Inside the Design & Production Studio
The studio at Matter Editions is anonymously nestled in the quiet suburban landscape of Northern California. It serves as an escape and quiet respite from the noise and rush of Silicon Valley. Things move slowly by design as a deeply felt response to the Valley’s “Move Fast” and scale endlessly ethos. Here, small is beautiful — and deep consideration, kindness, and delight are paramount in all things.
At Matter Editions, our tools are just that — tools. They represent extensions of the human body, mind, and spirit — and their contributions to the studio’s output are intwined in undeniably human stories.
Capabilities
The studio’s range of equipment is intended to offer opportunities for experimentation from the earliest design concepts through to final production and packaging. The production studio consists of a 2-color Risograph ME 9450 duplicator, a 30 x 36 Rabbit Portable Screenprinting Table, an xTool D1 laser cutter and Screen Printer, a Ryobi drill press, electric guillotine stack cutter, and various bookbinding and finishing tools.
What is a Risograph?
Risography is a stencil-based process like screen printing where ink is pushed through a stencil, and where layering one color on top of another adds detail and playful color interaction within an image.
The unpredictability of overprinting is the source of the Risograph’s imperfect and experimental hand-made aesthetic. Each print is an exercise in the balance of control and chance — where the end result is not so much created as discovered.
How the Riso Works
Moments after sending a file to print, the machine makes a screen (master) and automatically wraps it around one of the rotating cylindrical ink drums in the machine. Because the ink drum rotates at high speed while printing, the paper is fed along a flat path beneath the drum. Ink is pushed through the voids in the stencil onto the paper as it passes through the machine, one or two colors at a time. Additional colors are printed by repeating this process after allowing sheets to dry for a period of time.
Risograph Inks
- Black
- PMS: Black U
- HEX: #000000
- Bright Red
- PMS: Warm Red U
- HEX: #F15060
- Sunflower
- PMS: 116U
- HEX: #FFB511
- Aqua
- PMS: 637U
- HEX: #5EC8E5
- Kelly Green
- PMS: 368U
- HEX: #67B346
- Federal Blue
- PMS: 288U
- HEX: #3D5588