Our shops may be closed and we were not able to gather for the annual SGCI conference, BUT the energy of camaraderie, friendship, and love found in our printmaking community never stops traveling. The strength of the print world is boundless and our bonds are resolute. Through the distance that we are all living and feeling, SGCI is determined to help keep us together. In this spirit, we are pleased to announce MakeReady, the social platform addition to our Conference App.

MakeReady will allow our members to share resources, ideas, projects, observations, and inquiries to broaden our discourse. Like a makeready process of preparing a work for printing, this community space provides the opportunity to observe potentials, expand understandings, define contexts, and explore the resonance of printmaking history, theory, and practice.

To get started: on your phone, go to the App Store and search for SGC International. Download the app, and log in with the username and password linked to your SGCI account! A desktop version will be coming soon.

What types of things can I find and share on MakeReady? 

Shared Resources

• Course Materials: Syllabi, lesson plans, exercises, demonstrations, tagged by print process and subject matter.
• Social Distance Learning: Share your ideas for printing at home, teaching away from the studio, and ways to support your students and colleagues during this time of remote education. 
• Reading Materials: Articles, essays, bibliographies, books, book chapters, conference publications, reading lists, etc.
• Art History Collection: Share your favorite prints into our image database! Tag these print-related images by era, artist, medium, and topic. 
• Medium-specific Information: Looking for info on a specific medium? Search through the categories of relief printing, intaglio, engraving, screenprinting, lithography, letterpress, mezzotint, book arts, digital printing, post digital printing. Or make your own tag!
• Non-profit/Community Shop/Small Business Resource Area: How-to’s, city and government resources, and FAQs. 
• Online Resources: Listing of suppliers, printmaking blogs, printmaking websites, and more. 

Chats with Colleagues
Use the comments function to ask questions, share your knowledge, and chat with colleagues! Dream up Themed Portfolios, suggest panels for future conferences, share your Call for Participants. 

Your Profile
Add a little bit of information to your profile so people can learn about you. Members can see your profile by searching for your name within the Search Bar. Fill out your Profile in the main menu: add information about your work, your research, your interests, and how to find you in the web! To do this, select the icon next to the search bar at the upper right corner of your schedule. A “Menu” list will pop up; select “My Profile” to make edits. Highlight the “About Me” field to add a description of yourself. If you don’t want members to be able to add you, you can toggle that feature here as well.

New contacts!
Add contacts both old and new! Simply search for an individual’s name through the Search Bar. Once you find your friend, select their name and add them to your contact list.

Posts
All posts will appear in the “Everything” section. But be sure to tag them so they get filed in the right area for future reference and easy searching!

Our hope is that our members will use this platform to help make SGCI’s outreach and programming exactly what they want it to be. We look forward to seeing how you use it to expand our understanding of the medium we love. Most of all, our goal for MakeReady is to allow members to connect and learn from each other all year long, in the times between our annual gatherings. Please share MakeReady within your network by using #sgcimakeready 

The SGCI Board would like to thank Kate McQuillen on behalf of the entire membership for her work on this project. MakeReady is Kate’s brainchild and she has led its buildout through her work with the board and Bryce Meyer, our incredible web developer. Thank you, Kate, for this and all of the outstanding work you do for our organization.Keep printing!
The SGC International Executive Board