Tasty Snaks for Every Graphic Designer

This post will focus on graphic designers. Graphic designers understand that sometimes in order to get the job done on time, you might have to take the job home and stay up until the project gets done. This is true for any design job no matter if it’s a design going into a newspaper, magazine or even screen printing!

Here are tasty, yet healthy snacks that will keep the creative juices of a graphic designer flowing and help him/her stay awake when pulling an all-nighter. Did I also mention that these snacks are also keyboard friendly? meaning that they won’t cause too much of a mess while you eat them! 

Protein and fiber! While it is unlikely that you would crave a steak or a piece of grilled chicken in the middle of the night, other sources of protein such as nuts and seeds will provide you with sustained energy to stay awake. You may opt to avoid almonds, though, as they contain tryptophan and magnesium, which naturally reduce muscle function and steady the heart rate, causing some people to feel slightly sleepy. Here are some snack recipes to try!

Granola Bars Recipies

Nut Trail Mix Recipes

Bananas and apples! While whole fruits can provide some natural sugars to increase your energy levels, dried fruits, fruit snacks and fruit juices are not equal substitutes because of their excessively high levels of sugar. In other words, everything in moderation, but especially sugar. The dried fruits and fruit-flavored snacks and juices can induce a crash after the initial buzz that will easily have you dozing off in your chair. It may be wise to avoid cherries because they contain a hormone that regulates the sleep cycle. You can eat these whole or you can come up with creative ways of making these healthy fruits and converting them to snacks! Here are some of my favorite recipes:

Quick Chiquita Banana Social Recipie

Apple Recipies

Orange Honey Fruit Snacks

The everyday coffee drinker should opt for an espresso drink during an all-nighter, instead of plain coffee, for a stronger-lasting effect. Although caffeine seems like the obvious solution to making it through the night, there are some specific tips to keep in mind for getting the best effect from your caffeinated drink. If you are normally a heavy coffee drinker, try cutting back on coffee in preparation for an all-nighter, because the body tends to develop a tolerance to its effect.

If you normally don't drink coffee like me, you might opt for black tea during your all-nighter instead, since it has lower levels of caffeine than coffee, so you can avoid getting jittery.

If you want to make really good black tea here is a good recipe: 

How to brew black tea

Water! Interestingly, drinking two to three glasses of ice water each hour can be as effective for staying awake as a caffeinated beverage. The key is that dehydration causes grogginess that leaves you unable to focus and is also the source of most headaches; water is simply the best strategy to avoid these issues. The cold temperature of the water will also keep you alert if you take small sips throughout the night.

Peanut butter jelly sandwich! Grains are a good source of energy. When you eat carbohydrates, your body converts them into energy. Whole grains break down slowly, so they provide a steady source of energy. This is all about the taste. Having something sweet that has a lot of flavor, like jelly and peanut butter, which is still healthy can help you stay awake. Just make sure bread crumbs don’t fall on your keyboard as you work!

I have tried most of these and I can personally say that they have helped me stay awake at 1am in the morning working on school related projects. Give some of these a try and make sure you explore some new ones! You never know, making some of these snacks might also help you with your creative process while you are still working on that homework.

What are some of your favorite snacks? Comment bellow and let me know!

Making Your design ready for screen print

This post will teach you how to make your design ready to go on a screen by learning to separate the colors of your design and learn the reason behind doing the process of color separation.

A substrate is any surface that a design is going to be printed on, this can be a t-shirt, a bag etc. The more colors your design has, the more screens it will require to print. This could result on the project being more expensive and harder to do depending on the equipment you have available. If you are designing a logo or any other type of graphic for a client that is going to be screen printed for the first time, I recommend you use no more than two colors. I also recommend that you go with a simple design with big/ bold design elements. As you get used to the process and you become comfortable with aligning the screens you can use more colors and perhaps and go with a more detailed design. This post will show you how to make a color separation for a three-color screen-printing project for a white and dark substrate. ( a white and black t-shirt). 

Here are the general steps you need to follow in order to make your design ready for screen printing.

STEP 1:  

Have your design open in illustrator.

STEP 2:

Make three registration marks by drawing a circle with one vertical line and a horizontal line going through the circle. Place one at the top and two at the bottom. These marks will help you align the design once you print them to the screens. This will help you once you start the production process. Your marks should look something like this!

STEP 3:

Make each color its own layer.

 As you can see, we have two colors. Therefore, we will need two different screens. Each screen will carry one color just like this.  (The registration marks that we made in step 2 will help you align the design once it is on a screen. )

A good thing to remember if you are a graphic designer new to the screen-printing process is that the more simple and bigger the elements on your design, the easier it will be to align the screens for production. Also one thing to know is that bigger design elements print better than smaller ones because bigger elements are easier to wash out when you are in the process of making the screens ready for production.

Since hour design will be going to a white substrate (a white t-shirt), we do not have to worry about making another layer for the color white. If we were printing this design on a dark substrate (like a black t-shirt) or other color than white, we want to make sure to make another layer with the entire design white so our colors don’t get darker or change due to the t-shirts color. This is how it would look like if we were printing this on a black t-shirt.

Here is how the design would look like on a black t-shirt

Here are the color separations you would need.

Here is green.

Here is blue.

And here is the white. Remember, we add the color white on dark or colored substrates so that our colors remain consistent and do not change due to the color of the substrate that is being printed on.

And there it is! Your design is now ready for screen-printing. Make sure you save each layer as a different file.