. she gave me a run down of how the printing process works and how I had a few options on how to make the book and told me the best and cheapest way to do it. 

What I had to do was put my sticker sheets finished with my business name and have the designs not to close to each other, into a PDF with a 3mm margin because that's what her software its set to which wasn't a hassle at all.  She also told me that the reason why it is so expensive to print a sticker book is because of the process of die-cutting, and how it is trail and error and is quite time consuming as well. So I am better off cutting the die-cut lines myself with an exacto knife. Which I am ok with because then I know the cuts are how I want them to be. she also recommend to print out a black and white draw the outlines on the paper and then use that s guide lines to cutting the die-cut lines with the knife. 

I also had to figure out a way to lay the pages out in away that the book would be easier to use and cut out. Which was quite hard, but the Lana did show me different ways of putting the book together and how it would look as a final product. The best way to do it would be the stickers facing into the book, but this mean there was an empty space as the front of the book which meant I had to make a page fuller which was fine. 

After I sent her the final pages with my business name on it I went in to talk to her about the book layout and she printed them out right then in there, it took no time at all to print the pages. Which was amazing, so I took a non-biddened sticker book to use for in context photos and to put on the skate board. I ended up using the photos for the page fuller of the book which was great.

I am excited to do this project and keep making this project to develop it more and more and build my business.

final book lay out.

I sent this to Lana as a PDF with everything of high resolution so it was the nicest quality when I sent it to her and when they were printed.

This is what they looked like printed 

The cover is printed onto a nice card paper, and the stickers a printed onto a sticker paper with a snap and peel paper. Which is a paper where you bend the joints at the back and they snap apart and you peel it off. So when it came to folding the pages in half to be binded Lana used masking tape to keep it sealed shut and not snap and open. When you print the pages they print onto A3 so its two pages on one. 

 I ended up getting a skate board from Chris, which was nice. My thought was to decorate the skate board in the stickers and use it as like a marketing piece for my sticker brand and to show them in context.
So all I had to do with these sticker is cut them out and stick them on. So I cut the A3 pages in half so they were they were single A4 pages. This was so I could individually figure out the die-cut lines while I was cutting them out. Which took quite a long time but it was a very good way to figure out the die-cut line.
I cut them all out and then just attached them onto the board, I didn't want to layer them because I just couldn't cover up the art of each sticker, so I just suck the left over ones onto some other things, and then gave some away to people to see where they put them and if they worked as marketing tool which they surprisingly did. People put them on there every day used things, people were putting them on their hard drives and phones.

 Once this was done I got a book printed from Lana and it turned out great, and she happily is going to print more for me. This book I am using as a tester to see is the exacto knife cutting workers, which it did it just took a while to get use to and understand how the best and easiest way to cut the outline.

Now that everything is done, I'm not sure what I would like to do or how to expand this project further.

I would like to look into making a logo and business card, as this is a concrete base for my business but to make it more official I would like to make a logo and business card. I also want to look at selling single Die-cut stickers and sticker packs. So It expands the business but also it shows variety. As not everyone would like to buy a whole sticker book, they might just want one or two or a few.
So it made me think of ways to expand this idea of a sticker book to a basic starting for a business.