New Spectrolite!! 🌈 (plus some good links)

and some musings on what to work on

Mar 06, 2023

How to Sew Clothes is OUT! IN! THE! WORLD! I saw it at my local bookstores! Besides bookstores, and shopping online — lots of links on the book website — you can get the book FROM THE LIBRARY!!!!! Here’s where to put it on hold at SPL. In addition to the book, Amy and I also just released the Daily Tote sewing pattern. Then I rested a lot last week, we went paddling yesterday, and I made two pots of soup today. The book was a huge multi-year project, and oh man, I am so ready to reset, recharge, eat more pickles, and sew some high waisted shorts. Adam and I are planning to do a lot of hiking this summer.

The OTHER new thing, which is really the point of the rest of newsletter: there’s new version of Spectrolite!

But first some links!

FRODS! Important frog video. (2 min, watch with sound)
Leslie Kern: “I don’t know when I decided that I would ride or die for Marie Kondo or where that feeling comes from, but it runs deep. I cannot sleep at night knowing that misinterpretations of her aims, ideas, and intentions circulate freely through this irredeemable world.” YES! SAME!! (And here’s one of my blog posts with other related reading recs.)
“A global epidemic of women lacking time to conduct the activities of their everyday lives that men simply do not experience.” Yep. (Also the book All the Rage on this; and I’ve got Screaming on the Inside: The Unsustainability of Modern Motherhood on library hold. Also, the comic “You should’ve asked” should be required reading.)
When you’re the only designer on the team (an aspect of working at a small tech startups I do and don’t miss, mostly don’t)
Trail Moss on twitter for lichens and mosses.

Finally, a twitter thread with some cool gifs and images about how spectrometers work. The diffraction gratings part is really bringing me back to electrical engineering school, when I helped with some undergrad research creating nanoscale pores on silicon chips using interference lithography. Very cool work, but also clarified that I didn’t want a profession where I spent my days in a clean room (full bunny suit with hair cap and lil bootie foot coverings in a fluorescent-lit basement bunker) and a laser lab (pitch dark, also no windows, except now everything inside is painted black). That realization led me to Seattle vs staying at Vandy for grad school, and here we are now, making Spectrolite, which uses the same light separation technology under the hood. Not really. But a lot of the math/coding that Adam and I learned in EE school of course applies. As well as stuff from my photography and printmaking classes at Vanderbilt, and now art department students are using Spectrolite in their classes to make risograph prints and zines, a thrilling full circle.

Obviously, I’m thinking on what to do next, work-art-wise. I’m going to keep making climate zines for sure. Do I work on the energy transition, on the engineering side? I have all these math and engineering things in my head that I’m still using, but somewhat tangentially now. Do I use those skills more directly? I also have more to say about sewing that’s climate related, and about apartments and stuff and cleaning and mending and riding bikes. Do the light sculptures with microcontrollers and circuits and textile stuff play into it somehow? Do I learn CAD from my Dad so I can design frod houses? Only time (and hopefully a lot of hiking this summer) will tell.

Onto the new features in Spectrolite! Please, stop reading now if small press publishing, making booklets and zines, risograph printing, and color separation isn’t of interest to you. Switch to enjoying some of the links above? Rest your eyes! Reclaim your time! Cya next newsletter!

…

Alright riso and zine + art book nerds, now that it’s just us around here…

What’s new in Spectrolite app

As a refresher, Spectrolite is a free Mac app that helps make zines and booklets more easily, and does color separation for risograph printing… Adam and I make it as an art project, along with contributions from collaborators and riso friends. There’s also a big How-To with stuff about risograph printmaking and making zines in general, with lists of our studio shop tools and software resources.

Here’s what’s new at the moment:

Layouts

Try out the layouts even if you don’t have a PDF ready — just click the “info” button on the layout you want, and in the TRY IT OUT section, type in the number of pages, and it will fill in a PDF for you with simple numbered pages. It’s a good way to play around with all the imposition types.

Signatures

Speaking of imposition, signatures are when you print a bigger book as a series of smaller booklets bound together. For example, instead of making a 48 page book as 12 sheets of paper folded in half, you could make it with three 16-page signatures (with 4 sheets of paper folded in half in each signature). Here’s how to do it in Spectrolite:

You can choose the signature size in the inspector in the right sidebar; the options are different depending on the layout you’re using, but it looks a bit like this:

We’d been talking about adding Signatures to the imposition layouts “at some point” for a while, and finally got motivated when our riso friends Small Works sent us a detailed feature request. Thanks Gerald and Chen!

Efficient Printing

Speaking of imposition layouts, when you’re printing 4 pages per side, you end up with 8 pages per sheet of paper… so you typically make your booklets in increments of 8 pages: 8, 16, 24, 32, 40, and so on.

Here’s what 4 half-letter sized pages look like together on 11x17 paper.

We added new “Efficient printing” to allow special page counts that have multiples of four, on 4-up layouts. So you can make publications that are 4, 12, 20, 28 etc pages more easily. That give you more flexibility with how long booklet is.

The catch is that when you print, there’s one special sheet that you print the same stencil on both sides of the paper — and, importantly: you print half as many copies of that one. There’s an option to choose which sheet to be repeated, the first or last. Here’s instructions for printing these special layouts.

Center Marks for 2-up Zines / Booklets

For a long time, there’s been an option for a little + center mark for 4-up booklets, which we use to center the print on the paper in both directions, and align multiple inks, and align the printing front and back. (A loupe, light box, and bone folder are handy printshop equipment for this process.)

Now, there’s a little - - mark in the center for 2-up zines. This is on the spine of the booklet, and the space between the two dashes is used for centering on the y-axis, instead of the + mark, so that the mark shows less on the finished product. (With 4-up, you trim it off.)

New Tools

The PDF resizer tool is intended for converting between metric and imperial paper sizes, like letter to A4 which we do in the process of making the print-at-home files for All Well pattern instruction booklets. International shipping is expensive, this could help you make digital print-at-home files for people who want to read your booklets/zines but live too far to make shipping make sense. Maybe people want to print their own copies instead!
The PDF cleaner/flattener tool is for when your file is misbehaving in one of two ways. It might be getting mis-interpreted by the riso printer driver, and you end up with weird fills or artifacts. Or if you have a PDF that’s just not loading into Spectrolite properly, you could try this tool first.
Making spreads from pages tool is for previewing your work if you’ve been working in a one-page-at-a-time type of layout software like google docs, and want to see how everything lines up in spreads, just to check.
The ISBN bar code generator tool lets you pick from your ink colors now. Very niche, but we wanted to do that, so here it is for everyone!

Adobe Color Book of Risograph Ink Colors

In addition to exporting Procreate and Adobe color palettes of your ink set, you can now get Adobe Color Book files for both your ink set and all the riso inks. Thank you to George of Issue Press, Travis of [color/shift], and Jeffrey Evergreen for much ongoing color work and discussion.

Small improvements

There’s a new n-up filter in the layouts section.

Trim marks can be added to all pages, not just the first page, at the rather smart suggestion of TXTBooks, thank you!

Exports from layouts now have the press sheet’s size in the filename (eg, you’re printing on ledger or A3 paper), and a few other naming convention improvements for files to help them organize more neatly in the Finder and be easier to tell what’s what.

Some little styling and flow improvements to the inks and palettes page. I still want to do a bigger styling pass on the whole app at some point, but this was a first pass at a lot of the more functional style fixes I had in mind.

Correct DPI set on some exported images/files that were weird before, thanks to suggestions from Zach Clark.

(For software people: Adam also put a CDN in front of AWS downloads of the app file, since we were hitting the 100GB/month of app downloads. That will make it even less expensive for us to host the app, which is great for being able to provide it free. Apparently that’s how you’re supposed to do it, so just mentioning in case you’ve also got a project hosting a bunch of big downloads and want to pay less / nothing.)

Go to the Spectrolite website

As always, our working doc has lots of details on what’s next, Spectrolite-wise. Although… summer break is already coming up soon. ; )

How do you get the new version?

The version this newsletter is talking about is version 0.17.4 — if you start Spectrolite, it should check for the new version and get it for you automatically. If you already have the app open, you can kick-start that process by going to Spectrolite and picking “Check for updates” from the file menu. Either way, it will look for an update and download it in the background, and then give you a little message when it’s ready to restart.

If you have a Mac and don’t have Spectrolite yet, today’s a glorious day poke around. It’s fun! It’s free! You can make zines and booklets and books and other stuff with it (even if you only have a regular printer and not a riso)! Download it on our website, spectrolite.app !

Thanks for reading! Yours in printmaking and artist publishing and making delightfully specialized apps,

—Amelia (& Adam)