Turning sketches into products > Turning products into sketches.

Can a sketch or drawing be consistently manifest into reality? Could this be a business sales and marketing plan?

Having been co-owner at boutique print shop in Chicago, my background in prepress continues to strengthen the value added to our products and services.

Projects that require precision setup, cnc dies and tight registration have been my bread and butter for years.

Working to create a smooth design flow where technical constraints of prepress and production are alleviated has always been a professional goal.

As an artist, I continue to ask myself, what better way to create a vision of these printed products than traditional pen on paper? Or traditional digital drawing?

There are many tutorials outlining how to create sophisticated foil stamped, embossed effects on paper in 2d and 3d design software. Often multimedia designers create these digital mockups without much knowledge of how the printing process works. This can lead to frustration in the actual prepress and production of the printed material when clients expect virtual mockups to magically move into production.

I like the ideas of pre-visualizing products. I also like charming, aesthetically pleasing hand made drawings. So, why not just draw the final product? I could utilize my knowledge in prepress and production to forgo the complicated, run-of-the-mill renderings. My drawings would be built on a foundational understanding of the process that other designers don’t have.

On top of that, my sketches and drawing would have a style and life to them that no other visual mock-up would have.

As I thought about this process and how I might implement it, I did many sketches and drawings. Many of them never shared. The drawings led to new questions and ideas; how could the mockups be used in marketing to make this a full circle process? There is a constant need for refresh in print marketing. Also due to the very specific nature of our specialty offering, we don’t want to get stuck in the “corner printshop” niche.

Wondering if this concept of drawing could be taken to the next step, I struggled to find ways to implement drawings that would eventually become physical prints. There had to be a way to create a visual language in the drawings that would convincingly represent the final products.

An answer that is becoming more clear to me lies in the reversal of the process. In order to learn the visual cues for our prototype drawings, the drawings could be make from existing prints.