[Card Printing/Packaging] Hey Tony
Jason Morningstar:
Hey Tony!
I want to pick your brain about Misery Bubblegum. I understand you are producing this game as a single deck of cards with 1-2 pages of rules and quick-start material. Some initial questions:
1. Who is doing the printing? The production?
2. What are your card specs, in terms of weight, coating, etc?
3. Are you putting it all in a tuck box, and if so, are you assembling them yourself? If not, are you shrinking the whole thing?
4. How are you handling the rules insert - are you paying the printer to put it all together, assembling them after the fact, etc?
I'm working on several custom card-based projects so your experience will be very valuable to me. I'm sure I'm not alone.
Thanks!
--Jason
TonyLB:
Oh ... okay, first you have to understand that my "production process" here is fundamentally influenced by my getting things together at what turns out to be very much the last minute.
So, first tip: Eight weeks or so out from the convention you're aiming at? You need to have things finished. Not "in progress". Not "I can knock it into shape easy, it'll just take a day or three." Finished.
Because if you don't, you'll end up like me, scrambling at the last minute and still just barely getting things finished by the skin of my teeth! And none of us want that.
That warning having been given: the folks at Guild of Blades have been absolutely aces in compensating for my total inability to predict how long a process this would be. I don't know if I got super-special treatment from them, or if they help all of their customers this way, but I felt like I was super-special to them.
A fortunate thing: I had checked with them in advance, gotten their card template, and therefore knew that for 2.5"x3.5" cards with .1" possible registration errors I needed to produce 2.7"x3.7" art that kept everything important within the 2.3"x3.3" square centered on the middle. Folks who have dealt with bleed and registration will be nodding their heads in recognition now, but it's a point I like to keep bringing up, in case it saves someone having to redo their art on a deadline: Anything that gets cut (like cards) may get cut slightly wrong, so you need to make sure that if the borders aren't exactly where you expected (and therefore your center art is closer to the edges than you planned) there is both slack on the side where your art gets too close to the edge so that it doesn't run over, and extra art on the side where your art gets too far from the edge, so that it doesn't show unexpected white at the edges.
But, like I said, I actually had that under control. All the art was made to the proper specs. I don't like to think about where I'd have been if I only found out later that I needed everything small in the center, with extra room at the outside. Removing .2 inches from every border of my art would not have been fun. Get your sizes right before you start doing art (unless you're doing your art all-vector, in which case you do not care, so good for you!)
And it's worth pointing out that, though the GoB people were always very serious about telling me how registration errors can and do crop up, the decks that I've looked at so far appear to all have registration so perfect that I can't find a single card where I can say "Oh, hey, that art seems slightly off center in some direction." So you make your cards so that even the one-in-a-thousand massive mis-cut looks good, but those are a rarity.
GoB does 12pt Carolina Cover Stock: I believe it's a glossy paper, then hit with glossy ink, so it's not really the same as printing the card and then coating it paper, ink and all ... but seriously, I've gotten my hands on the physical cards and I can't tell the difference. It all just looks uniformly glossy. Maybe in a year or two, when I've been using them consistently, I'll notice the colors starting to wear off but right now they seem pretty darn good.
The cards are not casino-heavy: more like Magic cards in both stiffness and weight. That said, they are brilliantly well color saturated. I had grown accustomed to looking at the output that my images made when run through my home color printer, so seeing the professionally printed versions was like being socked in the eyeballs with a rubber hose filled with awesome.
GoB's process lets you specify the back of each card individually, which for some people is just another hoop to jump through (copy-paste my one back into every spot in this template) and for some (like me) is a sine-qua-non of producing a deck where there are not just a few backs, but actual whole sections of deck where every single card has meaningful and unique information printed on both sides. The problem? There's no guide yet for how to lay out your backs so that they line up with your fronts. There's a logic to it: if you read the instructions it's fairly clear how the cardstock must be being fed through the machine at each phase, and so I was fairly convinced that the layout I'd given was the only possible layout, and that the cards must all line up, even if I didn't have time for a proof deck to make sure of it. But I'll say that the minutes checking through the first deck I could pull out of the Priority Mail boxes were pretty tense: Every front went with the back it was intended for, but I'd have preferred a chance to have made a mistake on that without the results being devastating. Again: That's because I didn't include enough time in my process for a proof-deck before going to a full print run of 100 decks.
Tuck boxes were a problem, because my deck weighs in at 81 cards, and GoB's standard tuck box only goes out to 72 cards ... so I went with their oversized tuck box, and the guys there told me "Seriously, these boxes are pretty big!" but I said "Hey, don't sweat it, I don't have time to look into anything else before GenCon, so you're doing me a favor." And yeah, now that I've seen them the boxes are larger than I wanted (particularly, they won't fit into a pocket, which means that they'll presumably be discarded fairly quickly by anyone actually using the cards) but like I said, that's a factor of my not having given enough lead-time. I have no doubt that post-GenCon I can find a place to get printed tuck boxes made to size, and correct the size issue. But GenCon folks, and some thereafter, will be purchasing a small deck rattling around inside a big oversized box as a testimony to my hurried process.
I am assembling everything myself. I've got bagged decks (thank goodness I don't have to sort all the cards) but I'll be folding tuck boxes and inserting pamphlets by hand. I assume that by this time it goes without saying that I didn't have the rules inserts ready at the time that I finished up the card art? I didn't. GoB would have happily printed them for me, and assembled the boxes and everything. But I couldn't take advantage of that service, more fool me. So instead I've printed the pamphlets on my home printer, and cut them out with the fairly-high-end razor cutter that is one of the many home tools I have from past production processes, and they'll all look fine.
I don't quite know whether to be ashamed that I'm putting things together so much at the last minute in so many ways, or proud of how 'indie' it all is. I could formulate a "Quick Start" guide on wednesday, print it in the afternoon, cut it in the evening, then fold it on the plane to GenCon and insert it into boxes before handing them to IPR. And I may. It's nice to have the capacity to do some of the publishing tasks straight from home, because it gives you the ability to really keep making refinements right up to delivery.
I will say this though: you can't afford to have that mindset with the cards themselves. I got lucky. If I'd pushed the card printing more like four weeks in advance of the GenCon date? I would not have product to come to GenCon with. As it is, I was aiming to have something to come to DexCon, and only the complete impossibility of meeting that 'lead-the-target' deadline got me into panic mode in time to get this done. There were very real concerns with GoB about whether they would have capacity in this season to process my order (as they're doing a lot) and all sorts of other questions that I hadn't even thought about until they suddenly cropped up. Not niggling questions, real and serious questions brought about by the fact that there are very, very few places doing POD card printing these days. The whole industry is near its capacity at this time of year, so that shopping around doesn't do you much good. You just hear "Uh ... bad time of year to ask for things." The folks at Guild of Blades were absolute champs in helping me through this, and I'm very pleased both with their ability to compensate for my poor planning, and their ability to turn out good product. Happy customer here.
So if there's one lesson I would suggest to people? Give yourself way, way, WAY more time in advance, for something like card printing, than you think you'll need. Lulu makes printing a book a very turn-key process: Once you've actually gotten it formatted correctly, you can (if you're desperate) have books to you the NEXT DAY. That's not theoretical, by the way, I had a mix-up a few GenCons ago where that ended up being precisely the service I needed, and Lulu delivered. But Card printing is not at that stage: It is both a more involved process (since the die-cutters for card printing are nowhere near as automated as the page-cutters and binders for book printing) and one that is less saturated with services. You need the kind of lead time that in olden days you would have needed for printing a book. And that's if (as, thank heavens, was the case for me) nothing goes wrong.
A sane process would have a lead-time where you started talking to the card printers perhaps six months in advance of when you needed final cards: Have all of your rules ready, all your pamphlets, the art for your tuck boxes, everything. Get a batch of cards turned out as proofs, look them over, have time to correct any mistakes. As part of the proof, take a look at the tuck box and pamphlets, see how everything's put together by the printer. Maybe have a go-round or two with them about that. Get onto their queue of product five months or so in advance, so that they can do your job at a time when they're not so busy, and you can have the cards sitting around making you feel confident for a month before your convention.
Doing things in a hurry is a fine and glorious tradition of our community, but I don't want anyone to think it's better. It's possible, barely, but it'll cost you in frayed nerves and decisions made on the fly.
Still ... it's been a good ride. I'm looking forward to getting product to people, big, oversized box and all.
Tyler.Tinsley:
the over sized box is just so people have a place to hold all their expansion decks! thanks for the story, i have been looking into POD cards for a long time, good to hear GOB has good service.
guildofblades:
Hi Tony,
Average registration variance runs about .03" to .04", but if you look hard enough, I am sure you will find a small number than ran as much as .07" and even .09" and .1". It just happens that your card design and color scheme was ideal for masking that variance to such a degree its extraordinarily hard to see. So kudos on the graphic design front. It makes a HUGE difference.
Now that we are polishing off the last of the summer convention season printing with the last of the Gen Con orders heading out on Monday, over the next week we'll finally have the time needed to put up our expanded documentation. I've got two several page PDFs, one covering card design and layout (especially with regards to its visual impact on the varying registration issue) and expanded layout guide, that will go over press sheet layouts, covering front and back orientations and matching up specific fronts with specific backs. So hopefully the pre press process of preparing cards and layouts will be easier henchforth.
Sadly, this summer I have had to decline/delay printing for a goodly number of business. As POD card printing has been expanding, our orders going into the convention seasons quickly outstripped our ability to keep up with production. We chose to vastly limit taking in new clients in order to guarantee we could adequately service existing clients. One reason we were able to take you on was how prepared you were with you card designs and press sheet layouts. I am so with you with trying to get your publications ready for print far in advance of the show, and in fact, even in yoru rush, you were more prepared than many. Hehe, I myself can remember being at Kinkos in years past printing off small saddle stitched RPG books the nights before Origins and Gen Con, so, um, yeah.
You are right, for POD productions, there really are no automated die cutting solutions for cards. Some folks have tried to use paper riem cutters to cut decks whole swath as a means of being fast, but those aren't die cut, so they become problematic if you ever wanted those cards to match up with cards produced later in a later printing. There are automated die cutting presses, but they are NOt for POD. The smallest I found was 20 tons, would take up 1/3rd the square footage of our retail store and would take hours to program, but once programed could knock off thousands of decks fairly quickly. We have a design for an automated die cutter that is appropriate sized and scaled for our operations, that when finished will spead up the process by a multiple of 5 to 10 times. So in the not-so-distant future we'll have a lot more capacity and should be about to get faster turn arounds, even during the busy convention season.
Thanks for the good words. Glad you are happy with the cards and hope you have a good Gen Con.
Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Retail Group - http://www.gobretail.com
Guild of Blades Publishing Group - http://www.guildofblades.com
1483 Online - http://www.1483online.com
Jason Morningstar:
Thanks Tony,
That's a cautionary tale and a ringing endorsement of Guild of Blades.
Ryan, I'm looking forward to your expanded documentation. My happiness would be complete if it included an InDesign template for cards, with fronts and backs mapped accurately.
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