The art elite exists in a layer above hoi polloi, a world of painful trendy galleries, well-collected collectors and art critics who act as guardians of what is considered the pinnacle of travel culture. Artistic movements that develop beyond this bubble can be ridiculed or ignored as naive and incompetent, even in total denial of their raw creative edge. When the institution discovers them, a few of their artists are selected and anointed, and the pot in which they were made is inevitably forgotten. The streets of Bristol can see incredible works by far more graffiti artists than Banksy alone.

Our community has an art form, under the guise of PCB artwork and the # BadgeLife community. One day you will see electronic jewels of the art world jewelry behind glass in these trendy galleries, but for now, they live in wonderful abundance in the wild. Here at Hackadai, we are fortunate enough to have a colleague pushing the boundaries of PCB art at Brian Benchoff, and at the Hackadai Superconference, he took us through one of his more recent works.

The color palette of a typically printed circuit board is limited by the combination of fiberglass, copper, solder mask, upholstery and silk fabric that its designer chooses. Although a variety of colors and coating materials can do an attractive job, they have remained painted in monochrome. The Holy Grail of the PCB artist was to step into a world of full color, and Brian pursued that goal by exploring buffer printing to produce additional colors beyond Soderman.

It's a topic the past has written about here, and it introduces her to a conversation with a look at existing badge artwork and the mention of an expensive commercial inkjet process before considering the type of printing you see every day from the side of promotional pens. Company titles are deposited on pens by buffer printing, an offset process in which the ink is first applied to a photo-cut metal plate before being picked up on a silicone rubber pad to transfer to the item to be printed. It is not a panacea for all PCB color tasks, but adding relatively small blocks of pigment to an otherwise monochrome board can be very successful .............