We are fresh back from Portland, OR, where a team of LUNAR folks attended the IDSA International conference. We’ve got some impressions from the conference that we’ll be sharing shortly, along with the winners of our DIY design contest, but first we wanted to share with you our own DIY project.
Before the conference, we decided to go DIY all the way and actually screen print the contest entry forms and pen tags ourselves. So we had some prints made, threw on some smocks and spent two full days pulling brilliant pink, green, orange, and blue pigments across the screens. It was messy. It took patience. And it was a lot of fun. Getting away from the computer to actual use our hands and touch the piece we were creating was energizing.
The conference’s theme of “DIY—Threat or Opportunity,” spoke to the question of whether this movement will replace professional designers. But as Grace Bonney of Design Sponge noted in her keynote speech, if the DIYers learn anything about design, it’s that it’s hard! And we can attest to that. While we had a grand time getting out of the office and covering ourselves in fluorescent paint, quality craftsmanship is not something you can just pick up. It is much slower than the professional design process, so you need to be able to commit the time to doing it. And it takes a decent amount of skill. Our summer camp screen printing experience served us well for this particular project, but we’re not about to set up a shop—we’ll leave that to the professionals.
