Staying Fit
Climbing Mt. Distress
by Lon Winters & Don Hendricks
Intermediate
At the age of 21, Lon Winters was head of production for Ocean Pacific. He learned screen printing from the bottom up, starting his 20-plus-year career reclaiming screens. He has won nearly 50 international, SGIA, industry publication and FESPA awards and honors, has served 10 years as an honorary Golden Image judge, published numerous articles, led several industry seminars and workshops, and consulted on projects large and small throughout the world. Winters is the president of Colo.-based Print This, Inc./GraphicEle- phants.com, an international consulting firm specializing in technical advances, plant design, layout, troubleshooting, productivity, quality analysis and complete garment-embellishing solutions. Don Hendricks entered the graphic-arts industry in 1975, becoming art director for Ocean Pacific, and also owned/operated his own art, design and screen-printing business for 14 years. He is a published technical writer and continues to contribute to the trade press. Check out his work at www.artmechanic.net.
Believe it or not we both do our best to stay in shape, as most of us do these days. Of course, it helps that we have a couple of good buddies in the fitness industry that we do
work for all the time to keep us in check. Hardkore Fitness builds some of the finest fitness
equipment in the world. Over the years we have acquired some of the Hardkore home gym
equipment to mix in with our collection of screen graphics equipment (some of which, on a
side note, has also been built by Hardkore).
Not long ago, the founder of the company formed a new product in fitness industry that
also spoke to climbing enthusiasts. Fit Wall is its trademark and the name of the new company built by Brendle Climbing Systems. Their climbing systems are built any and every
where, from schools and studios to cruise ships and high-end hotels. With this booming new
business, our buddies would obviously need some logoed apparel. Leaving the design to the
artists, our old friend turned the project over and we were off and running.
We opened up the logo in Illustrator
and went to work. There wasn’t much to
work with, just a line of type—Fit Wall.
Nicely done, clean and corporate, but a
little boring. So we decided to start with
some distressing (isn’t that what everyone does?). By now most of us have been
using this technique for years. In fact, it
is probably the most requested “specialty
printing” technique we see from typical
customers. There’s just something about
that old, washed-out, vintage appearance that Abercrombie & Fitch made
famous years ago. Although this is a
popular technique, it also happens to be
one of the easiest to execute.
The authors added interest to a clean, corporate
line of type using home-made distressing. (All images
courtesy the author)
Approaching the summit
There are numerous Photoshop plug-ins available from a number of manufacturers that
provide several predetermined filters. Of course, being the old school type of guys we are, we
like to do things the hard way.
Some of our best filters are created by printing a solid black fill out onto copy paper,
adding a texture then wadding it up into
a ball. In this case the paper ball was then
used for bit of lunchtime keep-away, after
which we added some concrete texture and
cracks and really tore it up. When it was
flattened back out, a gum eraser was used
to open up the cracked and white areas,
and then the paper was scanned into Pho-
toshop. We adjusted the image further by
using curves, brightness, contrast and even
levels, and then saved the file as a bitmap
image.
