Studio journal

What Two Years of Teaching Riso Taught Us About Color

Every workshop starts the same way: someone asks which ink is their favorite, and June answers "whichever one is loaded," because the honest answer is that the shelf decides more than the artist does. We keep eleven inks in stock and maybe four in the drum at any time. Constraint is the actual creative tool here.

The surprise to most first-timers is that fluorescent pink is the most versatile ink on the shelf, not the most limiting. Pink overprints with nearly everything and stays loud doing it. Blue is the workhorse of information. Black is for type and quiet. When someone brings us a design in six colors and asks us to make it work, we are not translating their palette, we are editing it down until it argues with itself productively.

The second surprise is that people misregister on purpose now. Our first year we chased registration like it was a moral duty. Then a customer held a misaligned proof next to the clean one and bought the misaligned one, and we started leaving a little drift in on purpose. The machine was right before we were.

If you take one thing from this studio diary: pick your inks before your content. It feels backwards. It prints better.

The Zine Library Passed 200 Titles, So We Reorganized the Shelves

When the shelf hit two hundred, we did what any reasonable studio does: we took everything down, put it on the big table, and argued about categories for four hours. The result is six categories that are perfect and one called "Other" that keeps winning the card-file vote for best section.

The library runs on trade. Bring a zine we do not have, it buys you shelf credit. Roughly half our stock arrived that way, which means the collection is genuinely a map of what people in this city are making, not what a buyer chose. We would not trade that for anything, including a grant.

New rule as of this month: every trade gets cataloged with the number of pages, the ink count, and whether it smells like anything. The smell column was Dev's idea. It turns out it is load-bearing metadata. Coffee-roaster zines are a real and distinct category and the nose knows.

Grain Ate a Master, and Other Stories From Drum Two

Drum two, affectionately named Grain, is older than the studio and behaves like a retired sea captain: fully capable, idiosyncratic, and the subject of most of our stories. This month it consumed a master mid-print for the first time in two years, which we celebrated, because two years of good behavior from a 1998 duplicator is a miracle we do not take for granted.

The failure taught us something we keep relearning: the machine tells you everything if you listen to the feed. The paper misfed three times before the master ate it, each time one sheet, each time with a slightly different sound. We kept clearing it and pressing on because the deadline was ours, not the client's. Sixty sheets in, the master folded like a lawn chair.

New house rule: three misfeeds and the run stops. The client gets a call, the run gets rescheduled, and nobody loses a master. It costs us a day and saves us a week. Write that on the wall in whatever ink you like.

Thursday Nights Are the Best Part of This Job

Open studio started as a way to use ink before it expired. Inks have a shelf life once the drum is loaded, and throwing away fluorescent anything felt criminal, so we opened the doors one night a week and let anyone print for free. Two years later it is the engine of the whole place.

The crowd is anybody. A retired machinist who prints wave patterns. A high schooler making flyers for a basement show. A nurse who comes to not think for two hours. The drums do not care and that is the point of them. Whatever you bring, the machine will render an opinion on it, and the opinion is always printable.

We have watched people fall in love with print on Thursday nights about eleven times, and three of them now pay for a membership and one is applying for an apprenticeship. If you have been meaning to come: this Thursday, 6:30, doors open till 9. Bring paper if you have opinions about paper. You clearly do, you read a print studio's blog.

A Field Guide to Riso Inks (and the Ones We Will Never Stock Again)

Riso ink is soy-oil based, dries by absorption rather than evaporation, and has exactly one enemy: waiting. Fresh prints smear if you handle them too soon, which is why our drying racks are always full and why we tell every client the same thing about timelines. Plan the overnight. You cannot argue with absorption.

The shelf favorites: fluorescent pink, which is nearly a lifestyle; medium blue, which photographs like a mood; sunset orange, which makes every designer feel like they invented something; and beans green, which is the exact green of a specific legume and we will not be taking questions.

The hall of shame: metallic gold, which is gorgeous and dries slower than continental drift, clogging a drum if you look away; and a fluorescent teal that faded to a sad pond color in six weeks of window display. We printed a full run of posters in that teal in 2024 and watched them die live. The client knew. We all learned.

Stock rotates, lessons stay. If you are picking inks for a project that needs to survive sunlight, ask us before you fall in love.

How the Card Files Beat Our Database, Repeatedly

We built a proper catalog database in 2021. It has fields for everything: inks, page counts, trades, condition notes, the smell column. It is a good database. It is also the second-most-used system in the library, behind a shoebox of index cards Dev maintains out of what we can only call principle.

The cards win because the answer to "what should I read next" is not a query, it is a conversation. Someone at the counter asks, Dev pulls five cards, reads two aloud badly, and you leave with the right zine. The database supports this workflow poorly. The shoebox is the workflow.

We keep the database anyway, because when a card goes missing, and cards go missing, the database is where the truth lives. Together the two systems are worse than either alone and better than anything sensible. The library runs on them.

We Bought a Third Drum. Here Is Why We Almost Regret It.

The third machine arrived in June: a five-drum monster from a defunct church newsletter operation in Fall River. In theory, five drums means five inks without swapping, which means real CMYK-adjacent work. In practice, it means one machine that holds five grudges instead of two machines holding two.

The first month we ran it twice. Both times, something in the feed path needed a part we had to fabricate ourselves, which is the normal experience of owning discontinued office equipment and not a cautionary tale, exactly. June says the machine is "teaching us patience." June is being polite about her own weekends.

Where it stands: the big machine runs third colors and long one-color runs. Rizzo and Grain remain the studio's heart. The newsletter that last ran on this drum printed 40,000 copies of a fish fry schedule. We think about that a lot. Machines outlive their contexts and become ours to make sense of. That is the whole job, maybe.

What We Charge For, and What We Give Away

People ask why the rate card is public. The answer is that pricing mysteries are how small print shops lose trust, and trust is the only durable asset a neighborhood studio has. You know what a run costs before you email us, and the email is about your project, not our spreadsheet.

What we give away: the neighborhood newsletter, the firefly census, know-your-rights cards in an emergency, and the first consult on any project. What we charge for: everything with a deadline attached, fancy paper, and gold. The gold surcharge is not really about gold. It is about the two hours of babysitting gold demands, priced honestly.

The math that keeps us alive: three standing quarterly jobs, a dozen workshop seats a month, and membership dues cover the rent. Everything else is choice. We print what we want to print because the base is covered, and we think that shows in the work. If you run a small shop of any kind, that is the sentence worth stealing.

Registration Is a Relationship, Not a Setting

Every riso printer learns the same betrayal: you align the drum, you align the feed, you print a test, and the second color lands a millimeter and a half into next week. The machine does not have a registration setting so much as a registration mood, and your job is to negotiate with the mood.

Our routine: run ten sheets of color one, let them rest an hour (rush this and the drift doubles), then feed the stack back through by feel, adjusting the side lay by the width of a paper's edge. June can do it in three adjustments. Marisol does it in seven and swears her seven are more honest. They are both right, which is the annoying part.

Designers can help: keep two-color art loose at the seams. Give the inks a quarter inch of friendly overlap. Build the misregistration into the design and the machine becomes a collaborator instead of an adversary. Every print on our gallery page does this on purpose. Now you know the trick, and the trick is that it is not a trick, it is a relationship.

Shelf Two Hundred, and the Zines That Got Us There

Shelf two hundred went up in May, painted pink on one end and blue on the other, so the library now has a sunset corner whether you asked for one or not. The hundred titles that earned it are the usual wonderful mess: comics, poetry, a data zine about fireworks, a fourteen-page argument about a loon.

The shelf credit system deserves its own essay, and this is it. A trade is not a transaction here, it is a bet: we bet your zine is worth a place, you bet our shelf is worth a spot in your bio. Seven years in, the bet has paid out about as evenly as anything in the arts, which is to say imperfectly and in our favor often enough to keep going.

If you have made something and wondered if it counts: it counts. Bring it Thursday. The worse it is, the more we will like it, and the more honest you were in making it, the longer it stays on the shelf.

Parts From Three Continents

The feed roller on Grain cracked in April. The machine is from 1998, the manufacturer no longer exists, and the part number is a rumor. June found the replacement in three places: a surplus dealer in Osaka who answered email like a haiku, a repair forum where someone had the same roller in a garage in Porto, and a machinist in Central Falls who could copy the original out of UHMW plastic in a day.

We ordered all three. The Osaka roller arrived first and worked. The Porto roller arrived second and also worked, which means Grain now has a spare in a drawer labeled IN CASE OF EUROPE. The Central Falls copy is the one we actually use, because it is the one we can get again in a day.

The lesson we keep relearning: obsolete does not mean unsupported. It means the supply chain is now people. Every print shop running old equipment runs on a network of other people running old equipment. Be good to the network.

The Ledger Turns 850

Run SP-0850 went through the drums last week: a commemorative print for the library's 200th shelf, which means the ledger has now been keeping score for nine years and change. The ledger is a green notebook that has survived three coffee floods, one roof leak, and a brief period in 2020 when it was the only shared record of anything.

People ask why we still keep it on paper when a spreadsheet would be safer. The answer is that the ledger is not primarily a record, it is a ritual. Writing a run into the book by hand is how a job actually ends here. The moment the number goes in, the drums are clean and the next thing can start. A spreadsheet cannot end a job.

The full ledger lives at the counter. We put 58 of the entries on the site, the ones with stories worth typing. The other 792 are equally real and much less readable, which is exactly how an honest archive should look.

The Overnight Rule, Defended

We tell every client the same thing: two-color runs need overnight drying, and no, there is no way around it. Someone asks for a workaround about once a week, so here is the case in writing, for pointing at.

Riso ink dries by soaking into the paper, not by evaporating or curing. Stack fresh prints and the bottom sheets drink the back of the top sheets. You get set-off: ghost images on the reverse, smears where sheets touched, and a run that has to be restarted from the last clean stack, which is often nowhere.

There are machines that flash-cure each pass. We do not own one, and after watching a shop try to rush a two-color job through forced heat and get paper that cockled like a potato chip, we are not shopping for one. The overnight is not downtime. It is when the print becomes a print. Plan for it, and the 48-hour promise is real.

Consignment, Explained Fairly

The library takes zines on consignment at 60/40 in the maker's favor, and people are sometimes surprised that the number favors them. Here is the math that makes it work: we sell about forty consigned zines a month. The 40% covers shelf space, the card file entry, the person who explains your zine to strangers, and the fact that we do not get paid until you do.

The 60% is not charity, it is how the good zines keep coming. If we paid makers 40%, the people whose work is good enough to sell elsewhere would sell it elsewhere, and the shelf would fill with whatever accepts the worst terms. We would rather have the shelf full of things we are proud to hand across the counter.

One rule, enforced with affection: collect your payout within the quarter or it converts to store credit. The float in the drawer is not infinite, and honestly, most makers convert anyway and spend it on paper.

Spring Ink Order Notes

Twice a year we restock the shelf, and the spring order went in this week. The notes from the ordering session are a portrait of the studio's actual taste, so here they are, edited for dignity.

Fluorescent pink: two drums, obviously. Medium blue: two drums. Beans green: one, because last year we over-ordered and the shelf smelled like legumes. Sunset orange: one and a half, the half being a very optimistic rounding. Violet: one, plus a note reading "gold counts as violet's plus-one." Metallic gold: one, with a second note reading "we will regret this." Black: one, because black never runs out, it just gets quieter.

The full order came to just under what we budgeted, which in nine years has happened exactly twice. The shelf rotates, the lessons stay: order the pink, fear the gold, and never let the teal back in the building.

The guest book we keep by the door

Everyone who visits signs it, visitors and clients and the plumber who fixed the bathroom and stayed to watch a run. Nine years in, the book has 3,000 names and roughly 300 excellent marginal drawings. We reprint our favorites each December as a small calendar, and it sells out at the counter before the zines do.

Entries from this year include a diagram of how to unjam Whale drawn by a ten-year-old, and one line from a printer from Osaka that we have taped inside the supply cabinet: "Same machines everywhere. Same jam. Same joy."

We counted every cartridge in the building

The October audit found 214 unopened cartridges, 31 drums in rotation, and one can of metallic gold we forgot we owned until the shelf bowed. The gold is now spoken for through spring. This is what the ledger is for: the building tells you the truth if you count out loud.

Next year we will count before the autumn rush instead of during it, which we also said last year.

Four years without the teal

This month marks four years since we retired the teal. It printed green-ish on everything and looked sick against every paper we stocked, and we kept ordering it out of sunk-cost loyalty. The last teal job was a wedding suite that the couple loved, which is the only reason we do not regret the run itself.

The drum is still in the closet. We keep it the way you keep a retired jersey. It is not coming back, and the ink library page will not list it, and this post is the only place it exists now.

Paper price watch, autumn edition

Munken is up 4% since summer, the fibers are flat, and the krafts went up with fuel surcharges. We held the sheet prices on the services page anyway through December by narrowing our buffer stock, which is a real trade we made on purpose.

January's card will reflect it. If a big job is on your calendar for the new year, quoting it now is the honest move for both of us.