Damascus Media and Custom Apparel - [ San Diego, CA ]

Welcome

Damascus Team — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 22:19:49 +0000

The Traveling Stories

Damascus Team — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 20:24:59 +0000

Emily Moberly started Traveling Stories as a basis to invest in kids’ imaginations. To fuel their minds with stories the same way Ms. Moberly’s Library fueled her students’ minds in Honduras. At Traveling Stories, we believe that books not only strengthen minds and inspire dreams, but they also help people overcome the obstacles preventing them from becoming the best version of themselves.

We have great hopes for what Traveling Stories will accomplish but we can only accomplish so much by ourselves. Like the African Proverb says, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

Learn more…

Our great friends at SCHAP –

Damascus Team — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 09:44:46 +0000

SCHAP believes that extreme poverty as we know it today has a limited lifespan and that the collaboration and commitment of impassioned organizations and individuals across the world will help to usher in an age free of such human injustice.

They recognized that a major barrier of progress in this effort is the lack of accessible and appropriate training available to organizations and volunteers in the most correct principles of community development work.

Girl Talk

Damascus Team — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 23:47:20 +0000

Each year, Girl Talk Foundation, Incorporated reaches approximately 700 girls through our programs.
Because of Girl Talk:
• 61% of girls plan to attend college because of college tour
• 600 prom dresses collected, resulting in 95% of girls receiving dresses
• 400 girls and boys attended teen summits
• 1% asked for help in leaving gang activity
• 42% now include exercise in their daily routine
• 46% improved academically
• 73% expressed giving back boosted their self-esteem

Wartburg Alliance

Damascus Team — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 20:54:26 +0000

The purpose of Alliance is to provide a supportive and accepting environment for students, regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity, and to educate and provide resources to the Wartburg community to encourage open discussion about diverse issues pertaining to sexuality.

No Hate!

Honduras Medical Mission 2011

Damascus Team — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 20:53:22 +0000

Each year the team physician’s see approximately 2,900 to 3,500 patients in the five day clinic. Everyone who comes to the medical clinic is given free medicine and most are treated for intestinal parasites. The dentists pull about 750 to 1,000 teeth. The vets see hundreds of horses, cows, pigs, dogs and cats. These activities and numbers have been relatively constant since at least 1985.

Sister Connection

Damascus Team — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 20:48:19 +0000

Sister Connection is a Christian nonprofit organization dedicated to the healing of Burundian war widows and orphans, restoring their dignity, and offering hope for their futures. We provide assistance through monthly sponsorships, the building of homes, and special funding in emergency situations. Sponsorship monies are provided directly to the widows with a personal, self-help approach. Sister Connection is for all widows, regardless of ethnicity or religious affiliation.

Learn more…

The Berkeley Project

Damascus Team — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 20:55:27 +0000

The Berkeley Project will build a legacy of service and a strong, sustainable partnership between the students of Cal and the city and residents of Berkeley. To this end, the Berkeley Project’s foremost endeavor is to host an annual event during which thousands from the Cal campus unite on one day and work to positively impact the community through a network of service projects in and around the City of Berkeley. Fully student operated and supported, the Berkeley Project not only provides powerful assistance to the public, but aims to create a lasting culture of service-learning among its participants.

See the Berkley Project’s new site!

Using Gradients & Transparency In Screen Printing

Rachel — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 16:53:19 +0000

If you have a design with gradients or transparency, this cannot simply be burned onto screens for printing. The transparency will be ignored, and the print will look like a silhouette of your design. This tutorial will explain how you can use a Halftone effect to get the look of transparency, or to print gradient colors.

Note: If you want to use a photo, or full color image, consider direct to garment instead.

Start by finishing your design.

This includes color-separation, which is explained in the previous tutorial.
Once you turn the gradient layer into halftone, it will not be editable, so make sure your design is complete before you start this process.
Consider saving your design as a separate file before changing to half-tone so you will have the original as well.
The design I will be working with for this tutorial can be viewed below.

Select the objects in your design (each color separately) with transparency and copy them into a new file(s). (If the layer of transparency is white or a very light, change the hue to make it darker once it is in its own file. This makes it easier to see and work with. You will change it back once finished.)

Change the color mode to grayscale (Image>Mode>Grayscale). You cannot move onto the next step unless the image is in grayscale.

Popup Box: Discard color info? Click yes.

Change the color mode to bitmap (Image>Mode>Bitmap). There will be a few boxes that pop up.

Popup Box: Flatten layers? Click Ok.
Popup (Bitmap): Resolution: Input 300ppi, Output 300ppi. (Your design should be print-ready, so the input will already show 300.) Method: Use Halftone Screen.
Popup (Halftone Screen): Frequency, Angle, and Shape depend on preference and how you want your image to look.
> Frequency: The higher the frequency, the smaller the halftone shapes will be; which means there will be more-per-area. Careful not to have too high of a frequency, as it will be difficult to burn the screen.
>Angle: The angle the shapes will be drawn in your halftone. I leave mine at 20 degrees.
>Shape: The shape adds different looks to your image. Experiment with your options and see which works best for your needs. Photos or high-detail gradients generally work better with Round.

Change your image mode back to grayscale (Image>Mode>Grayscale). Your image should now be made up of very tiny shapes. These shapes give it the appearance of varying shades, while being only a single color.

Select the entire image, copy, and paste back into your design document. This process may be a bit of trial and error to see how you want your image to look. (You will need to select and delete the white background.)

Do this process for each separate color of transparency in your design. The finished result will look very similar when zoomed out; and when you zoom in you will notice the tiny dots that make up the halftone effect.

Let us know if this tutorial was of any help to you! =)

Rachel Michalkiewicz
Damascus || Graphic Designer

Creating and adapting designs for print. Pt 2

Rachel — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 18:52:24 +0000

This is part two of the “Creating and Adapting Designs for Print” tutorial. Part one focused on finding the right imagery, font, and getting the basic elements of the image completed. Part two will focus on finishing the image and preparing it for the screens to print onto the shirt.

Now that the basic elements are in place, its time to finish the design.

Compile some high-resolution Photoshop brushes, or make your own.
Experiment with different brushes to get the feel you are looking for. Keep in mind the balance, color, and concentration.
The design should be balanced either symmetrically or asymmetrically. Even abstract work has balance. It is much more aesthetically pleasing.
The image should also have a consistent and coinciding color palette. (Keep in mind that each color needs its own screen, so sometimes less is more for screen-printing.)
Also keep in mind the concentration of the design. Stand back and look at it and make sure you are not getting too brush-happy.

If you downloaded some new brush packs, unzip the files and put them into a single folder. (Only put the brush files into this new folder, not any other files that came with them.)

Open up Photoshop, select the Brush icon (B), then open your brush palette by either clicking on it in the top toolbar, or right clicking anywhere on the canvas.

There should be a small arrow in the top right corner of this window. Click that, and then click “Load Brushes…”. Find the folder that your brushes are in, select them all, and hit “Load”. Your loaded brushes will now appear in your brushes palette.

I wanted to keep this design relatively simple, so I only used a few brushes in the background of the logo. I made sure to keep the name of the organization very clear and easy to read, as this is the focus. (A shortcut to decrease/increase the size of the brush is ‘[' and ']‘ respectively.)

After adding a few darker colored brushes underneath the logo, I overlaid some white brushes on top so that the logo was visible.
To make it pop a bit more from the background, I also gave it a white stroke. (Double-click layer > Stroke).

After the design is finished, it is time to prepare the file to burn onto the printing screens.

The first thing I always do before adapting my design for the screens is to (File > Save As > myfile_PrintReady.psd). This way I always have my original file in case I need to make changes, since in the next step you will be flattening any layers that you have.

In order to prepare the document, the layers must be flattened so that each color has its own layer. Make sure each layer only has a single color on it. If there is more than one color on a single layer, select those elements and move them to their own layer. (Screenshot shows separation of charcoal from blue on logo layer.

To accomplish this next step, I find that it is easiest to start from the bottom layer and work my way up. What you want is to have one layer per color, and all the elements of a single color flattened onto a single layer. The problem is that some colors sit on top of other colors. So we need to remove these intersections.

While flattening layers, keep an eye on your design. It should look exactly the same at the end of this process.

Not including the background fill layer, start by selecting the very last layer in your Layers Palette, and hold [SHIFT] while you select the layers above it in the order that they appear as long as they are the same color. Stop when you come to a layer of a different color.

Pressing [APPLE+E (macs) or CTRL+E (pc)] will flatten the layers you have selected. Your image should not appear any different.
Its OK if there are layers of the same color higher up, we will get to them.

Move up to the next layer and repeat step #7 until you get to the top layer. (There may be multiple layers of the same color at this point, but they are not next to eachother.) We will fix this in the next step.

Now we want to remove the intersecting colors as well as the layer with [white] which is the shirt color. We want the shirt color to show through; the white will not be printed.

While before we worked from bottom to top, this step works best from top to bottom.
deleting the intersecting areas beneath it.
A simple way to do this is to (APPLE > CLICK LAYER THUMBNAIL). This will select the objects in that layer.
Then while the white objects are still selected, simply click on the layer underneath and (DELETE). This will delete any part of that layer that was intersecting the white objects.

If there are layers of the same color, but they were not flattened because there were intersecting colors, use the process in step 9 to select it, delete that area from the layers beneath, and then move it down to flatten.

Each color should have its own layer and there should be only a single layer of each color. You can also delete the [white] and [background] color layers now, as they are not part of the design. There should be no shirt-color left on the canvas.

Crop to edges of design using the Crop tool, then label each layer with the name of its color.

Now your file is color-separated and ready for screen-printing! Contact Damascus to print your awesome apparel!

Rachel Michalkiewicz
Damascus || Graphic Designer