Remember when screen printing shops had walls of film positives?

I was cleaning out my garage last weekend and found a stack of old film positives from a shop I worked at in 2011. Back then we kept everything filed by job number in these giant metal cabinets. Now it's all direct to screen and I haven't touched a film in years. The new setup is faster but sometimes I miss having that physical backup when a job goes wrong. Anyone else hold onto old workflow habits?

1 comments

1 Comment

hollym127d ago

Oh man, you just unlocked a memory I forgot I had! I think the thing nobody talks about is how those film positives forced everyone to double check their work before burning screens. Like, you had to physically lay the film on top of the screen and look for pinholes or misregistration before anything got locked in. Now with direct to screen, I swear people just hit send and assume the software caught everything. There is a kind of muscle memory or mental checklist that disappears when you skip the physical step. I caught a massive layout error on film once that the computer file looked perfect on but the negative revealed the whole design was shifted a quarter inch to the left. That physical backup saved a run of 500 shirts that would have been trashed.