I spend just about all my time at my internship on the computer designing signs for companies to use all over. We do simple ones that may just be for an event telling where the bathrooms are to the big ones you see hanging from street lights in center city, to some of the Templemade signs with the faces in the black background, to the ones Temple drops big bucks on that hang across broad street telling when the next games are going to be. Its kinda nice though, Temple is starting to pay me back for the years i’ve spent here I suppose. But it’s been a really nice internship, I’ve been learning a lot and helping with the rebranding of Metropolitan Flag and Banner Co. I think I’m going to stay after the semester and after I graduate.

Anyway, last week I put in my own order. I help run the snowboarding club here at Temple and we were looking to get some new stickers made. My work lets me get my own projects done at cost or slightly higher depending on the job. In this case we saved a lot because we didn’t really pay labor… I did the labor.

So we got about 60 cut vinyl stickers made. (you know, the kind where you lay down the sticker and then peel the see through piece off the top. this may help http://image.made-in-china.com/2f0j00DBhtHfSGaAqY/Die-Cut-Vinyl-Sticker-for-Car-2.jpg) So once I did the design, we printed them, which for this is actually really cutting. We load a roll of vinyl sticker into the machine, and then it goes through with a knife and cuts only the top vinyl layer leaving the sticker attached to the backing but cut out in the right shape. When it comes out the fun part of “weeding” begins. Weeding means we are peeling all the unwanted scrap parts out of the design, sort of like when you pull the unwanted annoying parts out of a garden. What I learned is that weeding in this sense is just as hard on the back as weeding in a garden. After about 10 minutes of leaning over a table doing this tedious work it wasn’t fun and interesting and new anymore, it was manual labor. (really it wasn’t so bad, im just being dramatic) but once that was done, the only part left was to “mask” the stickers which meant we just rolled a giant piece of masking tape down on top that would pull the sticker off when peeled away and then you can lay down the actual sticker. In the end we got some pretty sweet stickers and all it costed was a stiff neck and back for a day.

This was halfway through weeding the stickers.