Back when I was in high school, our favorite burger joint advertised its secret sauce. Whatever it was made from, it gave their burgers a decidedly different taste than other hamburgers. Today, marketers often talk about successful brands having a “secret sauce” – and they’re not talking about fast food. For Apple, their secret sauce is not only inventing groundbreaking products, but packaging them in a way that is simplistic to the point of seeming obvious. As Jonathan Ive, Apple chief designer says, “It feels almost inevitable.”

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I hope you all had a good holiday weekend. While Labor Day has come to mean the end of summer, and the day we put away our white pants and take out our corduroy, it was originally a celebration of people who make things. In that spirit, I thought I would share this segment from a few years ago that demonstrates how we build Roland DG devices. It is a fascinating process called Digital Yatai, and quite different from many other manufacturing techniques. Enjoy.

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Curved text is a must have when doing sports or any other type of apparel appliqués. So if your text effects in Adobe® Illustrator®, such as curves, are not properly displaying in the CutStudio plug-in window, try “expanding” the text to get the desired effect. This can be done by highlighting the graphic and choosing “Object/Expand” or “Object/Expand Appearance” in order to turn the text into vector lines that can be understood by the CutStudio software plug-in. This works with just about any effect that does not register in the plug-in window. Once it displays correctly, all that is left is to output the job to the cutter!

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Have you ever wondered if there was a way to improve registration of printing and cutting when producing small decals? Well, it turns out that there is. It’s a bit hidden in VersaWorks™ , but with CustomCUT, you are able to setup segments between printing and cutting that improve registration, especially when dealing with small objects in high quantities.

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It’s been 5 months since the country of Japan was turned upside down by a pair of natural disasters and a nuclear crisis. [See Dave’s Blog immediately following the crisis “The Sun Will Rise Again] While the world headlines have turned their attention elsewhere, the Japanese people are still dealing with the consequences and working on recovery day by day.

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I recently sat down with Tom Tetreault from Digital Output Magazine at ISA and talked about our outlook on the industry. While only parts of this interview are incorporated into the publication’s “State of the Industry” article series, I thought I’d share the entire interview here

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We recently updated the home page of our web site at Roland DGA. It sounds simple enough to do, but the reality was quite different.

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After a break that stretched too many years, I have been riding my bike a lot lately. Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a preachy post about the value of exercise, or good nutrition. There’s a lot out there on that, and everyone should make their own choices in life. No one who has met me would mistake me for a long-lost Schleck brother, and I’ve got a very long way to go before anyone’s likely to ask me for fitness advice.

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Every summer we head to Japan for what we affectionately call, Summer Camp. The similarity it has with most summer camps is that it's typically very hot & humid in Japan at this time of the year, about 85 degrees and 85% humidity!

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