Cedarville Poster Project on Black Paper with White Ink

Over the past several months, I’ve been talking A LOT about the need for up and coming designers to have a better understanding of some of the newer digital techniques. I’m happy to announce that my ramblings resonated!

Chad Jackson, Cedarville College’s creative director, brought us a really cool project for one of his design classes to help his students better understand how to design for digital.

Each student was tasked with designing a unique poster using white ink on black paper. The student could opt to use white ink as either a standalone color or an underlay to other colors to make them show up on the black paper.

Pre-pandemic, I was able to go out to Cedarville and talk to the class about not only the new digital capabilities, but how to set up files to utilize those capabilities (if you ever get the chance to visit  Cedarville in the future, I’d highly suggest, as it is a beautiful campus!), and Chad put together a great YouTube tutorial about setting up white to print under color.

Even with the Coronavirus crisis and social distancing, we were able to produce some great results (utilizing email and Zoom). It is a wonderful thing to witness young designers see their ideas come to life and turn into something tangible.

If you would have told me 10 years ago that we’d be printing bright colors on black paper as well as suffering a worldwide pandemic, I never would have believed you. Today here we are and here we’ll remain for the foreseeable future – so let’s embrace the first and find ways to deal with the second!

Stay well.