Success Stories Ep 95 - "Screening in the Future of Printing"

They say it takes one to know one. 

Well, we'll prove that theory today as JJ McCampbell is our guest on the Success Stories podcast! JJ has been helping shops with their artwork, separations and screen printing for decades, and has quite a number of shops go to person for any type of separation. 

On today's show, we'll chat about art, dialing in processes, and maybe even some future stuff, too. So stay tuned for a great show that you don't want to miss!

Transcript

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Marshall Atkinson 
They say it takes one to no one. Well, we'll prove that theory today, as JJ McCampbell is our guest on the success stories podcast. JJ has been helping shops with their artwork, separations, and screen printing for decades, and is quite a number of shops go to person for any type of separation. On today's show, we'll chat about art dialing in processes and maybe even some future stuff too. So stay tuned for a great show that you don't want to miss. Welcome to the Success Stories podcast JJ,

JJ McCampbell 
Hi, how are you, Marshall, and great to be here.

Marshall Atkinson 
Yeah, I'm very excited to talk to you today. I know a lot of people. You're either like, favorite person in the industry, and I think it's gonna be a fun discussion today, because, you know, I'm an artist too. You know, I do some stuff and have for a long time, and so I'm always fascinated with others. When you find people in your tribe, you know, you gotta, like, talked to them.

JJ McCampbell 
Absolutely. No, I I've spent a lifetime in this business, and I'm always intrigued by meeting new people in the industry and their stories of how they fell into the industry. I always find it fascinating, because it's nobody gets out of high school and says, You know what? I think this is going to be the career for me. Yeah, everybody stumbles into it in one shape, form or another. And I always find those stumblings intriguing.

Marshall Atkinson 
Yeah, and it's like the mafia once you're in, you

JJ McCampbell
Kind of...

Marshall Atkinson
Yeah, all right. So nice segue. JJ, so let's take us all the way back to the beginning, right? How did you get started in this crazy business?

JJ McCampbell 
Well, I, like many others, was kind of thrust into the business. In my case, my father opened up a screen printing shop in Franklin, Tennessee in 19 and 75 so I got to grow up. I was 9, 10, 11 years old during those years, and I had a blast. I was always intrigued. He had, I was running a 20 foot brown camera at, you know, 11 years old, which...

Marshall Atkinson 
that's the stack camera right?

JJ McCampbell 
That's, yeah, the old horizontal stack cam.

Marshall Atkinson 
Yeah, but that's, that's old school there.

JJ McCampbell 
Yeah, well you know, wooden frames, nailing the mesh to the to the wood homemade presses. You know, it was, it was a very primitive era. And after he, he passed away in 1982 and I found myself in the unenviable position at 16 years old of pretty much being out on my own. And I literally just saw an ad for a T shirt shop, you know, he needed, need a t shirt printer. And I was like, Well, I know a little something about it. I'll go give that a shot. So in 1982 at four bucks an hour, I entered the arena, and I fell in love with it very quickly. I thought it was a neat business. It wasn't as at the time in South Florida, you know, it was a flip flops and cut off jeans, type of business with music blasting in the background. And it was something that was, you know, art related, I guess you would say, because, let's face it, we're on the McDonald's fast food into the art industry, and particularly at that time, this was all tourist stuff that we were doing.

Marshall Atkinson 
So you moved from Tennessee to Florida?

JJ McCampbell 
I did. I did. I wound up in Florida in 1982 and there's a lot of other background there, but let's just say that my situation wasn't great, and I found myself out on my own within a few months of my father's passing.

Marshall Atkinson 
Right, and we're in Florida?

JJ McCampbell 
I landed in Palm Beach County. Okay, you know. So I now have been in this area since 1982 more or less, between middle Palm Beach County, up through the Treasure Coast, and currently residing for the last 25 years.

Marshall Atkinson 
Cool. I'm from Tallahassee. So, oh, nice Florida boy, right here, right? So,


JJ McCampbell
Absolutely, absolutely.

Marshall Atkinson
All right, so, and you started at the shop as a printer, right? This was a manual press or an auto.

JJ McCampbell 
I did, yes, I love telling stories about this press, because to this day, it is the most primitive piece of equipment I've ever worked on. And it was a tabletop Harco, three color, one station machine that had counterweights instead of springs or gas cylinders too, the counterweights went to the ceiling. Yeah. Well, actually, actually, these were just weights that that tilted off the back. It was extremely if you spun the press too fast, all the screens laid down.

Marshall Atkinson 
Yeah. So I worked at a sign shop, and the guy was a master printer, and that's why I learned how to use a stack camera and his screens, he used piano hinges, he would and then had a little contraption that would get the wooden frame to to a tabletop. And then he had a series of buckets with fishing weights in it to balance the screen out. So if you just and it was, it was a perfect balance. So if you just touch the screen, it would magically move up by itself.

JJ McCampbell
That's awesome.

Marshall Atkinson
It was, it was like, if you put one more weight in there, it wouldn't work, right?

JJ McCampbell
Right.

Marshall Atkinson
He had it like, he had it, like, perfect. And it was amazing.

JJ McCampbell 
Screenprinting ingenuity. Oh, it's all DIY, right, yeah, that's it, you know, particularly in the early days this was, you know, you had a need, and you made something to fit that need, you know, and the so. So after staying at that place for a couple of years, I proceeded to move on through a new series of shops. Screen printing was highly nomadic for the press operators and stuff. And there were, there were a dozen of us that were switching jobs all over the place. And, you know, nobody missed a day of work. But, you know, in my case, I always like to go to a place that had cooler toys to play with, right? You know, step up on the technological spectrum for my learning process. And I did a little bit of everything in those early years. I did. I worked at a rule and die place that did probably the most exacting form of screen printing, if not the most boring form of screen printing I've encountered. But, you know, this stuff was, was all very tightly controlled and and then I just began learning about keeping your processes in control. And that's a that's a recurring theme throughout my career, is seeking out best practices, you know, for each not just you know in general, but you can take your best practices in one shop and move them to another shop, and they might not be as good. And you know, the the conditions are different every you know, small things add up to make differences, and understanding those differences are what really separates the breakers from the nearly average printers.

Marshall Atkinson 
And how did you get into the art end of things?

JJ McCampbell 
I displayed aptitude at this stuff. So people, my employers, were actually pretty comfortable handing me new tasks. Here, do this. Here, try this. You know, learn that. You know. Can you, can you cut Ruby lift, can you? Do you understand what makes you know why you would do a contact exposure to, you know, create, you know. And these were all methods that were completely new to the concepts that were new to me, but they were falling in like dominoes to an overall heightened picture of the job and what was happening. And, you know, so I was more like a floor guy who kind of got lost in the art department and couldn't find his way out. I took it on, as you know, part of the overall responsibility, and to this day, I look at a screen printing shop as an integrated unit. You know, you know, the art department is not necessarily its own little fiefdom, and the screen department is not its own little kingdom. And, you know, so all these things have to work together to create the best possible product, and understanding across those lines is extremely important.

Marshall Atkinson 
Yeah, that's exactly right. And, you know, I was an art director for a long time, and then I moved into operations, and one of the things that I used to talk about a lot was that our customers aren't going to blame the screen room if they use the wrong mesh, or blame the art department because they left off the circle R by the logo, right? The company fails. That's it's a team concept. Tier that we all have to work together, and if we can have a culture where we're helping people downstream from us in the process, absolutely able to work faster and do do better more things, and have higher quality and blah, blah, blah, right? And, and so I love I love that that you know that you're learning that in your early career, and I'm sure that influenced you later on, correct?

JJ McCampbell 
Oh, absolutely. I had the benefit of learning from a lot of different people and being exposed to a lot of different schools of thought on what works and what doesn't. And, you know, by and large, the shops who, you know, what I like to call accidental shops, you know, they they started a little gig, and then it kind of blew up on them. And, you know, they kind of hit their own glass ceiling administratively, and they end up creating a business where, you know, they can excel at product, but the sales model doesn't necessarily follow along with it. So all of it has to, you know, come together. You know, having the sales people understand what they're selling, having the customers expectations managed appropriately.

Marshall Atkinson 
You just described half the industry right now.

JJ McCampbell 
I did. It's no coincidence.

Marshall Atkinson 
Yeah, and I think a lot of people get stuck because they're trying to sell ink on cotton. They're not selling the result. They're not selling the experience. They're not selling the bad-assery That we could bring to the table and they drop their pants for the lowest quote kind of a thing. And it doesn't have to be that way if you work and really know what you're providing your customer and all that is in alignment, because people will pay more. You know, you just have to find those people. And that's the challenge, right? There's always people who will pay more for what you do, just like there's people who will always say, I can get it a quarter or cheaper somewhere else. You know, we don't need those people. We need we need to go find the bigger fish out there.

JJ McCampbell 
The infamous race to the bottom.

Marshall Atkinson 
Yeah, what about the Race to the Top? How come nobody's ever talking about that JJ?

JJ McCampbell 
Why does it, you know? I, well, I, you know, I will touch on this. And having been in the industry now, this is going to be, this is my 42nd year in the industry. You know, we have not replenished our numbers when it comes to highly talented staff, you know, the the people who can do the higher end of color separation and artwork, there seem to be fewer of them in relation to the need in the industry, you know, so and now with AI coming out, and you know, AI has been good for me personally, because a lot of the art that I get crossing my table these days is coming from AI.

Marshall Atkinson 
We'll, we'll chat about that later. Sure, I have a bromance with Midjourney. I'm sure we'll get to that.

JJ McCampbell 
No.

Marshall Atkinson 
So, so JJ, like, how did you transition from being a printer to just doing the art full time?

JJ McCampbell 
Really, that was a transition that was made in self defense. When I started my own business, I began learning more of what I had to do to make half tones work in my shop with my stuff. As I became more familiar with that and through my contacts in the industry, I eventually started doing some separations for people on the side. Once I got proficient at that to the point to where I felt I could offer my services, it quickly ramped up in two or three years to being about half of my business, you know. So I was still running the small shop and still doing separations. And then I got into a car wreck, and I Blake couldn't do the physical aspect. I was in 2020 I was doing, I was doing, I've been doing separations for five or six years, for other people at that point, and I'd already been considering the transition, because, let's face it, I'm not getting any younger, and I wanted something that would slow the pace down a little bit and keep me more engaged with the industry as a whole. So I made up my decision. I made my decision. I sold all my stuff in like three days, and just, you know what I'm done. I'm doing this.

Marshall Atkinson 
I'm Cortez. I'm burning the boats. I'm not. Good. I didn't do that anymore.

JJ McCampbell 
I very much took that approach. I knew that if I just kept the shop, I would never keep my nose out of it, because that's my inclination and my nature, right? And so I set off on the new journey in 2020 right, when covid was hitting. And you know, it all worked out. It's so funny. It's still working out.

Marshall Atkinson 
To take us back. I remember distinctly one of the things that really had a big impact on me was Dave Gardner in new buffalo, when they were doing all those crazy steps, and the simulator process came out, and everybody was just like rabid, foaming at the mouth, trying to figure out how the hell you do that.

JJ McCampbell 
Yeah, I was one of those rabid people trying to figure it out myself.

Marshall Atkinson 
So we hired a guy to come in. He worked for Harlequin. We had a guy that came in and teach me the Photoshop process of separating using curves and doing stuff and, and that's how I learned mid, late 90s, somewhere in there, and, and then that really kind of changed everything. And I still separate the same way in Photoshop, using curves, splitting channels, the Apply Image command. You know, those are my tools. I've never been a big auto separator guy with the software, because I kind of design as I'm separating at the same time.

JJ McCampbell
Sure, sure.
 
Marshall Atkinson
And I'm very, kind of picky about things. And, and one of the things that, and I know we're going to get into that in a minute, but I want to know that what is the smallest half tone that we can print, right? Can we hold a 4% dot, you know? And, and I asked this sometimes with shops, like, what's the smallest Athlon you can keep and like, What are you talking about, right? So I know that they, they, they're, they're not process driven at that point, right?

JJ McCampbell 
Correct.

Marshall Atkinson 
And so, you know, that's, that's just kind of how I think and do things, right? So, you know, and I always love chatting with other artists and designers. So you know, what do you do to walk us through your process? What are your favorite tools? Where do you get inspiration? Can you look at our shirt and go, I bet you they did it this way. You know what? Like, what? Just like that new buffalo thing. So walk us through that a little bit JJ.

JJ McCampbell 
Yeah, from, from the first time I encountered a decent set of color separations, uh, done in a way that I didn't understand, which was the first in process job that I printed probably sometime in the early 90s had to have been, and I was absolutely fascinated with how they got that. I had worked at a place that focused primarily in CMYK on darks at that point. And, you know, we were turning it out and making good looking stuff, but this other stuff just had a vibrancy, and it had a power to it that I wanted to capture. You know what? I mean?

Marshall Atkinson 
Yeah, and spot color is always going to bounce more.

JJ McCampbell 
Absolutely, just having that, that pop factor and that wow factor, and it was, it might as well have been sorcery to me at that point. You know, I knew absolutely nothing about how they were doing it. And you know, when I started my Photoshop journey in earnest, and that was basically when I started my own business and had to start learning this stuff, you know, for myself. And basically I needed a half tone without a rip. And that was really where I focused on. And most of my focus has been in reverse in this aspect, um, from shop floor to art room, I concentrate on what is possible there, what is what? What can I do? What are my limitations? You know, where is my failure point? You know, beyond this, I can tread no further, you know, right? So, having the the the inspiration of, I know other people are doing it because they're talking about it, and they're doing it, and they're selling product. And, God, I wish I could work at that shop, but it's too cold in New York, so I've got to learn how to do it here, you know. And today, you know? I mean, I. Am a Photoshop convert. I hated Photoshop in my early years. I felt like it was not doing what I wanted it to do, because I didn't understand it well enough. And eventually those fears.

Marshall Atkinson 
It's not that way. It's the it's the operator, right?

JJ McCampbell 
That it is, it is. The tool can be reused a myriad of ways, and it's a very complicated tool. Um, you know, with one of the things that I prided myself on back in day was that, you know, oh, I do all this old school I don't need any automation tools. Um, well, I am far too busy to not use automation tools at this point in my career. Time is money, and you know, being able to, you know, pump out three or four jobs in a day the old school way on a particularly troublesome set of steps, and being able to turn out 30 in a day with the same level of quality, because I've got my workflow tuned to where. And mind you, I don't use a push button, you know, six, color eight, color 10, color option, or anything like that. I do still pull all my colors individually and then level and curve from, you know, from there to bring out what I want. You know. The the reality of my job is that my life pretty much revolves around bad art these days. Okay, well, yes, you know, that's I get. I get stuff done by people who, you know, they don't know what they're doing. You know?

Marshall Atkinson 
You ever get a Do you ever get an art file? And you go, Oh, they want that on our shirt?

JJ McCampbell 
Daily.

Marshall Atkinson 
What are they thinking?

JJ McCampbell 
Sometimes I ask the question, it's okay if I make it look better, right?

Marshall Atkinson 
Yeah. So that's great. And so one of the things that that really inspired me to like jump on that was I took a I took a class at an SGA or Long Beach, or not Long Beach, but the Tampa show. Remember when the Tampa show used to be huge? ISS Tampa, right? And I think it was kudre Mark cudray taught his class about separate on separations and and of course, he was showing all the science and stuff behind it. And it was so fascinating to me that I really just went bonkers and and we had a lot of and I worked at a shop, and we had a lot of really big name clients, and we were doing four color process, but we were always doing Spot Color hits, because there's a red or a blue or whatever, or, you know, a purple or some sort of green that would never come out right. And we would spend hours trying to adjust squeegee pressure to hit that tone right, and and then. But if we did it just with spot color, you know, so the kind of the foray that I went through was CMYK plus one or two or three spot colors sure to get those colors to work right. And then it was the epiphany of, what if we just left CMYK part out right and we just used spot colors? And that's kind of how I transitioned into it. And I took a lot of classes. I went to a week long Photoshop seminar in Boston once that was actually taught by some of the guys that like the names that when you open up Photoshops got that paragraph. One of those guys taught a class I was in and he showed how to use the the the I draw picker tool, right and the numbers, the graph of the numbers, and then how to balance your image. And one of the that was the most amazing thing is he had a student come up, and he had to mess up the color balance of an image. And then, without using a monitor and only using the color tool, the picker tool, he was able to in Levels and Curves. He was able to make the image look perfect that couldn't see the image. All we used was the numbers and that formula, yeah, that was because one of the things he found is, I want to find the white point, and I want to find the black point right. And then his color balance. And all went from that, and he was all in LAB, right, right, which is the mode, right. And then from then on, when I was doing separations, I was always using L, A, B for my steps. And I learned that the. L channel, the lightness channel made the absolute perfect under base. It does it and, and then I could use a and b to help modulate the other channels. I mean, whatever, find the other colors and do some share and. And then that's really how my separations really took off then, because of that L channel thing, right? So are you do you use that? It sounds like you do, right?

JJ McCampbell 
I do, I do. I do not all the time.

Marshall Atkinson
It depends on the image, right?

JJ McCampbell
It really depends on the image. And most of the work that I get these days, I do work on national merch accounts, occasionally, whenever I work on anything that comes across my desk, basically, you know, so I never know what type of joys or horrors I'm gonna get whenever I open up my email and it's honestly, you know, I get something that's really good, and it's Gonna be a high profile good, you know, particularly for really long run type stuff. Yeah, I break out all the tools, you know. I I want maximum impact. I want maximum ease of printing on press, you know, like if I do every set of separations, as if I had to stand there and print it. And I can remember how I used to cuss the art guys when I was the press operator, right? You got to blame somebody, right?

Marshall Atkinson 
Let me ask you this. One of the tricks that I love is to on the L Channel, the lightness channel, if you under base channel, is to do a little unsharp mask on it to really, like, define the deep black and the white, white, especially if there's texture, fur, feathers, Chrome, like whatever, like a chrome of a hot rod wheel or whatever. And what this does is it really forces the other colors, when they drop down on top of that, to really pop, because you're, you're boosting the white part, and you're making the black kind of recede a little bit, so you get this kind of a supernatural tonal curve there with that unsharp mask. And it just makes all that stuff really crisp up, right?

JJ McCampbell 
And it's counterintuitive, really, you know, when you you, you can blur something a little bit and actually bring out more details in it. Yeah, right. But the reality is, is that, yeah, I do that in on a regular basis. I've got, you know, each, each piece of artwork is like a puzzle that needs to be solved, an equation, you know, and you know, finding the right approach within the customer's budget, within their press size and their skill level, you know, I have guys that work on very primitive, homemade equipment. I've got guys that run three LT, SS and 16 autos. You know.

Marshall Atkinson 
So, one of the challenges that I know that you face probably is, hey, this is a 10 color design, but I've got six colors I can use. Help me squirrel it down to this color count. What's a trick that you use that seems to work better?

JJ McCampbell 
Well, you know, this is a very subjective, you know question be just because every project is different, but my general approach is, if I see 10 must have colors, I pull them all, and then I start analyzing which ones I can either eliminate and. Entirely, or dump that information onto another channel, you know, and I'm notorious for, you know, I have no fear of trying something and it not working out. You know, on my end, I will redo it over and over until I'm happy with it, you know, until I feel that the customer has the best chance of success with it. So, but, yeah, isolating the channels. I mean, this is something that I literally have to do every day. I do a lot of race car designs, and the the people who are brokering these jobs are not reigning in their artists and saying, Look, we have to stay within a certain amount of colors, you know. So I get 1011, color designs all day, and get told, No, I got six or seven Max I can, I can work with, you know? And sometimes it's a been easy, you know, fix Well, you know, this red will just, there's, there's barely any red. We'll just dump that on the orange. It'll be all right, you know. But you know, managing the customer's expectations on that, you know, is really, is really important the final end user, especially in a day when everything is digital, and you know, a customer may not understand the difference between an inkjet printed transfer, or DTG and screen printing, and what can be done and how the ultimate product is going to look, you know, so keeping that that expectation realistic, is an important part of the process as well.

Marshall Atkinson 
Yeah, I tell you something that a lot of newer people forget, is to use the shirt color to modulate your ink colors Absolutely. And it's, you know, if you're printing on a black shirt, the black shirts the best, right? Yeah, you could do all kinds of great things with a black shirt. And just not, you not have an Underbase, you know? And instantly that red is maroon

JJ McCampbell 
Yeah, I am i Black probably constitutes 60 to 70% of my work, you know.

Marshall Atkinso
I bet, you're doing race stuff, you know about ordering lime green.

JJ McCampbell 
Yeah, absolutely. I love it. It's great. I because it's easier to do, you know? It's easier Photoshop, to work with those colors. And anybody who's separated long enough knows that Photoshop has a preferred set of things that it can see. You know that it can, that it can easily modulate greens are not really one of them. You know, I've had many designs where you can see the green in the design, but you go to try to isolate a green by formula, and it's not there. It doesn't exist. It exists in the yellow range. So I you know, doing? You know, you know, because you know this is really a an illusionary process. You know, you're taking an artwork and you're trying to isolate it down into a very few colors and still have it come out somehow as being the exact same artwork. You know, that's, you know, cheating.

Marshall Atkinson 
Yeah, all right, cool. So let's switch gears a little bit.

JJ McCampbell
Sure.

Marshall Atkinson
You talk with a lot of shops you've been around the block a minute, right? So what do you feel is the biggest mistake shops make when it comes to getting bad results with their art on press, right? What is their what is their Achilles heel, if you will, that seems to turn up the most?

JJ McCampbell 
Well, I do have, I mean, you know this, it's a loaded question, because there are so many variables.

Marshall Atkinson
That's why I asked it.

JJ McCampbell
Yeah, there's so many variables, but I will tell you that the most common issue I see is actually encoding screens. I see undercoding of screens, particularly in film shops, you know, with CTS, the those problems are quite as apparent, but there's a lot of things that happen on the very small scale when you're trying to play in the realm of 7% and under dots that you can do to enhance your chances of getting those dots, and one of them is making sure you got enough of a smoothness factor on the side that contacts the film. Now that what happens is, if you look at it under a microscope, which I have and I take to my client shops to illustrate exactly what I'm talking about now is that if you just do a simple one in one coat, when that emulsion dries, it looks like it's actually shrink wrapped to the mesh, and it has high spots and it has low spots, and light will enter those low spots no matter how strong your vacuum is, because you're not. Not going to get that film to suck right up to the to the to the surface. So, and that generally blows out half tones, but underneath, you know, 10, 10% it makes them difficult. So keeping with that, I have to say that that is definitely the most common. Probably, it's an easily solved problem. You know, just add an extra coat of emulsion. You don't need a huge EOM, but you do need enough flatness for the film to make contact, and preferably enough of a retaining wall for the ink to not escape the boundaries of the stencil. You know, that's a, that's a big thing. When you look at a print and someone's printing a gradient from 0% to 100% Well, everything over 70% looks black, you know.

Marshall Atkinson 
And that's a dot game.

JJ McCampbell
That's a dot game, you know.

Marshall Atkinson
So that's, uh, you know, these are the questions to ask, like the, yeah, do you sharpen your squeegee?

JJ McCampbell 
Yes.

Marshall Atkinson 
What sweeter angle? What's What's the draw?

JJ McCampbell 
All of it. You know, you start off with good tightening, screen tension, proper mesh, proper tension. Good squeegee, you know, a level pressed, you know, a Level, Level. Platens, you know, you know, keeping, you know, all of these things will contribute, you know. And it's like it's really easy for shops to pull off a decent looking print most of the time. What doesn't appear to be quite as easy as reorders and making them look exactly the same, you know. And that's where control your processes is really going to shine, you know, particularly in the old days with CMYK, it was brutal, you know, going from run to run and trying to make sure it passed the muster, you know.

Marshall Atkinson 
And so I think the thing that a lot of shops don't think about is that we're in the business of controlling variables. That's it. You control your variables. You're going to have standards and guardrails that are set up to allow you to have success, but this requires you to have thinking and craftsmanship and really great people and one of the most ridiculous things that I see when I talk with folks sometimes is their worst employees, the ones that's in the screen room, and because it's like, you know, jail or something, yes. And so they put these characters in there and who don't care, and they're just in there, and they're what I call clock punchers, right? Yes, sir. We want the most anal retentive, like, ADD, not ADD, but it's got to, like, be so focused on exactly perfection, because this called screen printing. And if you don't have a good screen the printing part's going to be kind of mediocre, right?

JJ McCampbell 
That's it. I mean, you just set a mouthful right there. Um, I have had the position of being a production manager, um, and having to choose the person that goes in the screen room. And I've also been the guy in the screen room, you know, running it, and it's, you know, you do want that steady, Eddie, Eagle Eye guy who's got his, you know, who's, who's doing everything the same, you know. I mean, you know, when you get a shop where, you know, you've got a rotating staff, and it might not be the same guy in the screen room, day in, day out, you know, you might have a, you know, three or four guys who kind of share that job as duties dictate, um, and you know, if one of those guys isn't doing things the same as the others, it shows in the work, you know, and it shows up in the frustration levels of the printers. And, you know, everybody downstream.

Marshall Atkinson 
Yeah, because it's, been great every day, except for Thursday. What happened? What happened?

JJ McCampbell 
You let Jose do the screens again?

Marshall Atkinson 
Oh my gosh. Why is there mustard in the emulsion?

JJ McCampbell 
Yes, yes.

Marshall Atkinson 
I think, you know, one of the biggest challenges that shops face is they put a lot of emphasis, I think, on the equipment that we use to print, rather than the equipment that we have in the screen room, right? And so people ask me all the time, they go, all right, I got money to spend. What should I spend it on? I go, you should buy an auto coder, right? But you should look at a CTS system, right? You're like, they're like, why? And I'm like, Well, you know, it's the screens, you know, that really matter here, right? And, and then we start talking about screen tension. What's your four tension for the frames that you use? Like, you know. What's under under this tension? If you're using static frames, we're just taking the utility blade and cutting the mesh out, because we don't want to use that frame ever again, right? And we can get it remeshed. It's like, can you use a 15 Newton screen? Yes, you could use this the barn screen door from your house, right? But that doesn't need to right. So, you know? So I think a lot of people, even if they're not even printing half tones, right, if they're just doing just flat color stuff, you know, the better screen that you have, the better print you're going to get right. And absolutely, and I don't know why this is such a secret. Can you explain that to me? JJ, why secret?

JJ McCampbell 
I have some theories on why people do what they do in this industry.

Marshall Atkinson
What's your theory? I want to hear your theory.
 
JJ McCampbell
My theory is you got generational bad habits being passed on. Okay? 

Marshall Atkinson
How we've always done it.

JJ McCampbell
This is how we've always done it. This is the way I was told to do it by the boss. And, well, he's the boss, right? You know, and you know? Well, that doesn't mean he knows better than me. And if you know that's, that's I've seen, I've seen this happen in shops, hierarchical, hierarchical mistakes, you know that just keep being repeated over and over and over, because that's the way they were taught to do it, and that's how they're going to do it, because that's the way they were taught. You know.

Marshall Atkinson 
I go to a lot of shops. JJ, you probably do too. And like, the first thing I do when I walk in, sometimes there's two things I check, I look on press, and if I can see the print on the boards, I know they're using so much pressure they're driving an ink through the the shirt, right? And so the so opacity issues are probably, you've got some Screen Room issues. Yeah, they probably haven't sharpened those key jeans and blah, blah, blah. So let's see. This takes me down a whole road. Sure, another thing I check is the production employing bathroom. Yeah? Because if they can't put the paper towels in the trash or in the sink, you know, if it looks worse than a gas station bathroom screen, they have employees who just don't care. Yeah, so, two things that I check. Have you seen those in action?

JJ McCampbell 
Right, right. And going in and seeing screen rooms. You know, they always seem like these, dank, moldy, dark...

Marshall Atkinson 
Emulsions all over their floor and the walls like they were slaughtering a cow.

JJ McCampbell 
Yeah, the washout tank looks like it's just been hit with a bomb of spackle, you know, colored spackle.

Marshall Atkinson 
So is there any wonder they're not getting what they want on press.

JJ McCampbell 
That's it. Well, you know, and it comes down to priority, the person who's in charge of setting up that stuff, you know, having a a solid grounding and organizational skills and neatness, I gotta tell you, I have seen some horror shows in this industry, And I've also seen some amazingly clean shops out there.

Marshall Atkinson 
No, I've been, yeah, I've been to shops that are surgical room clean.

JJ McCampbell 
Yes, I believe it. I was just at one a couple of weeks ago, and it was you could eat off the production bathroom floor. Should you so choose? It was ridiculously clean, um, not a speck of ink on a floor, not a speck of ink on a bucket. And I bet you their prints matched that level. Their prints were flawless. Their prints were flawless. I have to say that's merch ops in Tampa. If they happen to be listening.

Marshall Atkinson 
That's good. All right. Hey, last question, check. Let's chat about the future, right? Yes, you've been around a while. You've seen trends come and go, and you see what's happening these days, right? Where do you see the industry going? Right? And are you excited about that or dreadful about that? What are you What are you thinking about JJ?

JJ McCampbell 
I actually run a little bit of a spectrum of emotions on that subject. You know, as far as high end screen printing, I don't think it'll go away ever, for the main reason of cost effectiveness. You know, I don't think that digital technology will replace the physical processes for a while. It may eventually, it may eventually overtake it, but the world is a big place, and it's always going to be in there, somewhere trending in the art. It would be AI, you know. How do I feel about. That. And as someone who has basically spent most of his career taking someone else's art and then doing what I do and translating it onto a shirt, um, you know, the I actually have had higher access to cooler art. You know, more of my customers are handing me projects that are, you know, that's cool. That's gonna be a good looking shirt, you know, that's gonna be neat, you know. And I have artist friends who, you know, pretty much want to string me up every time I mention mid journey, you know, because it's running them out of a job, right? And, and, well, you know, the, you know the you cannot stop a river, you can't damn an ocean, you know, and, and, AI is the ocean. It's, it's an unlimited resource that people will use. And, you know it's going to improve over time. It's going to be a force to be reckoned with. And you know that that is just something that every artist is going to have to deal with. You know.

Marshall Atkinson 
Sure, there's people who are staunch, on their position that, you know, I'm an artist. AI is cheating or stealing writing or whatever, other people who are, you know, what? I'm using this because I can get more done in a day and make more money. That's in the customer. It's a tool. You drew it by hand. Use, used AI. All they want is a cool looking shirt. They don't care. Customer doesn't care. They just want something that's going to look badass. And what I can tell you, because I'm really heavily involved in mid journey, is that you know you're if you've got a graphic or an background or an eye for art, or whatever, you're going to make better art in mid journey because you're curating the experience. The challenge that we have, of course, is that there isn't a pen tool or a brush tool or a blur tool or any of that stuff. It's based on your vocabulary, right? So that's weird. It's really awkward, like, and it's hard to do, because what words do I want to play with, right? Right? And those, if you think of words as like a tube of paint, right? It's just, that's how you're going to get the image. Is by using, you know, this particular thing gets this particular result. And if you play with enough of this stuff, you'll realize this is how I can get this result, sure. And then we can, we can play with some stuff, and you don't it, you're not going to get perfection, but you're going to get 95% of what you need. And then in 10 or 15 minutes in Photoshop, you can edit so it's exactly perfect, and then add your type or make your colors or do your, you know, whatever you got to do, and your client will go bananas, absolutely. And that's what people were doing, right? And then they're going to take you that, take that file, and they're going to send it to you, and you're gonna go, wow, this is the best work I've seen you do, right? I'm sure you've said that, wow. This is much better than what this guy normally is, absolutely. How did he get that?

JJ McCampbell 
Yep, yep, that is it. The words man, uh, prompt generation. Uh, anybody's played with Midjourney for any any length of time, absolutely, has gone down that rabbit hole. What words? How do I tweak the words? How do I lay them out when you put what order do I put them in? You know.

Marshall Atkinson 
The order is the words in the beginning of this the prompt sequence matter more than the words at the end, correct. And if you use more than 60 words, it just ignores the ones past 60. So if you're going to chat GPT or using some other thing to give you a paragraph of prompts, sure it doesn't, Midourney. Doesn't care about grammar, it doesn't care about spelling, it doesn't care about punctuation, it doesn't care about that stuff. So you can, if you just learn how to do the prompt sequences correctly, you're going to have a really good experience. And if you're like me, I can generate 60 to 80 images in about a minute, and from those two or three will look pretty good. And then I can play with those, and then I can pump out some things that really look good. And then in about five minutes, I got something spectacular that I could use for something.

JJ McCampbell 
That is and that's it. And that level of brutal efficiency in the process, and anyone who's ever had to con. Tracked out with an artist. The back and forth of dialing in the design can take months.

Marshall Atkinson 
Yeah, I know guys that you know, John Anderson and their dudes, right? They're using Midjourney, and they'll, instead of doing one design for the client, in 20 minutes, they'll send their client three right? Because I've it's the tools, it's the tool. And so you're giving that person a better experience, because you've got some variations. Here's the, here's three versions. Which one do you like the best? I like that one. Okay, great. Now we separate that one and we're done, yeah, and you're still getting paid the same.

JJ McCampbell 
And you're still getting paid the same, you know, being able to, you know, take the stress out of, you know, this business is pretty stressful. For some reason, I see a lot of people who get tweaked out over this stuff. You know.

Marshall Atkinson 
We're both grayhaired old guys, right? Where did that come from? That comes from the stress.

JJ McCampbell 
It does. Man, it does. You know, I really enjoy doing what I'm doing now, because I get to print vicariously through my client shops, and I get to share in their successes and help them, you know, dial in their failures, you know, to identify the weak spots in their program. It's quite satisfying to me being the professional know it all at this point.

Marshall Atkinson 
So, so what do you think about DTF digital stuff? I see that, you know, you can't swing a dead cat at a trade show without seeing a DTF booth, right? So I see this as especially the print on demand that's really taking over huge, right? Sure. Is that impacting what you do at all? Or what do you think about that?

JJ McCampbell 
I honestly don't think it's impacting me specifically, you know, what I do. I mean, there may be some jobs that are not entering the screen printing market because of it, you know. But when it comes down to, you know, the sheer numbers, you know, nobody's ordering, you know, 5000 DTF designs, yeah. I mean, they're just, this is a, this is a small market. What they'll in a retail point thing.

Marshall Atkinson 
What they'll do though, is they'll have a website, and they'll just print that image one, one by one as orders are coming in, instead of printing 5000 shirts to hold an inventory.

JJ McCampbell 
Right. Absolutely. I mean it. It has its place in, you know, in the overall marketplace, you know, when the the first DTF machines hit, one of my clients over in the UK, bought one straight away, and he sent it back. Two weeks later, he was like, this won't do what I wanted to do. You know, this won't, this doesn't look the way I expected. This doesn't feel the way I expected, and this isn't what I, you know, what I want to do. So he immediately went from, you know, but that gave him learning experience that what he really wanted was a DTG machine, you know, because of what he was doing, which was print. It was more or less, you know, print on demand, you know, orders from coming print out the individual shirts. And that's kind of what he wanted to gear his shop towards right, and, you know? And that worked really well for him, you know. But the reality of being a direct to garment machine owner is a little different than the concept of being one, you know. They're, they're kind of finicky machines, and can be really expensive if something goes wrong. You know, dtfs, hey, you know you're in that you're not quite in that high a price point, but I just it has limitations. You know, there are looks you simply can't achieve with it. You know, you know, fading backgrounds. You know, there's just certain things that you know that aren't really there yet with that technology. And it may, it may, in the future, you know, there may be some other hybrid technology that allow the DTF film to achieve higher rates of detail on something that's not just a cut slab rectangle, which, right, I cringe every time I see that.

Marshall Atkinson 
Are you doing separations for anybody that has a digital squeegee that you're doing some like special effect printing as spot color plates. At the end, you do anything like that?

JJ McCampbell 
Not with a digital squeegee. I have yet to get one of those clients in my base. I'd like to, I'm curious about it.

Marshall Atkinson 
If someone out there is listening. JJ, wants, wants some work.

JJ McCampbell 
Yes. Yes, I want to play with your machine. But yeah, I do specialty requests, you know. Or you know, everything from, you know. The HD overb bait, you know, overprints to, you know, metallics, special basis to accommodate metallics. And, you know, just the whole gamut, you know, if they I'll figure if I don't know how to do it, I'll figure it out. I'll invent the process. It won't be the first time.

Marshall Atkinson 
That's great. All right. Well, hey, JJ, thank you so much for sharing your success story with us today. What's the best way to contact you if someone wants to learn more about what you do or maybe how you can help them?

JJ McCampbell 
My Facebook Messenger is pretty much open to all comers. It's J A Y J A Y M C, Campbell, M C C A M P B E L L. My email is squeezologist@gmail.com that's S Q U E E Z O L O G I S T@gmail.com

Marshall Atkinson 
Great. That's awesome. Well, thanks, J, J, have a fantastic day. Thank you so much for being on the show. Appreciate you, and it was a lot of fun.

JJ McCampbell 
Appreciate you having me man, this is great, fantastic.