Williams Visual Solutions

Despite the appearance of a very small business in a very small building, the crew was more than taken by surprise at the capacity of Williams Visual Solutions. Bubba, our guide, started off by giving us a brief history of the company, stating that it was run by his grand father and continuously expanded and evolved into what it is today. A fully Mac-based design team of six work at their desks for conceptual and visual work, while the majority of the space was for the many printing features of the company.

The first printer that we were guided to was the Hewlett-Packard Indigo 5000 Digital Press. Costing half a million dollars, this digital press was designed to use liquid ink that was safer for the environment. Another difference with this printer is that it is a 6-color press, capable of producing 818 dots per inch and up to 20 12×18 pages per minute. Besides its economically friendly nature, it is also a very easy device, capable of printing by uploading a PDF.

The next printer that we encountered was their large, offset printer in the Press Room. They have machines to create specific-colored plates for each of their six presses and these large offset printers produce many kinds of prints in very large quantities. They are proud to state that they can use these offset printers to produce multi-page catalogs, booklets, textbooks, brochures, pocket folders, rack cards, posters, counter cards, flyers, CD and DVD booklets, wraps, inserts, calendars, door hangers, self-mailers, letterheads, custom envelopes, hangtags, bumper stickers, postcards, greeting cards, and many more. You get the idea.

Afterwards, Williams Visual Solutions treated us to delicious pizza and showed us a quick presentation of their company’s aims. Politely concerned with our time remaining to stay, they did give us as much information as they could in the little time we had left over.

PHOTOS BY: T.J. Bowman

Times Free Press and Its Complex Process

After a quiet morning, the Design Crew headed to the Chattanooga Times Free Press to learn all we can about the process behind the newspapers we see. We were allowed to go on a tour of the building, guided by Frank Anthony, the Vice President. He began the tour by showing us the historical printing presses that were used in the past and the process for using each machine. It was obvious that each improvement focused on increasing automation and speed dramatically.

Photo by Austin Reed

Along the way, Mr. Anthony showed us the digital part of printing, starting with the large room divided into many sections for specific topics such as the news, the weather, and the sports sections. He made a humorous comment about the sports section, but I’ll keep that to myself. We moved on to rooms full of large printers (He won’t call them printers. He calls them image setters because they are expensive.) and showed us the process of transferring the negatives onto plates that would print the papers. He also noted that every image setter has a “130 thousand dollar spare tire” just in case something went wrong, and the building contains six to seven million dollars in spare equipment.

The Design Crew weaved around and through the printing press, witnessing the paper being printed, and guided us into the mail room.

Photo by Austin Reed

The mail room is where the papers printed by the printing press are led to. In this room, the papers are then filled with inserts from other stores such as Sears and JC Penney, and then tagged and wrapped to be sent to a place where the papers are delivered. When I was nineteen, I worked in the mail room for Roane County News back home in Kingston, and so I was very familiar with everything I saw in this room. Frank Anthony said that a paper spends most of its time in the mail room, and I knew this was true. The process of printing the paper doesn’t take nearly as long as it does to make sure that each paper gets every insert, is tagged to be delivered to a specific address, wrapped into a bundle, and then sent off. This process took Roane County News five or more hours every day. Fortunately, unlike Roane County News with its workforce of eight mail room workers, Times Free Press has much, much more to handle the papers.

Overall, we were very satisfied and impressed with what we saw, and only regretted that a crew photo was not taken at the end.

Project 1: Helviathan

Since we get to do anything we want(basically) with this project, I decided to go crazy with it. I wanted to do a poster featuring a huge, overwhelming, and awesome monster that would put anybody else’s font monster attempt to shame. In order to do that, I would have to find some inspiration. Having been a gamer and a lover for fantasy since I was little, I quickly found inspiration in a monster that was commonly used as a monstrous, intimidating creature: the leviathan. The leviathan originally comes from the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament. It is referred in the bible as a sea monster, and is commonly known as any large sea monster or creature today. Now that I had found an inspirational monster, next I had to find an inspirational poster that gave that intimidating feeling of something waiting to happen. The only poster that came to mind was the poster for Cloverfield, which shows New York City from the seas, with the head of the Statue of Liberty ripped off. While I haven’t seen Cloverfield, I am aware that it is about a gargantuan sea monster, so I thought it would be perfect. Having found the monster and the style, next I wanted to add some inspiration for myself: humor. I often find myself trying to add humor to all of my projects to ease the process of doing it and having fun at the same time, because there is never enough time for fun. This time, I would humor myself by making the leviathan out of a very, very bold and normal typeface: Helvetica. Thus, the Helviathan was born. The process of putting the actual monster together out of Helvetica took hours upon hours. To save some time, I started with the parentheses and shaped the outlines of the beast, and continued to add most of the detail with just parentheses. This way I could simply copy and paste most of the time and get a general idea of what I was going for. I wanted the Helviathan to be more than a snake, though. Inspired by images of epic monsters from video games such as Final Fantasy, I wanted to just fill this guy up with outer organs and extremities that just looked gross and overwhelming.
The only tough time I had with the project was picking the right colors. My recent obsession with warm, welcoming colors kind of went against the poster, but learning that I was pretty good at picking colors of nice contrast and feel, I stuck to my guns and kept the warm blues, to make sure it still looked like a sea, with a subtle, but surely-there sea monster. I gave it a dark blue color, do imitate a shadowy figure under the sea, and also to hint that the inhabitants of the land on the shore are unaware of the nearby threat but the viewers of the poster were aware of it. Dramatic irony at its finest?