I've been testing some new printable media and testing some equipment I bought a while ago. The supplier who I buy the double-sided matte photo paper we use from has recently expanded their offerings and I wanted to test a few before emailing them to negotiate a bulk purchase of multiple materials at once. A few of them have proven to be quite promising for certain applications, and one looks like fucking dogshit. Always worth it to order test batches to try out.
A couple of the materials I'm most excited about are the matte printable vinyl sticker sheets and the laminating sheets. For the Bug Saga release we had initially planned on including a vinyl sticker, and Odin_Odang_Obie even designed a unique piece of art (very cool) just for the release, but the printable vinyl I had previously ordered was inconsistent in print quality and I had a lot of issues with the production. After the sticker didn't work out Obie and I worked frantically to come up with the card idea, design/edit them, acquire proper printable media and a corner cutter, and produce the cards in a three day span. Obie was a trooper and I thought it would be appropriate to test the new printable vinyl sticker material with his cards.
This new printable vinyl is much easier to work with than the previous one I had tried and, after some test prints, I've figured out that it uses the same print settings as the double-sided matte photo paper we use for zines and comics, so I don't have to fuck around with printer settings between projects.
The sharp, vibrant image of the matte surface paired with the glossy laminate looks amazing. A lot better than I was expecting. I still need to do some more tests to figure out the best way to laminate/cut out the stickers using a couple pieces of gear I bought four years ago for this sort of thing but had never used until last week, but I think custom vinyl stickers with a water/weather resistant laminate is nearly figured out.
The Obie card stickers are test prints and quickly, roughly (and drunkenly) cut out by hand, so don't look at the shitty corners and think This shit is shit!!. My standards for production are much higher than that.