letterpress / offset printing

Experience:

Premier Press, Letterpress Leadworker/Supervisor , Portland, OR, 10/1989-06/2011

*Coordinated letterpress department as well as doing the work myself.

• Typically took in high quality/high profile letterpress work for Nike, Adidas, Taylormade, W+K, Smith Optics and many others.

• Completed work with extremely short deadlines.

• Offset printing on Hamada, and Shinohara presses from simple line work to complex, high quality, multicolored work.

• All of the above work was done on a very wide range of stocks and materials including plastic, recycled paper and high quality un/coated paper.

• I worked on my own with no direct supervision except for clarifying questions I might have about a job or deadlines.

• My work was considered top quality by job planners and salespeople as well as my immediate supervisor, coworkers and customers. People knew they could count on me to do a good job. Quality is very important to me.

• I love doing printing, especially on smaller presses, because of the artistic aspects inherent in it. Properly mixing ink or judging color is just as important on a BC or LTHD as it is on an art print. I love doing letterpress work because of the craft and variety of tasks involved. I also love working with the equipment itself and the fact that letterpress work is such a combination of old and new tech. You can create some really exceptional pieces with letterpress elements

Since I have worked in the printing industry for the last 30+ years, 22 of them at Premier Press, most of my work skills are related to that.

• Took a haphazard, small, low volume, department and (with the support of my immediate supervisor) turned it into a well functioning department which typically used 2-3 other part time people to help out and learn how to do letterpress as well.

• Trained department helpers

• Completely organised the storage of all die cutting, foil and emboss dies.

• Created an Access application/database to keep track of all existing dies and to enter new ones in the system

• Learned enough Access on my own to accomplish the above as well as continue to learn more to improve the system.

• Lengthier explanation: As we only had so much space to store dies, I completely organized and set up a system for keeping track of die cutting, foil and emboss dies to make sure we always could find them and know their age in the event of them being old enough to be recycled. I wrote a main database application for this purpose, in Microsoft Access, as well as a couple of minor apps for keeping track of vendors and so on. I am not an expert in Access, but did learn enough on my own to do the above apps, maintain them and change them so they would be more functional and as I learned more about Access_ capabilities. I also used my main database app to generate a printed catalog so other people could look up dies that might not be as comfortable using a computer as I am. Along with that I exported the information to Excel spreadsheets and emailed them to those job planners that liked to have their own copy of the information at hand.

Education High School, Benson Polytechnic, Portland, OR, 1972-1976

Major: Graphic Arts/Printing Major

Minor: N/A

*2 yr Graphic Arts studies including all aspects of the following:

*Offset Printing

*Letterpress

*Layout/Typesetting

Skills

• High level of computer use and maintenance

• Excellent reader and writer

• Excellent driver

• Good teacher/trainer

• Level headed/patient

• Get along well with people

• People like working with me

• Coworkers responsible for dealing with my work appreciate the fact that I will do my best to do a good job for them. Personally, I am an avid reader and computer user. I spend many hours using my computer at home as well as troubleshooting problems both for my personal computer and our home network. I am very familiar with using Photoshop for my own artistic and creative enjoyment, but have never been formally trained since I am capable of learning what I need to on my own. If you are interested in seeing some of my Photo Remixes, then let me know. I did have them up on a website, but it was on Microsoft Spaces which is not around anymore. I have not yet chosen another place to display them.

Contact this candidate