Department Chair Dennis Landry directs students at the Digital Art Service Bureau in Tucson’s Pima Community College.

Student Chapo Sanchez prints an image to an Epson 7800 printer.

Students worked long hours to print and mount the 96 images for the Annual Digital Arts Student Exhibition.

The Annex lab enables students to print independently to large formati printers.

The Digital Eye

When department chair Dennis Landry talks about his jobⁱ at Pima Community College in Tucson, Ariz., he proudly reflects on how the Digital Arts department has grown and evolved over the years from a modest, two-room Advertising Art program in the 1980s with 30 students teaching traditional cut-and-paste, optical and offset lithography processes to its currentⁱ iteration as a state-of-the-art training facility offering courses in the complete field of digital art, including design, multimediaⁱ, animationⁱ, film and video, and game and simulation design with a student head count of over 1,800.

Landry is especially proud of the Digital Arts Service Bureau (DASB) that functions as a print center for student work. This facility offers, at no charge, professional quality output to students so that they may see the final versions of their class projects and creative work realized in the best possible capacity. Ultimately these prints will find a home in their portfolios as a testament to their artistic visions and aesthetic sensibility as they pound the pavement searching for employment in a highly competitive field.

TRAINING FACILITY

The service bureau is not only a print center. It is also a training facility for future print shop employees. On any given day you will see four or five student trainees clustered around computers, outputting student work to one of the five large-format printers. Students are trained to work in a calibrated environment and to manage high-volume demand. Just like in the commercial print world, they are required to meet the deadlines that the instructors impose upon all projects. Client students must place their work in the service bureau folder at least 24 hours in advance.

The DASB attempts to simulate the commercial printing environment with the one exception that the students pay for their prints indirectly through course fees. These fees provide the materials, maintenance and overhead that any sign or print shop business would encounter. The fees are paid when tuition is collected.

Most DASB clients are digital arts students who are seeking associate of science degrees in digital art for direct employment. The degrees usually take five semesters as a full-time student to complete. There are several areas of focus, including design, illustration, multi-media, Web design, animation and film and video. Often students will pursue multiple areas of focus in that several courses overlapⁱ. By taking a few additional courses they canⁱ complete additional areas of study. To simulate the commercial world, many of the digital art courses require that the students produce professional quality prints on drop-dead deadlines.

WORKFLOW

The workflow begins when a student completes an assigned project and prints a proof of it on one of five HP5550 Color laserⁱ printers. After carefully proofing the print with the instructor, the student deposits the file to the Service Bureau folder on the Digital Arts networkⁱ. All the computers in the Digital Arts department are networked to several servers that provide access with several different levels of security. The service bureau folder is a write-only environment for the general student population, but trainees naturally have read/write access. The student fillsⁱ out a form that the instructor signs. The form contains all of the relevant information for the job including the document’s name, its physical size, file type, desired paper type, and if the image is an InDesign or Illustrator document as well as the names of supporting files and fonts.

CALIBRATIONⁱ

The DASB had strived to produce outstanding full-color large-format prints, but the ability to match color has been limited. The students have been trained to regularly calibrate the printers using an EyeOne Photo color matching system. Manual profiling can be quite time consuming considering the volume of daily output that the DASB is required to produce. An automatic profileⁱ scanning bed has recently been ordered and hopefully will be in place by the time this article is published.

The DASB prints the images in the order in which they are submitted on one of several archival inkjet printers. There are two 19" six-color Epson 4800 printers, an Epson 7800 24" eight-color printer and a 54" HP5500 four-color printer that are in production from 8 a.m. until 8 p.m., six days a week.

The Digital Art department also has an annex lab with several large-format archival printers, including two Epson 7800s and a dedicated Epson 2400 with a Kone grayscale ink set for superb archival blackⁱ and white prints. Advanced digital photography and advanced Photoshop students can independently print their work after attending an orientation that trains them in the use of this technology. The lab is open on a continual basis. Students must provide their own paper.

GREEN EFFICIENCY

Environmental considerations are also a part of the student’s training. Students work with water-based inks and are taught to conserve and recycle materials. They do this by configuring files to maximize the use of paper whenever possible, and they use trimmed paper to print smaller work on smaller-sized printers. A limited budget dictates that materials be accounted for. Students inventory and requisition materials on a regular basis so that there is a continual, uninterrupted supply.

THE BIG SHOW

As important as the equipment is to the workflow, so are the students who work in the DASB to produce the prints. The Digital Arts department at Pima Community College employs four student aids to run the shop, but there are several volunteers who freely contribute their time to benefit from the production experience. They work in a team environment where each person knows his or her duties and shares a specific part of the workload. As of this writing, they have just completed the printing and mounting of 96 large-format prints for the annual exhibition of the Digital Arts department, displayed in a special gallery at the college.

During this time they have also had to print their regular workload, so the pressure was turned up several notches. Printing this much large work in a very short period of time required long days and a few all-nighters. They mounted the prints on 3/4" black Gator board and then collaborated with the art department’s museum studies class to hang and light the show. The opening proved to be a huge success with a large crowd of people attending. Listening to the oohs and aahs of the crowd at the professional quality of the work was, as one student put it, better than an A grade.

The DASB has established a professional printing environment to serve the output needs of a large, creative student body. Over the four years of its existence, it has supported thousands of students and helped them develop professional print-based portfolios that will assist them in obtaining jobs in the highly competitive visual communications field. The service bureau is a training facility that not only teaches students the techniques of production output, but also instills the ethos of professionalism which is an asset that will benefit them throughout their careers.