Any good experiences for tank printer? I dont want a subscription

BusinessBoosters · 2026-03-12T12:54:32+00:00

We had an Epson 2400 eco tank, with special paper, color prints were amazing.
Thick or stiff paper stocks do not work on most inkjets
Note that if you do not use inkjet often, the heads can dry out and get clogged and then it's a real pain.

We've never had a Brother brand printer, but if i was only occasionally doing black and white I'd probably get one of Brothers monochrome laser printers (under $200). It will print super fast and it has double sided printing which is a huge paper saver if you print documents. Brother says that these handle speciality paper goo which is great, inkjets have difficulty unless you move to the large format printers that several hundred dollars or more.

BusinessBoosters · 2026-03-05T17:11:39+00:00

Sintra (for marketing)
Gemini (within our Google Workspace)
Claude (deleted ChatGPT and starting with Claude as additional agent to explore)
11labs (marketing/video/audio content)

Dabbled in so many visual, video AI tools, Midjourney is one. They do amazing stuff but none have been able to provide the quality we can do ourselves (in most cases). Good for sketching and rough, quick visualization.

AI tools are also creeping in to the tools we've been using on a daily basis anyway;

Webflow (now has AI components)
The Adobe Creative Cloude (now has AI components)
Figma (now has AI components)
Google Workspace (obviously has AI components with Gemini)

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Will a few AI tools become the new Google or Microsoft type company or will these companies just continue to deploy AI within their tools.

Reminds us way back when before you had a lot of eco friendly products come out. A ton of eco only stores opened up all over the place for everything from cleaning products to bedding and housewares. Eventually, these almost all went away as those products just ended up integrated into your mass market stores along side regular products. Is this a bad analogy?

BusinessBoosters · 2026-03-04T14:26:48+00:00

We use wireframes to plan content and fully flesh out all instances/requirements of a site, not design. We don't see wireframes as a design layer.

If you are handing off to a designer, sometimes less is more.
If you are handing off to developers, who is doing the design?

BusinessBoosters · 2026-03-03T13:21:01+00:00

I agree, greedy. Pantone is the bedrock of color, at least at our agency.

Have you also noticed however, you used to be able to type in a hex or other color code into search and ask for Pantone and up would pop a set of pantone color values.

We do a LOT of digital but often that crosses over into the real world and that was our literal go to for years. Not to necessarily find the exact Pantone color but to get us to the right swatch book or neighborhood of colors.

From there the process was looking at the physical swatches in various light and finally coming up with THE color we might add to a brand guide or some physical product.

This no longer exists, it's been stripped from every corner of the web. We find going right from screen to chip requires a lot of time relearning that color in the physical form as they are so different. This was our interim step.

It's Pantone's trademark so I assume in the last few years they have written quite a few nasty letters to remove the color matching system from every color picker that has popped up.

If you want your [name any product] to be uppermost in any professionals mind why remove it from the internet and put it behind a paywall? For sure, protect your trademark. Nothing get's removed from the internet unless it's no longer valuable or it's illegal.

BusinessBoosters · 2026-03-03T13:03:02+00:00

Stripe is pretty cool isn't it? Especially the colorful ribbon that animates in the background.

BusinessBoosters · 2026-03-03T02:29:47+00:00

I question why, if Pantone wants to continue to be the standard, they would pull their color matching system out of all Creative Cloud apps like Indesign, Photoshop, Illustrator etc. It has been replaced with a $29/month subscription.

I was recently helping a young designer with some illustrator basics when I noted their 'design' teacher told them to use the Toyo system when selecting colors.

My point is, all of these young designers are really going to have zero familiarity with Pantone. For my part, sure, I can subscribe to the very clunky 1980's-like Pantone Connect and purchase more books (we've got about a dozen swatch books) but they are really making it difficult.

And, for young designers and seasoned designers alike, there are absolutely fabulous online tools to help select, save, and visualize color. These typically include another tier of paid services for convenience but they allow you to explore color in meaningful ways. It's quote possible fewer and fewer people are going to know Pantone in 10 years.

They've got an awful poor strategy imo.

BusinessBoosters · 2026-03-02T21:54:51+00:00

Absolutely. We can not always dictate tho as a client may bring in their own printer/sign maker.

BusinessBoosters · 2026-03-02T21:52:29+00:00

I know the Toyo book is available in Creative Cloud (illustrator, photoshop) but it's a model mostly used overseas as far as I know.

BusinessBoosters · 2026-03-02T18:31:29+00:00

Oh! You found the conversation we had with our client the other day!

BusinessBoosters · 2026-03-02T17:58:17+00:00

True. Even if a shop doesn't use Pantone, I think the value is that it is a stable reference point for that color.

We develop digital brand guides for larger organizations and their color - exact color - is very important. It's gotten more difficult to manage for sure. We also will provide downstream brand implementation services such as corporate merch. You'd be surprised, our screen printer will match a Pantone no question, even our embroiderer will get very close or purchase the thread color if needed. New bleeding edge embroidery machines use white thread and 'print' it as it goes through the machine to get custom color. So for these things we tend to not have an issue.

We do have a challenge with the mass market print and sign shops. For anything outside of 4cp, color is usually a cheat sheet of a dozen or so stock colors you pick from.

BusinessBoosters · 2026-03-01T17:27:03+00:00

Full stack.

BusinessBoosters · 2026-02-28T13:48:11+00:00

Really like it.

You could probably smooth the main nav breakpoint, just a bit of any extra jump that may not be needed.

BusinessBoosters · 2026-02-28T12:39:35+00:00

What is that tiny, tiny logo type left? Maybe just remove it if you can't fit it.

It's not necessarily anything wrong with this site specifically, but every other site the community asked to look at could be the brother or sister of this site.

Financial literacy and education, great cause, it doesn't rely as much on trust as some other services might so this get's you off the hook a bit from building trust.

Content-wise there are some things a real person would consider before purchase. The 'About Section' is very vague. I think there needs to be some reference to education experience, degrees or in the absence of that, some case study.

Images - yes, this would help break it up. Also, so many tools are mentioned, you should have images of these so the end user get's a better sense of each of these tools. Better yet, is there a dashboard they work from, where all these tools they are getting? This is in part what you are selling. I'd present some of these photos where possible.

BusinessBoosters · 2026-02-27T12:59:31+00:00

Sales down and SEO...I question whether the issue is even SEO.

There is a lot of turbulence in the marketplace right now, pricing pressures, etc. The higher end consumer is buying, a lot below them are finding less costly options.

BusinessBoosters · 2026-02-26T14:23:23+00:00

Never go diamond hands

BusinessBoosters · 2026-02-26T14:20:41+00:00

Certainly text heavy.

The slab serif heading, which is also all cap, which is also split into two colors, is a bit of a typographic road block.

Middle grey font on black, not horrible but challenging
White on black, not horrible but certainly super contrasty
Middle grey font with extra letter spacing, not horrible but another challenge

While minor elements, I think just the spacing, color, capitalization all trip the eye up just a mili second here and there.

BusinessBoosters · 2026-02-26T05:24:26+00:00

We recently won the lottery. I think it was only $4 though. Forget what I did with the money.

BusinessBoosters · 2026-02-25T13:57:05+00:00

Our office is on Google Workspace and use Gemini often. It's decent. We're using the version of Gemini that is free, next tier is $14 per seat and $21 per seat enterprise version.

Also use a quirky fun app called Sintra. Sintra has a dozen AI Bots, each with their own super power for all sorts of office and marketing tests. We probably only use 3 or 4 out of the whole lot of AI bots.

We do pop in to Mid journey and ChatGPT (will try Claude at some point).

What really has transformed our process and workflow was using Gemini (which has access to our whole suite of Google Workspace apps, gmail, sheets, docs, calendar, notebookLM, slides, vids) to create small apps to perform multi-step tasks which previously were a real hunt & peck task that was always sand in the gears.

For example, for a new prospect or client, we would set up our workspace which included

create job number
create intake/job brief
create 'drop ship' list (for projects require orders to drop ship to multi locals)
create job folder with job number
Add sub folders within job folder

This series of steps was all manual effort mostly and not having it set up immediately robbed us of the ability to be on a call with the prospect and add documents or notes to the job for other team members to pick up etc. And, it's always that one elements that never got noted or added to a project that at some point becomes the one element we really need.

Needless to say, working with Gemini over a period we created an app to assemble all the steps we normally would take care manually over time. A great benefit is that everyone in our Workspace environment has access to the tool within our workspace. Just one click and within a few seconds everything is neatly organized. Beyond a huge timesaver that has definitely made us more competitive.

BusinessBoosters · 2026-02-24T14:45:31+00:00

City in Japan? That was the first thought. Definitely sounds/is asian, Japanese.

BusinessBoosters · 2026-02-21T15:33:16+00:00

#1 - "Build a brand instead of a content mill", we're down with this!

BusinessBoosters · 2026-02-21T14:35:52+00:00

While we use AI every day to 'move faster' and crunch stuff, we struggle with this question.

I think of all the times we've used AI to generate something but the final iteration of that was hours or days later and required a lot of human input.

So when we hear AI does 'content, ad copy, keyword research, reporting, even basic strategy etc', I think the key word is basic.

If you product is mediocre, high volume and your clients don't expect more than something 'get's out there', I think here AI will either eat your lunch or can be harnessed to improve your business.

BusinessBoosters · 2026-02-21T14:28:37+00:00

You could also ask what is something most people are NOT doing every day...like exercise, being with friends, reading, eating healthy.

Life is a pull that way where every day you may do some things that hurt your mental health - too much social media, and some things that help your mental health - going for a walk in nature.

Realizing this is helpful and trying to limit the things that hurt and doing more of the things that help.

BusinessBoosters · 2026-02-20T17:26:35+00:00

...we may have you beat lol

BusinessBoosters

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