I’m pleased to say that we’ve put together a great advisory committee with representatives from national and regional co-op organizations and state cooperatives. Meet the committee:

Maggie Cohen, Cooperative Fund of New England http://cooperativefund.org/
Andrew Kessel, Equal Exchange http://equalexchange.coop
Doug DiMento, Cabot Creamery Cooperative / Agri-Mark http://agrimark.coop
Erbin Crowell, Neighboring Food Co-op Association http://nfca.coop/
Emily Lippold Cheney, North American Students of Cooperation http://nasco.coop
Noemi Giszpenc, Cooperative Development Institute http://www.cdi.coop/
Melissa Hoover, US Federation of Worker Co-ops http://usworker.coop
Ivy Foster, Whirlybird Co-op http://whirlybird.bostoncoops.org
Peter Brown, Red Sun Press http://redsunpress.com

Yesterday, we officially announced the initiative and new website, and have begun the process of reaching out to the hundreds of co-ops and credit unions in the state, to seek their participation. Below is the official announcement. Please help spread the word!

It’s 2012, the International Year of Cooperatives (IYC)!

Today, we’re announcing a new Massachusetts state wide initiative:

OPERATION COOPERATION http://operation.coop

Our goals are to: highlight the importance and power of the Massachusetts cooperative economy; to forge better cooperation across our co-op sectors; to increase citizen awareness and support for our cooperative economy.

Find us online: http://operation.coop
Like us on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/operation.coop
Please share this email with your colleagues and friends!

Join the conversation at http://groups.google.com/group/operationcooperation/

Q: How can my co-op participate in Operation Cooperation?
A: We will be publishing a list of participating co-ops. Join the list at: http://operation.coop/?p=219 Through your participation we can start to promote collective actions that strengthen our co-op economy across all sectors.

Q: I don’t live or work in a cooperative. What’s my role?
A: First, join in support at http://operation.coop/?p=219 . Help spread the word and encourage friends to join too. We are preparing a public campaign to promote actions that all citizens can take to support cooperation. These actions include: Move your money to a credit union; Join a food co-op; Do business with local cooperative enterprises; Support co-op food brands; Renting or sharing? Learn more about the benefits of cooperative living.

Q: What’s first?
A: We have a Boston City resolution being prepared and the text of a State Resolution that we want to build support for. The draft text can be seen here http://operation.coop/?p=11

Q: I have a great idea or suggestion. What do I do?
Join the conversation at http://groups.google.com/group/operationcooperation/

In cooperation

Operation Cooperation Team

–
Peter T. Brown
Red Sun Press
www.redsunpress.com

To us this is much more than the typical UN, warm and fuzzy, “year of”. As a print shop and design studio, you wouldn’t necessarily expect Red Sun Press to be organizing a campaign, but then maybe you don’t know our history or how personal us coop(ites) take this cause, and why we think increasing human cooperation is so important.

By putting people at the center of their activity instead of capital acquisition, cooperatives are the natural form of organizing to increase human cooperation and progress – in all fields.

With Time magazine awarding “The Protestor” as their person of the year, there are clear signs that social consciousness is rising around the world. Corporatism and conflict are discredited. They have left us with increased unemployment, environmental degradation, poverty, war and debt. Yet, when we lift our heads up from our current activities, and look down on our struggle, we see our fellow occupiers, our fellow community activists, our neighbor looking for a job, and we can’t help but notice how separate we are in our struggles. It’s that separatism that keeps us from getting to real solutions. The modern communication tools provided by the Internet give us unprecedented opportunity to overcome this separateness, bridge the gaps, and finally, empower each others struggles and campaigns. But we haven’t gotten there yet. We are still struggling in our own patch.

With more than a 100 million Americans already participating in cooperatives, either through food cooperatives, cooperative employment, cooperative housing, or by entrusting their finances to a cooperative Credit Union, we have in place a network of immense economic and positive potential. And with a new generation awakening to the struggle for social justice and desiring solutions, here we are again, more ready than ever: the cooperative movement.

Modernizing our campaign to promote the cooperative movement is the  opportunity that I see before us, and is what our campaign will emphasize. It is the raising of awareness to the fact that by increasing human cooperation here in Massachusetts we can create more jobs, strengthen our community, and build a narrative of human cooperation and the cooperative entity as the basis for finding solutions to our problems.

In the way that “Occupy” has come to define protest in 2011, so “Cooperation” can be the banner under which we define solutions in 2012. Cooperation is to embrace each others struggles and know that each is part of the whole. 

The UN year of the cooperative will be there constantly reminding us of the serendipity of this moment. It’s up to us to make it real. After all, human cooperation is the most powerful resource we have.

(If you would like to get involved directly in the campaign contact me at peterb@redsunpress.com or follow us on twitter.com/redsunpress)

Even if if we still haven’t gotten the “change we can believe in” no one can take away the glory, those moments of triumphant striving for justice and peace that we experienced at some point along the road.

And luckily those events – both momentous and minor –  have been preserved for us through the years in the political art and graphics that blazoned our progressive visions. Art continues to be a powerful force in political activism (look at the impact of Shepard Fairey’s work, for instance). And the historical narrative of a vital progressive movement is nowhere more tangible than in the graphical manifestos and the poignant posters that have so often rallied us to the call.

Pictured here are some posters that we feel really captured the spirit of progressive activism. Although they are inextricably tied to specific events, they continue to eerily resonate with our current lives and struggles.

Red Sun Press has printed hundreds of posters for the movement for social change, and maintains an archive of this material, but we don’t necessarily have all the details about each piece. This is an invitation to reflect upon your memories from the event, the art or the movement.

Enjoy.

Image credit: NASA and the MODIS Rapid Response Team

There are no words.

Beyond belief: the size and impact of the oil catastrophe. Destruction on a scale unknown in human memory.

Beyond belief: in just 2 months, the effects of human industry have destroyed an ocean and laid waste to the coastal life of a vast part of a continent.

Beyond belief: the utter lack of meaningful response to the worst. environmental. disaster. ever. The lying and shirking of British Petroleum. The hollow words of a well-meaning but ineffective President. The continued patronage of the oil industry by gangrenous, soul-dead Congressional bodies and Court systems (the oil industry successfully challenged the moratorium on deep-water drilling, heaping insult on top of mortal injury). Equally incredible is the stultifying apathy of a nation full of SUV-driving, over-air conditioned, Fox news-watching drones, willfully ignoring the need for change.

I’m not putting my stock in any of the current U.S. energy legislation in congress, either. Bills like the Kerry-Lieberman Climate Bill or the slightly more appealing Cantwell-Collins CLEAR Act (PDF) only scratch the surface of what we need to effect. And I know I’m not alone when I might dismiss the prospect of real change coming from Congress.

A national overhaul of policy, technology and attitude is more the recipe I would consult in confronting the devastation wrought on the Gulf of Mexico. What we need is nothing short of a sea change. Pardon my pontificating. At the moment I am at a loss for anything else.

Damn. | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine.

1. Do you PDF/X-1a?

Don’t be put off by the obscure and cumbersome acronym. Of the myriad formats and vehicles for sharing electronic files, PDF – specifically the flavor called PDF/X-1a – has become the standard in the printing industry. For good reason, we think.

After decades of struggling with dozens of divergent, incompatible formats, from Quark to Word to Postcript to My-Cool-Little-Layout-Program-That-Only-3-People-Use, not to mention platform-dependent idiosyncracies, the graphics world has settled on a system that smooths out virtually all the bumps in the road to reliable output (that means printing things the way you want them). Besides more predictable output, PDF has the extra benefit of slimming your files for sending to the printer. Instead of packaging up and transmitting 250 big ol’ Megabytes of documents, graphics and fonts, you can just shoot over a fit and trim 14 Mb (or so) PDF.

For those who are not convinced about the efficacy of PDF for print, the first step is often to recognize that PDF is not some mysterious alien entity threatening your way of life. It’s there to help you in your graphic pursuits, to look out for your interests as a pro designer. And, like a sort of altruistic software superhero, it’ll do this pretty much for free.

Of course, you’ll need access to good graphics software. But you already have that, otherwise I doubt you’d be reading this. Adobe makes it particularly easy to make great PDFs (not surprising since they invented the format).

It is head-slappingly simple to do in InDesign: go to File > Export > Adobe PDF. Then pull down the top Preset menu to PDF/X-1a. Press Export.  D’oh! In Illustrator, it’s File > Save As. Then pull down the Format menu to Adobe PDF. Grab that PDF/X-1a Adobe PDF Preset  from the menu (you’ll get a warning that trying to open or edit the resulting PDF file in Illustrator might not work, but that’s OK – save the original .ai file as a precaution). That’s really all there is to it. Each piece of graphics software will have its own special way of serving up the PDFs, but remember to lay on the X-1a sauce.

Your print service provider will send you secret thought beams of thanks for it. But even more importantly, your job will print just the way you expect – provided, of course, you have  inspected your new PDF/X-1a file to make sure everything looks right.

This last bit can be accomplished best in Acrobat, where the under-heralded Output Preview feature will show you…yes, an actual preview of the output: a simulation of  how colors will separate, which colors are overprinting and which are knocking out, and also how any transparency effects were flattened. The Output Intent specified in a PDF/X will tell Acrobat how to render the colors as they likely will appear in the final output (the default tends to be U.S. Web Coated – typical magazine style printing – but you can change this). In version 8 and above of Acrobat, Output Preview mode is invoked automatically when you open a PDF/X document. If you open the Output Preview panel you will see a list of color separations (CMYK and any spot colors). Make sure they are all there. Click off the colors one-by one to see how the file will separate. If there are extraneous colors listed, or the wrong colors, then you may need to go back to the original document and make modifications.

Not to dwell too heavily on the Adobe references, but they do offer a great guide to print production (this is a big PDF file) which contains a goodly bit on PDF creation, editing and minutiae.

In case you can’t tell, I’m trying to emphasize the friendly simplicity of PDFing your files. But I’ll make a stab at including one odd detail about the process: adding in crop marks and bleed area. In some inscrutable act of (IMHO) illogic, Adobe and others (actually an association of technicians in Ghent, Belgium) have ignored these attributes in the PDF/X standard. So, if your page has content that bleeds off the page edge, you have to check the appropriate boxes in the PDF Export or Save As dialog boxes (they are reasonably self-explanatory). That way the file should need no other manipulation by the printer’s prepress to try to reveal your design’s bleed area (which would still be there, but hidden from view outside the documents Crop box.)

Under the hood, PDF/X-1a is configuring all the formatting, graphics, fonts, colors, and other attributes of your file so that it will output on a modern printing press:

• All fonts will be embedded (as long as there are no pernicious licensing restrictions)
• RGB and ICC-based colors will be converted to CMYK
• Trim and Bleed boxes will be included as appropriate. By the way, you did read that bit about bleed area in PDFs above, didn’t you?
• Annotations, hyperlinks, markups, movies and sound are removed, as are all actions and Javascript.
• All transparency is flattened. A good reason to inspect your final PDF is to make sure all your glorious transparency effects (you know those drop shadows and emboss and bevel effects you used? Those are transparency effects ) are rendered into a suitable “flat” form. PDF/X-4, by the way, is just like PDF/X-1a, but it leaves the transparency “live.” This can be OK, but your printer’s software might not flatten the piece the way you expected.
• A host of obscure little technical attributes are checked and corrected to make the file X-1a compliant.

Also awesome is the way PDF/X will render a “soft proof” on your monitor, translating the vibrant RGB of your computer screen into the slightly softer color gamut of the printing press. This carries a substantial caveat: your monitor must be calibrated properly, and the correct Output Intent for your printer’s press must be represented in the PDF. And, oh yeah, the print provider must have their equipment all profiled and calibrated to this Output Intent (you can always ask what Output Intent to use, and hopefully you won’t hear the sound of a mouth hanging open). In the end, the soft proof is a good general reference, but your printer’s hard proof will be the best guide to final color.

Anyone who has used the web, worked in an office or had any sort of exposure to digital information or printed matter anywhere has seen PDF in action. It’s everywhere. So whether you prefer designing in or qxd, .indd, or .ai, you should get to know PDF/X-1a. Let the goodness go to work for you.

Having experienced the first Earth Day celebration as a school child in 1970, learning about new disturbing concepts like “pollution” and “endangered species,” doing projects and oral reports and listening to grownups talk about protecting our planet, it’s kind of cool to think that the commemorative date has actually survived these 40 years. It’s also sad and distressing to see that in terms of environmental sustainability we have actually slipped backward from those heady days when Nixon’s administration established the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Why have the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act been battered and threatened almost to extinction? How did climate change explode on us to arguably become the number one threat to life on earth?

Especially vexing is the fact that there is actually so much more awareness now, and so many thousands of organized groups striving to save some bit (or all) of the planet. Great work is being done every day, from local initiatives like Boston’s Sustainable Business Network and the Massachusetts Energy Consumers Alliance, to larger national and global projects like those of Greenpeace (also founded in 1970), and Friends of the Earth.

You may have your own theories about the cyclone of environmental destruction. To me, a consistent policy of favoring big corporate power in the U.S. is always a ripe candidate for culpability. Oil companies are allowed to operate seemingly unfettered by restrictions or taxes and nefarious subsidies are issued to big polluting companies. Not to mention the massive corporate giveaway/environmental catastrophe that is NAFTA. To add insult to environmental injury, corporations have adopted greenwashing as a Standard Operating Procedure, making sure that consumers and shareholders are distracted by a facade of ecological benevolence.

These issues form a basis for a sort of  global economic idea of why things have gone so wrong. And for many of us here in the U.S., the whole picture of what is going on in China (Red China as we called it in 1970) is almost unimaginable. They are the fastest growing economy in the world, and poised to challenge us for the title of greatest abuser of natural resources. At the same time, they seem to be leaders in progressive environmental action.

Then there is us. As in we as individuals, sometimes making thoughtful choices about our environmental impact. And sometimes being lazy. Or ignorant. Climate change is so huge, it seems hard to imagine we can do anything about it as individuals.

Today I read with despair that the latest “environmental” bill in the Senate is another slap in the face to the meaning of Earth Day. Not only does it reduce the power of the EPA to regulate carbon emissions, it introduces a whole new level of “cap and trade” policies designed to make it easier for corporations to pollute. By “trading” some of their huge CO2 footprint for a share of tropical rainforest, for instance, the corporation can “offset” their vast and deleterious carbon emissions. The labyrinth of accountability for legislation like this leads inevitably up the path of the lobbyists, straight to the headquarters of corporate America. This is the epitome of economic duplicity, subordinating the real need for carbon reduction to corporate greed.

The Story of Cap & Trade on Vimeo on Vimeo

via The Story of Cap & Trade on Vimeo.

QVectors provides a nice assortment of tiny treasures. Download this leaf set from here

Green vector leaves | QVectors Free Vector Graphics.

YouTube – Ride Along with Bikes Not Bombs.

You love layout and design. Pushing around colors, text and graphics, manipulating pixels, and jockeying the mouse around the pasteboard until that eye-candy pops off the page. It’s got a rich, satisfying feeling like (almost) nothing else you do. And making the client happy with your cool concepts and designs yields the added bonus of bringing in the paychecks.

As printers, we love seeing those fine designs in all their glory on paper. In between the design and printing the finished piece, however, comes a lot of work. This stage is known as electronic prepress, or sometimes more simply as a boatload of pain.

Your carefully selected Pantone colors must be re-interpreted so they render with exactly the tonality you intended. The delicate transparency effects like feathered edges and layer masks must be brought down to earth so they look good when flattened into their 2-dimensional domain. And all that critical text, kerned and hyphenated to perfection, must come through the process with precision rivaling the work of a rocket scientist. In fact, the stakes might seem even higher than the star wars missile defense system. After all, this is no ordinary satellite orbit we are dealing with. It is your design – as well as your clients business – that is on the line.

The following tips are offered as a guide, a plea really, to design your print work with the actual printing process in mind.

In addition to this abbreviated roundup, check out Adobe’s voluminous compendium of data in their CS4 Print Production Guide, downladable here.
Disclaimer: changes in technology can render any advice obsolete rather quickly. But if you follow these principles now, you can help yourself – and your printer – stay ahead of the curve.

1. Size matters. Know the final dimensions of the printed piece and use this as the setup for your document size. Exactly. Whether using inches or picas, the page size must match the trimmed size of the final piece. A booklet that will be 6 by 9 inches should be set up with a document size of 6 by 9 inches. Make sure of these dimensions before committing any design to the page. In InDesign, go to File > Document Setup. In Quark, go to Layout > Layout Properties. In Illustrator use the artboard tool to size the document (CS4) or File > Document Setup (older versions).

2. Let it Bleed. This is very basic information; so experienced professionals, look away now. After setting the appropriate document size in your application, add bleed area beyond these dimensions. This might require a trip to the “More Options” tab in the Document Setup panel, but it is well worth it. If your page elements go all the way to the edge of the page, they must actually extend over the edge of that page to allow for (inevitable) variations when trimming the stacks of your beautiful printed sheets. Extend any photos, boxes, graphics and whatnot – anything on the document that you want to bleed off the edge of the trimmed page – to outside the page area. Usually a bleed area of 1/8 inch is sufficient. In InDesign you will likely see a red outer boundary rectangle beyond the page edge if you have set up the bleed correctly. Extend page elements to this red line. Quark doesn’t actually show the bleed area, but it will be there. Photoshop does not include any bleed setting until output, so if you must use this program to do a page layout, make sure to allow for an extra 1/8 inch on all sides of your page area.

3. Mind Your Resolutions. The general rule of thumb for photos and other graphics is to make sure the resolution is at least 1.7 times the line screen at which the job will be printed. Well, what line screen is this being printed at, you may well ask? At Red Sun we use either 150 or 175 line screen, which means a resolution of 300 dpi is  just about right.  Don’t be tempted to use much higher than this, as the extra data will only slow things down and not result in a higher quality job.  This is true for all graphics, except “bitmap” black and white (line art), which should always be at least 1200 dpi. Also, be aware that when you scale down a graphic in your page layout program, it  will actually increase the  effective resolution of the image. When you scale a graphic up in the page layout, the effective resolution will go down. This is why it is always best to scale the images to the correct final size (in Photoshop, e.g.) before they get into the layout. Vector graphics, such as those created in Illustrator, are usually scalable to any size. (An exception would be if your Illustrator image contains photos or raster effects – in these cases the image resolution can become a factor).  Fact of life: as a designer you will at some point be asked to utilize images that you and I know are unsuitable for good print reproduction. These images might come from the web, or from a phone camera. Try to get better quality images if possible. If not, you can sometimes boost the resolution and then enhance the quality using filters and adjustments in Photoshop. If you leave an image in your layout with an effective resolution of less than 90 dpi you can almost bank on something looking really messed up.

4. Transparency Affects Us. All those wonderful new filters and effects available in design applications have given tremendous creative power to even the most inchoate graphics workers. Drop Shadows, Inner Glows and Outer Glows, Gradient Feathers, etc all change the look of your piece in ways ranging from subtle to dramatic. They also add a certain kind of overhead to the document structure; more complex page compositions call for more careful treatment at the output stage (that’s us – the printers). All these transparent graphic enhancements at some point in the printing process must be “flattened” into their final 2-dimensional form; the color effects, the feathering, the careful layering of semi-transparent elements all must get reduced to the simple dots of ink laid down on paper.

Luckily for us all, the software normally does a good job of translating those effects into printable form; but there are caveats, and complex transparency can result in unexpected results at the printing stage. Anything underneath a transparency effect (a semi-transparent box or the edge of a drop shadow, for instance) becomes “rasterized.”  This means it will probably get  turned into a graphic of a fixed resolution. Text and vector art layered under a transparency effect may lose its sharpness upon output. And colors can change rather dramatically from what you might expect. More confusingly, In Adobe Illustrator, the user must set the “Document Raster Effects Settings” manually (for print work set it to 300 dpi). You may also see warnings about “Transparency Blend Space” when creating or exporting documents (keep the blend space the same as your working space – in print this would normally be some flavor of CMYK). Best practice is to go easy with the special effects. Don’t layer one transparent thing on top of another and then on top of another. Keep your text and vector art arranged above transparent objects. A great practice is to use InDesign’s and Acrobat Professional’s Flattener Preview to see how the page design may really be affected by the transparency effects.

Have fun with your toys, but remember that at the end of the day it will all have to be cleaned up. Adobe has put out a useful document for detailed study: Transparency in Adobe Applications: A Print Production Guide.

Watch for our next installment of this unsolicited technical advice soon.

While we won’t greenwash the effect of pernicious forestry practices (even certifications such as those from the “Forest Stewardship Council” are suspiciously tied to corporate interests), there is good reason to believe that much of the trend towards “all things digital” is equally the product of industry manipulation.

As a culture, we exalt the digital lifestyle, cradling our new iPads and demanding ever-increasing levels of computer power and industrial-scaled “server farms” to support our need for internet communication, social networking and entertainment. Few are willing to muse on the tremendous energy use incurred by these habits or on the gigantic mountains of plastic and silicon waste and toxic refuse generated by the digital lifestyle. This blog post is ironically dedicated to the poor worker in Thailand who is asked to take apart old computers to salvage what she can and to live among the toxic ruins of what she can’t.

One of the more compelling sound bites refuting the environmental advantage of electronic media over print is the calculation by a Harvard scientist that “performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea.”  See this article for more details of the analysis.

U.S. Department of Energy reports in Printing Impressions (10-09) that paper manufacturers used 75 billion kilowatts of energy in 2006, compared to 60 billiion kilowatts used by electronic data centers, which doesn’t even include the energy used by millions upon millions of home and business PCs. Moreover, an average American’s annual paper use is produced by 500 kilowatts-hours of electricity, the same amount required to one computer on for five months. Reading the Daily News print edition generates 20% less CO2 than reading the news on the web for a half hour.

At Red Sun, we use recycled paper for virtually everything, and 100% post-consumer recycled paper for an increasing number of jobs. Our paper sources use very little virgin growth and no old-growth whatsoever.

We were recently accredited a City of Boston certificate as a Sustainable Business Leader for efforts we took as a small business to improve our energy efficiency reduce our environmental impact. We think a lot about these things and I would love to hear any informed discussion on this.